Ping is a social network built into the iTunes Music Store. If you have an iTunes account you can have a Ping account. People enter their real name. You can follow other users, and user can follow you as are the functions of Twitter, unlike a reciprocal friend-type system in Facebook. You can follow me on Ping here.

You can opt to have people not follow you or make them get your permission before they can follow you. At launched there were a dozen or so artists profiles from bands like U2, Coldplay, Jack Johnson, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Rick Ruben along with tastemakers like KCRW dj Jason Bentley and music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas.

For your profile photo Ping automatically pulls your existing photo form your iChat profile if you have one, or will allow you take a new photo from your webcam similar to Photo Booth, or just upload a new photo. On the night of the launch 9/1/2010 photos where taking a long time to appear. I am not sure if they needed to be approved manually or if the servers were having a problem keeping up. You can write a bio about yourself, but links are not clickable.

You can feature up to 10 tracks on your profile. They are represented as album covers in the upper right corner of your profile.
When a user clicks on an album cover it launches a preview player containing all of the songs on that album. This means you can only feature songs that exist in iTMS. I buy a lot of songs on Amazon MP3, Bleep, and Boomkat and use iTunes as a last resort.

The key means of interacting with friends in the social media sense in Ping is to go to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), find an album or track you like, and then “like” or “post” them by clicking on the black triangle button next to an album or track’s buy button, or buy an album or track. These actions show up in your profile and the public timeline of your followers. When you like an album or track, it simply states this in your timeline and shows a buy link, along with the ability for others to like or post your like or post (yes, so meta). In a Post you can add a bit of text that will appear with the link to a track or album. Along with like and post you can gift it to a friend, add to your wishlist, tell a friend, copy the link for use on the web, and share on Facebook or Twitter. Of these actions only post and like will be shown to your followers. You can also like your own posts and post other users or artists posts and likes, even if you don’t follow them or they don’t follow you.

On artist pages in the iTMS some artists have a Concerts directory which will tell you about the concerts near you (probably based on your account info) and all other concerts by this artists and let you declare that you are going to a particular concert (a feature in Last.fm, MySpace, and iLike) and a “Find Tickets” link that opens to the Ticketmaster page on your default web browser. Declaring you will go will be displayed to your followers.

You can comment on or like that a friend or any other user has added new friends. You can comment on posts by artists you do not follow.

For Podcasts, Audiobooks, the App Store, TV Shows, Movies, and iTunes U you can share on Facebook and Twitter, gift, tell a friend, and add to your wishlist but you cannot post or like. At one point on the night of the launch there was a Facebook connect button. When clicked, it prompted me to enter my Facebook username and password and it seemed to connect but it failed to bring in my friends. It was revealed by Steve Jobs that this function was not working because Apple did not agree to Facebook’s terms. Since then the Facebook connect button has been removed. It turns out Ping was Being blocked by Facebook.

There is a lot of speculation as to whether Ping is a MySpace killer or a Last.fm killer. It is neither. For now Apple decides which artists they want to feature with a Ping artists profile. On MySpace and Last.fm, Bandcamp, etc any artists can feature their own music on their profile. Artists can still promote their music if it is in the iTMS with a regular Ping user account. The only difference is the absence of a Like and Post button on the artist profile. I don’t know if this will mean a spike in TuneCore accounts for artists to get their music on iTunes (update 9/16/2010 TuneCore announces Ping artist account integration). There were reports that Apple was going to extend song previews to 60 seconds, but the music publishers did not yet grant permission. Meanwhile you can hear entire songs at MySpace and watch music videos on YouTube for free. You can use Blip.fm to post an entire track streaming on your timeline. Unlike Last.fm’s core function, Ping does nothing with the songs that you play in iTunes.

No music that has not been released yet is ever going to break on Ping.

If no new features are added to Ping in the next month I think it will be like the next Google Buzz. It is a techno-distraction and not necessary when people are already accustomed to sharing things in other ways. I think the best implementation of social music is still Last.fm. You can friend me on Last.fm here and check out my artists profile here.

