Setting sail ...
All dig down sets sail this week into a perfect storm, a little boat
armed only with a compass and the wisdom of others who have navigated
similar storms and survived. We’re not talking about a closed beta
anymore, but we are opening the site to anyone – a vast open sea of
users will be lapping against our hull.
In the wake of economic mayhem the closure of one of the most
media-hyped “potential” competitors to the iTunes, Spiral Frog is
likely to be overlooked but points to some of the obstacles that any
upstart digital entertainment site will have to overcome. Spiral Frog
forced users to listen to ads in order to download music for “free” in
a format that was not iPod friendly. It tried to offer users “free”
music and to give iTunes a bit of competition but was doomed to failure
having agreed to pay monstrous advances to major record labels hoping
to use venture funding given to wanna-be MySpaces like Spiral Frog
(with flawed business models) to save them from themselves. Others like
QTrax, iMeem and lala.com, may not dead yet but are surely drowning.[Read More]
Posted at 07:02AM Apr 03, 2009 by shelley in Social Networking | Comments[0]
The French Resistance
France, the indomitable little village, is the only one with the power to resist for once and all the invasion of MySpace!
My Remix:
Posted at 10:21AM Jan 15, 2007 by shelley in Social Networking | Comments[0]
Me Me Me and Me, Too…
I love to write, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why I’d want my own 15 minutes of fame in the form of a blog. Stream of consciousness here…bear with me. 
I know how to criticize and analyze (having spent the last 20 years or so doing just that for a living), but I am struggling to define my POV. What’s the angle? What’s the benefit, not just for me, but for the readers (assuming that I find some)? Simply writing a blog feels so self indulgent, so ME ME ME. Who really cares? My friends, my family? Maybe my colleagues? Me? It makes me think of those YouTube videos with adolescents jumping on the bed playing their air guitars to a hit from their parents’ generation. Why not write their own music or jump on the bed to music of their own generation? Music repurposed. Where’s the soul in this? So why would I, too, want to do it? Why be a Me Too?
[Read More]
Posted at 11:11AM Jan 09, 2007 by shelley in Social Networking | Comments[1]
Bonfire of the Vanities
“Vanity, definitely my favorite sin.”
-Al Pacino as the Devil (The Devil’s Advocate)
Now that the Holiday season has ended, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic and wondering what the New Year will bring. My boyfriend came to visit for Christmas, bringing along a copy of Time magazine. “You’ll be interested in this,” he said. I glanced at the cover -- “Time’s Person of the Year. You. Yes, you.” -- and became incredibly depressed.
That issue, published on Christmas Day, reminded me of another cover, long ago, that had quite the opposite effect on me. It shouted: “The 80s are over, greed goes out of style,” and was subtitled “The Rewards of Virtue.” The article’s prediction, that social conscience would be the way of the 90s, made me pause. Dare I hope? It almost seemed possible.
[Read More]
Posted at 12:28PM Dec 29, 2006 by shelley in Social Networking | Comments[48]