Just a brief Round-up of barely-related things that have caught our magpie-like attention over the last few days. We've been researching materials for the "Marketing in the Digital Age" presentation we're doing as part of the social media workshop series we're putting together for the BBC. Predictably, it looks as though it's going to be pretty freewheeling (we've got the first one of the two sessions we're doing coming up later today). Anyway, here are some of the things we've turned up while looking at areas like reputation management, business model promiscuity and the changing nature of broadcasting brands when a. talent can have a direct relationship with the audience and b. s much content is available beyond its official broadcast time-slot.

Trent Reznor has been widely praised for constantly experimenting with digital business formulae. This presentation by Michael Masnick at MidemNet does a nice job of trying to capture it all.

You certainly can't rely on the old ways of doing things, that's for sure. It seems that in the week after playing the Superbowl, watched on TV by 90 million Americans, Bruce Springsteen managed to flog just 100,000 units of his new album, Working on a Dream. Meanhwile, U2 opened up the Grammys with their new single Get on Yer Boots without managing to get it into the top 100 songs on the iTMS. (And all this against a background of 2008's most talked about about album - G'n'R's 17-year-hiatus-ending Chinese Democracy charting only at No 3 on its US release.

For social media dissenters, check the news that up to 75% of 15+ Europeans now use networking services. The UK top the table at more or less 75%; the Austrians are "bottom", but even they're at 46% or so. That's quite a fad.

Still, you can get this so badly wrong. We've especially enjoyed the Wal-Marting Across America fiasco, in which (to be as brief as possible) it turned out that the lovely couple Laura and Jim, who were blogging about their experiences of travelling across the US and camping in Wal Mart car parks, tuned out to be related to Walmart's PR agency Edelman's, "experts" in blogging. The very widely held suspicion is that the whole shebang was a get-up; certainly, the Walmarting Across America blog no longer exists.

(Aside: at another of our BBC sessions last week, Roo Reynolds talked about the default status of content on the web being permanent. I think we'd want to qualify that: its ideal default status is permanent; in reality - as we increasingly discover when researching areas considered even vaguely contentious - content is all too frequently taken down for any number of political, legal or personal reasons.)

The new generation of world-leading politicos - from Sarkozy to Cameron, Merkel to Obama -  have certainly grabbed the interweb by the scruff of the neck. I think it's not unreasonable to say that none of these names was know to all but students of politics perhaps as little as five years ago; one wonders whether comms tech has played a pretty significant role in the hasty spread of their thinking.

There are dangers, of course. Cameron's inner circle recently earned opprobrium for altering a Wikipedia entry on Titian to back up a PMQs jibe made by their leader; and Obama's getting a creeping bad rep for his post-White House occupancy abandoning of the very social media he'd exploited to gain power.

All of which pails into insignificance when considering Palin, of course. It seems pointless to pick out any one of her gaffes, but the continued presence of the Sarkozy prank call rather bears out our "you can't run, you can't hide thinking.

Another more recent example, if less celebrated example of the phenomenon: Japanese finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa pretty obviously drunken appliance at a G8 press conference seems to have led to his resignation...

We heart Mary Anne-Hobbs at DS. Here's a very obviously home-made film she made while recording her West Coast Rocks show for Radio 1; it's as fine an example of broadcasting "talent" having a direct relationship  with the audience as, say, Stephen Fry's very amusing Twitter feed.

(Again, with regards to Roo's nostrum above, note that MAH's own film is still on YouTube; the original Radio 1 WCR show, of course, is no longer available on the iPlayer. The collateral outlives the intended... another common phenomenon when broadcasting and online paradigms collide.)

Anyway, that's just a smattering of stuff we'll be discussing later. If you work at the BBC and like the sound of this, we'll be repeating the session on March 12th; check in with BBC Training & Development.
Simon

On February 20th we hosted the second installment of the Right Tool for the Right Job workshop - part of our ongoing social media work for the BBC's Training & Development team. Here are a few snaps we took during the afternoon.
Simon

First up, two bits of exiting news for us. Our old friend John Kieffer is joining us as an associate and we're going to working with John on an important project with Glyndebourne, helping them scope out the development of their digital offering. More on that as it develops.

In the meantime, a few things we've been keeping an eye on.

"You ain't seen nothing yet": music & media theorist/advocate Gerd Leonhard at MidemNet, talking about ways creators can be compensated for all their wares flying around the internet:

Of course, he talks about The Pirate Bay in there; you hardly need us to tell you about the Bay going to trial in Sweden currently. It's worth taking a peek at the site they've put live to follow the trial.