Update: 9/21/2010 Apple was in talks with Facebook for 18 months in trying to come to terms with a more elegant solution, Ping as a Facebook app, perhaps. But they could not come to an agreement, probably because Facebook was asking for too much, aka the “onerous terms” mentioned by Jobs.

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With NAMM taking place over the weekend and several of our clients in the musical instrument business, I thought it would be appropriate to evaluate the participation level in social media and web strategies of musical instrument companies. (Disclosure: a few of these companies are Heavybag Media clients, noted below.)

As part of this evaluation, we have set up a site bringing in RSS feeds from as many musical instrument related companies we could find at TheyAreTheMusicMakers.com (a reference to an Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem) using Sweetcron.

Many corporate websites are becoming irrelevant, serving as static brochures. Visitors are expecting more than just information and positive spin. Social media, blogs, syndicated news, widgets, and videos are just some of the ways these companies are participating, along with a new approach to sharing and conversing with customers. Using the network effect of social networking sites allows content to be more discoverable than being on an island (aka, your website). More searches are happening on YouTube than on Yahoo (Google being first place). For this reason, along with zero bandwidth costs to you, there is no reason to not have your brand’s content on YouTube.

The Musical Instrument industry (including makers of brass and woodwinds, guitars, basses, drums and percussion, keyboards, synths, pianos, recording and effects, live sound reinforcement, DJ, karaoke, and all related accessories and educational products and services) is using a variety tools and tactics to execute their web strategy for marketing and customer contact. They can be classified into 12 areas:

Newsletter/mailing lists with a public news archive

You can tell these companies have been using the web to engaged with their customers for years, because at one point newsletters were the easiest way to reach out to customers, back when sending and managing e-mail was easier than posting a blog. I would still recommend both newsletters/mailing lists and blogs to make content available in as many formats as possible. Feedburner allows publishers to be notified of new posts by e-mail.

Bias: news, press releases, newsletter
SKB Cases: news and mailing list
AKG: mailing list, news
Sony: mailing list, press releases

Newsletter/mailing lists with no public newsletter archive

You need to sign up for the mailing list just to see if any news is happening. This strategy means that there are fewer pages for search engines to spider, and then other sites have a better chance of receiving search traffic about a companies’ product, like Harmony-Central forum.

D’Addario
Ovation Guitars (Disclosure: Heavybag client)
Korg
Dean Guitars
Dipinto guitars
Gretsch Drums
Toca Percussion
LP Percussion
Steinberg Software
Roger Linn Design

Hosting Forums

These are a great way to get search engine queries from users that helps them find answers to product questions saving companies repeated support inquires over time. They do take some time to manage, but they are a great way to show customers that you are listening and willing to help. Several of these brands below are with the Harmon Group.

Fishman: news, forum
Jackson Guitars: news, forum
Lexicon: news, forum
Digitech: forum, news
dbx: news, forum
TC Electronic: forum (more below)

Using a blogging platform or good content, but no feed

This is coming from a good place, but for blogs to live in the blogosphere properly, they need to have feeds and comments. WordPress is free, runs on any commodity LAMP server. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel here. Although, there is one blog in my survey that seems to be using Blogger.com but has disabled the feed. This is no way to get people to go to your site. Allowing people to subscribe to your feed makes your content stickier. (Update: I spoke to Rick at PreSonus and he is now aware of the problem).

PreSonus: blog, YouTube
Access

Blogs on Blogger, MySpace, or WordPress

These guys are seeing the light. In some cases, maybe it is a rouge employee in the marketing department who is living the “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” rule. It is really easy and free for anyone to go on to these sites, start a presence, and link back to the main site.

