A brief analysis of why MySpace is successful as a space for music

Why is MySpace popular

An interesting discussion surfaced over the past week among some bloggers, precipitated by comments from Esther Dyson in a debate with Vint Cerf in Wall Street Journal Online.

Paying Attention

Chris appears to believe that in a long tail world brand fractures and fragments as customers themselves, or at least the tastemakers and celebrities among us, develop reputations as trusted advisors to help others navigate through the long tail. I hold that, in a long tail world, customer relationship businesses have an opportunity to create very powerful and scalable brands based on the proposition that they know individual audience members or customers better than anyone else and can be trusted to use that knowledge to become ever more helpful to the audience member or customer.

The Long Tail and the Structure of the Media Industry

The new Dylan album starts with the voice of God in the mountains and the sound of pistols in the streets. Bad things are happening, and the ladies in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to get out of town. Dylan has ladies on his mind, too-- Alicia Keys, who's forty years younger than he is yet worth chasing through the Tennessee Hills just the same, but also good women who do just what you say, and the wicked women who drain your heart and mind. War and love are in the air. It's time to get right with the Lord, maybe go back up north and try his hand at farming. But the pitchfork is on the shelf. The hammer is on the table. And from the sound of things, the hammer is coming down.

NPR coverage

Bob Dylan : Modern Times : Rolling Stone Review

Globalization is real, but its power to improve the lot of humankind has been madly oversold.

Return of the Tribes

"The police are really good at understanding someone stole my credit card and ran up a lot of money. It's a lot harder to get them to buy into 'someone stole my magic sword.'"

Do identity theft laws apply to virtual identities? Or are they property?

"Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking at you."
-- Dave Weinstein, Microsoft

I'm having a hard time picturing Tony Soprano raking it in on WoW.

Microsoft warning on online games

We've opened up Yahoo! from the inside out with our world-renowned Hack Day, and from the outside in through the Yahoo! Developer Network. Now we're opening up Yahoo! itself to a select group of hackers and special guests for a weekend festival of hacking, camping (yes, the tents-in-the-outdoors kind--we have really, really nice grass!), music, and good times.

We'll kick things off on Friday, September 29th with a free all-day developer workshop. Then we'll launch a 24-hour Hack Day with an outdoor party into the wee hours, with special guests providing the soundtrack. (Details to come later, but we guarantee this won't be your usual corporate-wedding-band leading the crowd through 2am group sing-alongs of "Brick House.") We'll hack through the night, keep going through Saturday morning, and wind it all up that evening with hacker demos, judging from a panel of luminaries. and special awards for the coolest hacks. We'll have special guest speakers all weekend, with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch presiding over the festivities. And after nightfall we'll close things out with another round of entertainment that you would be happy to pay for, except that you won't have to.

We have no idea what's going to happen at Hack Day. We never do. We're pretty sure we'll be amazed. We're still working out the final details, but we'll be posting more here soon.

If you'd like to attend, please sign up on Upcoming.org. If you're interested in creating and showing a project at Hack Day, please fill in the form below and we'll be in touch.

Yahoo! Hack Day Is Coming : September 29th and 30th, 2006

To the uninitiated, modern jazz can sound like a secret language, full of unpredictable melodies and unexpected rhythms. For alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, however, the idea of jazz as code is more than just a metaphor.

Mahanthappa is best known for combining avant-garde jazz with Indian classical music. But for his latest release, Codebook, from Pi Recordings, the artist looked instead to cryptography and number theory for inspiration. (The album's title pays homage to The Code Book, a history of cryptography by the British science writer Simon Singh.)

From Crypto to Jazz

A bicycle for the mind, redux.

Electronic Learning April 1994

(interview with Alan Kay, inventor of the Graphical User interface)

A bicycle for the mind | Alan Kay

Just as information workers surpassed physical laborers in economic importance, Pink claims, the workplace terrain is changing yet again, and power will inevitably shift to people who possess strong right brain qualities. His advocacy of "R-directed thinking" begins with a bit of neuroscience tourism to a brain lab that will be extremely familiar to those who read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open last year, but while Johnson was fascinated by the brain's internal processes, Pink is more concerned with how certain skill sets can be harnessed effectively in the dawning "Conceptual Age." The second half of the book details the six "senses" Pink identifies as crucial to success in the new economy-design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning-while "portfolio" sections offer practical (and sometimes whimsical) advice on how to cultivate these skills within oneself. Thought-provoking moments abound-from the results of an intensive drawing workshop to the claim that "bad design" created the chaos of the 2000 presidential election-but the basic premise may still strike some as unproven. Furthermore, the warning that people who don't nurture their right brains "may miss out, or worse, suffer" in the economy of tomorrow comes off as alarmist. But since Pink's last big idea (Free Agent Nation) has become a cornerstone of employee-management relations, expect just as much buzz around his latest theory.

Review

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, by Daniel Pink