Why are some old albums not for sale online? The Wall Street Journal “Real Time” guys look into one of life’s mysteries (free feature).

Quote:

“…while most pop new releases are a click away, some artists’ “back catalogs” are frustrating patchworks, with albums unavailable because of rights issues, because clearing those rights isn’t a priority for a record label, or maybe just because they’re way down on an awfully long list. Think of them as the digital-music revolution’s missing in action.

Blogging the sudden end of a business: Closing a company is a sad, traumatic experience. (Trust me.) Paul Purdue is going through the experience now…and is using his blog to keep the customers of iFulfill.com informed during the days after he announced the company has shut down. His customers are using the comments as a forum to display their concern (and anger), but also to look for help in getting their merchandise to another fulfillment vendor. It’s not fun to look at, but is somewhat of a milestone in business blogging. It’s certainly something I’ve never seen before.

(via: Steve Baker and BL Ochman)

What Steve Baker said: Mainstream journalist/blogger Steve Baker (of BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting) responds to the question, “Should mainstream journalists blog?” (Here was my response.)

Terry Heaton surveys Nashville bloggers about Channel 2’s efforts: 46 bloggers (including me) responded to a survey by Terry Heaton who has been working with Nashville’s Channel 2 (and SF’s KRON) on citizens’ media initiatives. This weekend, he posted some of his findings.

Quote:

“Mainstream media that play in this space need to first understand that the blogging community doesn’t need them, and that humbling reality is what needs to guide strategies and tactics as they work to get involved. The Nashville blogosphere is now five times larger than it was when the station first began its involvement, and I think it’s safe to say they’ve played a role in encouraging that growth.

How? Simply by listening. Who knew?

Along the way, station personnel have discovered something they didn’t expect: getting to know the local blogging community is a lot more fun than you can possibly imagine up front. And frankly, folks, fun isn’t a word that’s been associated with local media for a long, long time. How do you put a value on that?

What Jeff Jarvis said: Jeff notes that TV Guide should have overhauled themselves 10 years ago when it would have actually done some good, and then asks why drastic strategic changes are not happening at other publishing companies today.

And then he answers: “It’s because they are cash cows.”

No longer an outsider: Dave Winer reports (celebrates) the availability of a Mac version of the OPML editor. (Download page here). I guess I now get to play. (However, I think I’ll wait until I’m on vacation in a couple of weeks to really dive in.)

At Gnomedex, I spent some time with Dave Luebbert, who worked with Dave W. on the initial release. Dave says also that Andre Radke has helped in getting the Mac version available. Thanks to everyone.

Better question: After years of linking to (and explaining why they’re wrong) articles about why magazines are going to go away because of the Internet, I finally get to link to a story that asks, “Why are magazines so successful?”

What Kevin Kelly said: (Note: I’m still not blogging this weekend, I just happened to finally getting around to reading something in a magazine that, fortunately, is also online, and couldn’t help myself.) In a must-read Wired Magazine article, “We Are the Web,” Kevin Kelly displays how to make a profound argument stick, not by focusing on the rules and rants about who can and cannot blog, but by providing insight into the beauty of what has taken place over the past ten years — and, in turn, making us realize that the next ten could take us places the rule-makers (be they bloggers or old-media types) are the last to envision.:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site’s long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe, Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer’s forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone’s 10-year vision.

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences - and they knew a lot - confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There - another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC - and almost everyone else - expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?

Update: Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick pokes around the same topic and calls it “the contribution economy” (book with same title to be pitched later, no doubt).

Quote:

“Who would have thought that your customers would work as volunteers on behalf of your company?” asks Scott Cook, founder and chairman of software firm Intuit. The trend, which Intuit calls “user contribution systems,” helps the company constantly improve the quality of its products, he says.

Early weekend blogging schedule: Unless I hear some juicy news about movie stars or drunk country singers, I’m off line until late Sunday.

Happy birthday, Doc: Doc Searls, who once said something like, everything we know him for, he’s done after turning 50, has a birthday today. Doc, you’ve certainly done a lot in 8 years. And, frankly, I can’t think of anyone during the past 8 years who has influenced my thinking about certain topics than you. Thank you.

Bob Cauthorn goes all priggy on us: Amen, brother Jeff Jarvis. I think this is one of the most unfortunate inaugural weblog posts I’ve ever read. In it, Bob Cauthorn uses several thousand words (I’ll admit, he lost me on about the 600th) to lecture (nay, pontificate) who should and should not blog - specifically, old-media types should not.

I’ll confess, I’m a die-hard old-media guy and, frankly, the only thing I know about blogging comes from making a few thousand posts on this weblog since 2000* and reading, perhaps, a few hundred thousand posts on other blogs during that same time. But despite this limited knowledge, my brief foray into the whole blogosphere thing has taught me this: The first rule of blogging is, “never attempt to make up rules about blogging.” The second rule of blogging is, “if you think God has called you to be the Moses of blogging, please wait a few months after coming down from the mountain-top before issuing your commandments.” And the third rule of blogging is, never use the word “jiggy.”

*I first said 1990, but decided that was only amusing me and was adding to the widely held notion that I’m going senile in my old age.

What teenagers think e-mail is: (According to a Pew-funded survey) “It’s something used to talk to ‘old people.’”

I couldn’t agree more.

(via: iwantmedia.com)

Pay to play: (From: Economist.com) “I’ve paid payola,” admits one music executive. “I couldn’t get through to the key radio stations, my band made difficult music and now they’re a household name.”

Observation: I say podcasting won’t officially be mainstream until it has its first payola scandal.

Obvious: Only 2% of survey respondents said “yes” when asked “Do you use RSS?”

Here’s a suggestion to display how ridiculous it is to ask a layperson
anything like, “Do you use RSS?”: Walk up to someone on the street and
ask, “Hey, do you use the Interent?” When they say “yes,” ask, “So, do
you ever use HTML?”

Why not ask, “Would you like to have a page set up, say, on Google / (http://www.google.com/ig) or
Yahoo or AOL, where on that one page all the news from sources you want (and
on all the topics you’re interested in) will automatically appear as
soon as the news-source releases it — so you will never again have to
surf around to a bunch of websites looking for the information
important to you?”

(via: Steve Rubel)

What David Pogue said: (In the NY Times, after a few weeks of iTunes 4.9) “In One Stroke, Podcasting Hits Mainstream.” (Come to think of it, I said it first.)