Epiphone blog, Twitter
BC Rich: blog
Jomox: MySpace (no posts yet), news and newsletter
Seymore Duncan: MySpace blog

RSS syndicated press releases

These companies understand the benefits of syndication. Both musicians and publishers looking for news updates and stories can subscribe to news feeds directly from the sources by subscribing to RSS feeds. This has less management headroom in comparison to having a mailing list. But some are just putting out the same type of content they have always put out: product launches, personnel changes, partnerships, and promotions. And these sites are not using a full blown blog platform so there are no comments or trackbacks.

MoTU
Akia (with bonus Digg button)
Crown Audio
ElectroVoice
Monster Cable

RSS syndicated news and newsletters/mailing list

From an infrastructure perspective, these guys have everything covered. Some are also using social media. But some are not using blogging platforms, so there are no comments or trackbacks.

Behringer has a blog posts by Uli Behringer himself and three other Behringer personnel so far. It looks like they just started the blog in December 2008. They are also on Twitter.

M-Audio: news, newsletter
Moog Music: MySpace blog, YouTube, news (no feed or newsletter)
Digidesign
Alesis
Native Instruments: news, newsletter

Blog on the company’s site, used as a channel to push promotions

These sites have a full blog platform such as WordPress, allowing comments and RSS feeds, but still the content is not helping or teaching potential customers. In some cases the companies are well-known companies in their categories. Maybe they think they can only push awareness of promotions, which may result in a spike in sales, but does little to help build a long-term relationship with their user base. Some posts are about events and profiles on organizations that use the companies’ products. Most do not have comments or have them disabled.

Mackie
Fender
Taylor Guitars (featuring ShareThis.com links on every post)
Ernie Ball

All of the Conn-Selmer brands have at least an RSS feeds on their news pages. Some have Facebook fan pages:

• Bachbrass: news, Facebook
• Conn-Selmer: news
• Armstong Fultes: news
• Kingwinds: news
• Henri Selmer Paris news
• Benge Brass: news
• Selmer: news
• Ludwig: MySpace, MySpace blog, Facebook, news, Twitter

Blog on the company’s site (or on Blogger/Wordpress.com), with content that helps or teaches

If a company is doing this, in my opinion, they have seen the light. They are using their brand’s influence to help their user base, teach them why they should pay more for finer features, and help them kick ass with their products after the sale. These blogs are also not afraid to put a face on the companies’ personnel. Some blogs have an actual byline from an person in the company.

Kessler:blog, written by the owner’s son
Gibson Guitars: MySpace, news, Twitter, YouTube
Dixon Drums: blog, YouTube (disclosure: Heavybag client)
Propellerheads Software: artist profiles, YouTube

Roland has 8 different content channels, all with feeds, and most with a newsletter option, each one for a specific market need. These include:

• What’s New
• Support News
• Insider (artist profiles
• Media Press Releases
• Boss Podcasts
• Boss User Group
• Worship Connection
• Roland Atelier (organ products)

They certainly offer the widest range and best frequency of content if you count ever channel. Roland has a long history of content production with their RUG (Roland User Group) print magazines. They are also one of the only companies profiled here to have a support channel as content available in a feed. This makes sense since they are a technology company. These notifications are are mostly software updates. They specifically cater to the church musician niche with their Worship Connection content channel, offering advice on live sound that fits in well with their organ products. They have a link to Worship Northwest 2009, a conference sponsored by many audio companies.

The Best are using two or more: blog, forum, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook

These companies have embraced the tools of social media. I don’t like the content style of all of them (some are too press release-ish), but they are going to where their users are. They do not need to reinvent concepts, and are fine using open source software or free web 2.0 services. Their blog content is decent as well.

ElectroHarmonix: YouTube, MySpace blog
Ludwig: MySpace, MySpace blog, Facebook, news, Twitter
Yamaha: The Hub: podcasts, blogs, and videos
Kaces: blog (disclosure: this is our client)
Rock n’ Roller Cart: blog (disclosure: this is our client)
Line6: news, Twitter
Reunion Blues gig bags: blog, wiki (a directory for touring musicians), Twitter, MySpace (disclosure: this is our client)
Sabian: news (no feed), forum, Twitter
Taye Drums: blog, community, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

D’Addario bands have MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and forums for most of it’s brands. They are listed on their ToTheStage.com community site along with a directory of sites that teach you how to play better:

• D’Addario Strings: forum, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube,
• Evans Drums Heads: MySpace YouTube, Facebook
• Rico Reeds: MySpace, Facebook, forum

TC Electronic has news across multiple categories available in one RSS feed, a forum, videos on YouTube, a Netvibes Widget, and a newsletter: news (on the home page), YouTube, Netvibes news widget, newsletter, forum, news page for the TC Helicon brand, and a Flickr stream. These guys really get it, and I think they are the best example of a company that is really participating in the social web, allowing their brand to be found across many platforms. I especially like how their news is part of their homepage. They understand that the context of their web presence is immediacy.

Newspage and newsletter/mailing list, no feeds

BSS Audio: newsletter and news
DM Pro: newsletter, news
Focusrite: newsletter, news
Mapex: newsletter, news
Marshall Amps: newsletter, news
Novation: newsletter
Peavy: newsletter, news
Soundcraft: newsletter
Sabian: newsletter and news
Zildjian: newsletter and news

Non-syndicated news page with press releases and/or collection of press mentions, no feed or newsletter, no forum

When companies can speak directly to musicians from their sites, why do they need to write a press release? It’s as if the only other place the musicians will read about new products is magazines and other niche sites. These news pages are written for them. There could also be content for end users.

Allen and Heath
Audix USA
Buffet-Crampon
Dave Smith Instuments
DW Drums
Fostex USA
Gibraltar Drums Hardware
Hosa Cables
JBL Pro
Johnson Guitars
KRK Systems
Kurzweil Music Systems
Middle Atlantic
Novation
Nord Keyboards
Numark
OC Drum and Percussion
Ovation Guitars (disclosure: this is a past client)
Pearl Drums
Paiste
Premier Percussion
ProCo Sound
Samson Audio
Shure
SennheiserUSA
Sony Professional
Tama Drums
Tascam
Ultimate Support

Some of the tools we use

For Heavybag Media clients, we use Twitter for “ambient awareness,” WordPress as a blogging platform, PHPList for mailing lists, YouTube for free video hosting and syndication, MySpace for demographic outreach, Google Analytics and Feedburner to track visors and subscribers.

Our Favorite Picks

We are happy to see Conn-Selmer syndicate all of it’s news. TC Electronic has done a fair job using social media and RSS syndication, and YouTube. Yamaha has not only great videos that help to educate customers on their products, but podcasts also. Roland has the richest and longest running content channels.

Comments and Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions on companies we forgot to include, corrections, or would like help with your web strategy, leave us a comment.

(photos by synthesizers, psycht, Squiggle, and TCElectronic on Flickr)

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But for now, the transition is rough for music industry veterans. Almost every week for the past two years the music industry manages to make one puzzling move after another, while independent artists are free to make decisions who’s only stockholders are themselves along with their artistic and commercial aspirations. Increasingly, independent artists commercial strategy is not in selling CDs, but in the more scarce goods such as early access to new releases, performances, and limited edition vinyl or DVDs, reliable discovery and immediate access to files on iTune or Amazon MP3 . They now they need to sell their fans something they cannot get for free.

People love to talk about the music they love. Allowing them to share it easily and legally, and talk about it online, and put it in new contexts is the new path to commercial success.

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Right now, there are a bunch of SEOs listening to what Danny Sullivan has to say about social media strategy because they trust him. But some SEOs refuse to re-evaluate what brings value to their clients, (note: this Sphinn user was not in attendance) even saying that Jason should not be allowed at conferences. These sentiments just prove to him that what he is doing is right. It is innovators dilemma. SEOs got where they are today by being great at SEO strategies. Asking them to adopt social media as a new strategy is new and foreign. As Danny tries to lead his followers to new territory, some think he is betraying them and the strategies that made them the stars they are today. Some might be too afraid to go back to their clients to tell them they are going to try some new strategies to help their clients succeeded. They should remember that this does not mean the work they did in the past did not allow for successes or was a bad idea. SEO definitely has been one of the main ways to help clients succeed on the web for the past 10 years. But, there is no need to defend past actions with future ignorance. They need to redefine their metrics. The longer they wait, the more likely they will get their lunch eaten.

Thus, the knee-jerk reaction to Jason Calicanis’s rhetoric that SEO is a dying or bad strategy. Yes, let’s admit that Jason loves to agitate people by rubbing strategy decay into SEO’s faces, bad Jason . No one is going to tell an SEO that they are not giving value to their clients using SEO techniques. It just that the tactics they are using need to evolve.

Less attention is going to be paid to traditional SEO because (especially in the creation of static pages) now it is so much easier and valuable to create site with an open source blog, CMS, wiki or other application platform that may or may not rely on search engine traffic. Sure, even with these there are some ways to tweak them from an SEO perspective, but not as much as you might have needed to do 10 years ago. This is disruptive technology, bad news for the traditional SEOs that build sites from scratch, sprinkling in their elusive, magical SEO code. But, the developers of these open source CMS apps have figured out how to do the complicated SEO work for you (why else would Matt Cutts speak, attend, and endorse Wordcamp?). Here (along with social media application designers) is where good SEO needs to happen, and smart web strategists will realize that this is where it should continue to happen, because it scales and eliminates redundant work. You just need to wait for the search engines to spider your site. Now, traditional SEOs (which should now be called web strategists) should have more time available to add additional types of value for their clients by either engaging in social media on their behalf, or teaching them how to engaging with their prospects in a way that will help them efficiently meet their goals over the web. This is done by creating “meaningful relationships” (for lack of a better term) with people. At this point, SEO is just one of many tactics used by a web strategist. So calling a person an SEOs or SEM will soon be a way to show how outdated or limited that person’s strategy toolbox is. SEO competes with other value-adding strategies if all you do is SEO. Thus, SEO people see social media strategy as a threat. Being a web strategist is where it’s at.

Update 4/25/08: Oh yeah, add semantic web to the list in the title.

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Jackson West approached Arrnington, saying “Hi, I am with Valleywag” as Bonny shot the reaction: Arrnington storming off to find bouncers, kicking them both out moments later. In case you are not aware, Valleywag does about one disparaging pieces a week on Arrnington, and I can understand why he would not want them at his private party. But Jackson and Bonny are new to the team. They could have remained at the party without stirring anything up, but that would not be in true Valleywag form. Stirring the pot and making the news happen, it seems, was there intention, and they accomplished their mission.

Do I mind the exposure for the part I took? Not really, but now it appears it was at the expense of Arrington’s nerves, and I am not completely comfortable with that. But perhaps it is just the tax Arrington has to pay for fame and success. It would have helped if Arrnington had explained all of this to me at the time, but emotions were running high with everyone, the club was loud and dark, and it was not possible. As for Bonny, she is a sweet girl, and I guess if she wants to work for Valleywag, that is her choice. I suppose neither Bonny nor Jackson were surprised that they were personally escorted out by Arrnington and the bouncers after what they did. By the time I became involved, Valleywag already made the news, I just helped to unknowingly sweeten it a bit. I don’t wish to downplay my “heroics,” but just to say that they were uninformed. So, I really was Vallywaged, not in a good way.

Photo by Bonny Pierzina.

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I later learned that the ever-charming Pete Cashmore of Mashable was kicked out as well, presumably becuase his blog competes with TechCrunch? I just don’t get it. I guess the idea of friendly competition/”co-opitition” are dead. More details here along with the photos Arrington does not want you to see! Even more pwnage ensued after the event. Well, hopefully everyone can be friends afterwords. Loren Feldman, who made a name for himself by calling out Arrington, is now friends with him.

Update:
LA Times reporter David Sarno reports Pete may have fabricated the story of his ouster at the party just for fun (via Valleywag).

Update 2: The Truth Emerges: Valleywag at the TechCrunch/PopSugar Party

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Twitxr
The brand new player in this space is Twitxr.com. What interested me is the ability to send my mobile phone pics to both my Twitter and Flickr accounts (it will send them to Facebook as well, but I was not as excited about that). I singed up, and found it pretty easy to connect it each of these other profiles. Due to the nature of each of these connecting sites, the registration process was slightly different for each one. I took some pics, and sent it to a special e-mail address generated by Twitxr, and had it appear on my Flickr, with a geo tag (you set your location on Twitxr ahead of time), as well as my Twitxr profile which appears to have its own obligatory social network along with a user landing page and commenting, and RSS feed with a simple URL. Twitxr’s social network seems kind of pointless at first, since I am using it as a utility to send pics to my other social networks. However, the value is that you don’t need to have a profile on these other sites to make use of Twitxr. I don’t feel much like looking for friends on it, especially since FriendFeed has raised the standard for ease of friend-finding. According to TechCrunch, Twitxr is a product of Fon Labs, part of Fon Wireless, a WiFi provider with offices worldwide.

ShoZu
Next, I checked out ShoZu. I found ShoZu on Flickr’s mobile tools page. BarCampLA5 is this weekend, and I wanted to make use of my camera phone there. While twitxr does geotags tags (set it on the site ahead of time) but not regular meta tags, ShoZu does meta tags (set it on the site ahead of time) but not geotags. So, I set the tags ShoZu to BarCampLA5 and some variations on that. ShoZu, being the oldest out of the three sites, supports connections to the widest variety of social networking and blogging platforms that have open APIs: 28 sites including YouTube and Facebook, plus e-mail and ftp. It does not have a social networking feature, or a landing page for your profile like twitxr, but it does provide an RSS feed for my photos like twitxr. ShoZu has a blog and a support forum, and their team looks pretty solid. They are venture funded and their target user demographic is worldwide, and are based in London. I am not sure what their business model is, but they appear to have some corporate partnerships with big media companies.

JuiceCaster
The first site I checked out was actually JuiceCaster since a friend of mine was just hired there. By far, this was the most difficult site to use, and I could not even get it to work. I had to send it from my phone with the text “Profile” to [my phone number] @juicecaster.com. It cleverly sends the pic right back to my phone (I don’t think it is supposed to do this, and I do not see any value in it), but nothing changes on the site. I could not even get a picture to appear. I don’t care if there is some step I skipped or something, it should just work and be idiot-proof.

JuiceCaster lets you host both pictures and videos, lets you embed a Flash widgets on your blog or MySpace, or Facebook, but it does not seem very useful I can get the pictures to appear. The widget takes the TV metaphor a little too far by showing snow, color bars (when there is no content yet), and letting you change the channel to another users. The widget is the only way to view the content, which creates a bit of a usability problem. This means that you don’t have access to the raw jpg files. As a destination for photos and videos, there are no open APIs to allow the connection of something Flickr or YouTube, which in some ways are compititors. There are no RSS feeds so there is no real platform for others to build on. As a user, if you want your videos to get seen by a lot of people, you are far better off using the ShoZu to YouTube application than embedding the JuiceCaster widget. But, it is pretty clear that the main purpose of this platform is for mobile phones themselves (not the web), sharing with specific friends, and immediacy. However, a little web usability can go a long way in helping to build this brand via some mild SEO. They do have a Facebook application, with instructions on installing it here, but strangely, no link to the actual Facebook application on that page, which is here, listing 19 active daily users. There are four different fan groups on Facebook, the most having 26 members. All of this calls their current strategy into question.

One feature that JuiceCaster has that other services do not have is the ability to send photos and videos to your friends’ phones. However, it seems most phones today have this feature built in, and you do not need a 3rd party application. I am not sure what the core competency or business model is for JuiceCaster. In some ways they compete with Slide.com and RockYou.com’s MySpace widgets and Facebook applications. The target user seems to be the MySpace demographic. I suggest they focus more on allowing the content to be spread around the net with more than just Flash widgets, but also with RSS and an open API, and perhaps a blog. According to their about page, they were able to make their mark years ago as a white label solution, back when there was less competition and innovation in the space.

It seems they definitely want to be a platform, but the other two competitors mentioned in this post, which are simply tools to enable the use of larger platforms, seem to be ahead of them in functionality, flexibility, and momentum. I would love to see them get it together. JuiceCaster is based out of Los Angeles, Ca. They appear to have investors but do not list any of them, but they are listed here at the TechCrunch CrunchBase

I tried to embed the Flash widget, but it messed up the layout of this page to much, so here is a screen shot instead.

Mashable took a less in-depth look at around 30 of the competitors in this space last year.

Update:
If my friend is able to help me fix the problems with JuiceCaster, I’ll update it here.

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I accidentally listed PaidContent.org as another site of mine (I have it in my blogroll, I intended to mark it as “muse”, not “me”, I am not affiliated with them),  so it then goes on to show links to colleagues and acquaintances of PaidContent.org that it attributes back to me. I have fixed this in my blog roll, but the Google cache has not updated yet.

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When you are having a conversation with a friend at your home, you might talk about a piece of corporately owned media, and you might use that corporately owned media in the conversation. The conversation is private and non-commercial.

Now, when you try to take your conversation about media online (in a blog, video, or mp3 for example) and use the media in this conversation, Big Media sees this conversations as their exclusive right to have. And if you did not get the proper licenses, copyrights, and permissions to have an online conversations about the media while using (in it’s original form, in its partial form, or in a re-purposed form except in the case of parody), you are a pirate or a thief. And since it is online, it is assumed to be commercial or have commercial value.

This is the fundamental problem with IP and Fair Use today. To Big Media, all media is big media, and to regular people having a conversation, media is a conversation piece that will be used. Big Media is at odds with normal people’s use of corporately owned Media as part of commentary or conversation if it is online or in the public and for non-commercial purposes.

What Big Media fails to realizes is that conversations about corporately owned Media is not a substitute for media, is not a law enforceable business opportunity, and does not decrease or destroy the ability for corporately owned Media to produce more corporately owned Media. What normal people fail to realize is that Big Media assume they own all the rights to all forms of conversation about their media. But that is where Fair Use should and will be allowed present its case.

The way it looks today is that whoever has the money for a lawyer is allowed to exercise Fair Use. This means that most regular people, despite the ability to broadcast messages on the internet for free, are not allowed to comment by using corporately owned Media.

My favorite books on this topic are Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (who is featured in the video above). You can buy it on Amazon, read it on Google Books, download the free audio book version, or check out all of the other free formats.

Update: 5/27/08
Techdirt shows how Viacom suing YouTube shows this difference perfectly. YouTube is about communication. But Viacom sees it as a broadcast, and so the laws governing broadcast should apply. YouTube sees it as freedom of speech and fair use.

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Dave McClure: Facebook Beacon & Privacy Settings for External Websites (ex: BustedTees.com)

Sean Percival: Facebook Beacon is Sexy

Sawickipedia: Facebook’s beacon program isn’t the spawn of the devil – why you’ll grow to love it too

These posts address the privacy concerns regarding the sharing of your activity about other sites with your friends. However, what about the sharing of your browsing habits with Facebook’s Beacon partners regardless of your Beacon privacy settings in Facebook? The data could still get collected and shared between Facebook and their partners, it is just not published by your newsfeed. In other words, Facebook is leveraging its users cookies’ for its partners to mine data. This will make advertising more targeted and relevant, and this could still be a concern for some people. This is the future, but most people are not ready for this today.

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