In a similar vein... Spotify is running into all-too-expected problems with the majors.

Meantime, Bob Lefsetz has been bigging the service up, with his usual mix of insight and, well, certainty:
"When Spotify hits the U.S., the story is going to be gargantuan.  Instant uptake will take place.  You see we’re moving towards the future, it’s almost here."

The Guardian's This Much I Know caught up with Clay Shirky. We've pointed to this anecdote of Shirky's before, but, well, it's important:
"Someone asked me, "Where do people find the time to write Wikipedia?" But it has involved an estimated 100m hours, against the 200bn hours Americans spend watching TV each year. I think of me as a child sat watching every Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch and Partridge Family on TV as a lost opportunity poured down the sink of the worst sort of media."

We're preparing a presentation about the relationship between IPR and the arts for IT4Arts right now. In the course of his archeological digs, Justin turned up this wonderful 2007 Jonathan Lethem essay in the Harpers, on the importance of influence - indeed, of plagiarism - in art. If you follow no other link from this post, follow this one.

The New York Times' David Pogue introduced Twitter to tech-unaware/averse; not the most incisive piece, but given his audience, it's pretty insightful, not least about the fact that there is simply no one way to deploy it.

Now then, the Carter report has promised, er, 2mbps... meanwhile Korea is looking at 1gbps  for urban areas over the next three years. Sigh.

Chris Anderson talked to the Wall Street Journal about his "Free" theory; this is obviously going to build and build over the next few months.

We liked this little observation of generation-i songwriter Jonathon Coulton's:
"Skip the cookie-cutter MySpace stuff and get a full-fledged content-management system like WordPress or Drupal, which will allow you to build your empire as you go: a blog, forums, photos, videos - all in one place that you control."

Already overwhelmed by music apps? Yes, us too... So we probably don't need to sign up for Twisten, which allows you to stream songs being tweeted about. But we probably will, if only to write about it here.

We often talk to our clients about reputation management. This audio clip of Christian Bale dressing down the DOP on the set of T4 - a clip now heard by hundreds of thousands - is a pretty neat example of the axiom that you can't keep anything quiet.

Irish ISP Eircom has bowed to pressure from the major labels to adopt a similar "three strikes and your out" for persistent file-sharers that the French have in place.

Nice little transcript of an NPR show looking at how the Japanese use their mobiles for email and browsing.

It's pointless to point to all the coverage of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger; pointless and a bit beyond our remit, to be honest. But here's The Register on it.

Oh, and here's The Reg again, this time on the demise of the BMG- and Universal-backed music streaming service Totalmusic; can't say I didn't gulp a little at this:
"TotalMusic failed because it had the visionaries of the caliber of [TM exec] Jason on board: people comfortable with the phrase "business model" but with no experience of business, particularly selling something people want. Pseudo-technologists who don't really understand technology, swaying from fad ("compete with free!") to fad (social networking), have nothing to fall back on."
Simon

It's impossible to keep track of even purely music-related iPhone apps, but we try. Gizmodo point to US satellite radio network Sirius shortly coming to the iPhone, although they do question why anyone would bother subscribing when they can get, say, Last or Slacker for free...

Music analyst/strategist Keith Jopling takes a keen and unflinching look at marketing yourself as a musician in the digital age, taking a pop at some daft myths along the way. We liked his two upfront questions:
1. Just what do you do to get your music heard? and;2. Just how long do you intend to last?

Our friend Daniel Nathan of totallyradio is in "print" again... this time talking to the Guardian about how technology can help local radio weather the economic storm.

Nine Inch Nails continue to try out new digital business models with each release - the correct approach at this stage of the game, in our view. They're releasing The Slip as a free PlayApp download with a Creative Commons licence.

There's already a lot of opprobrium - or at least scorn - building in response to Lord Carter's Digital Britain report, and apparently with good reason: the inevitable - but unworkable, indeed, ultimately meaningless - promise to crack down on file sharers (elimination of 80% of illegal file sharing in the UK by 2011 - really?) , the commitment to "upto" 2 Mbps broadband connectivity for every household in Britain by 2012 (wow!), the eschewing of Obama's content neutrality for ISPs and on and on...

But it was Culture Secretary Andy Burnham's assertion that "Britain has always led the world in content creation - with the best music, films and TV" that made me laugh out loud. I guess he has to say it, but worryingly, I suspect he means it. (Sarah pointed out that the irony here that he could legitimately have claimed British radio and video games as world leading but somehow managed not to... )

We did like the Reg's observation that "Carter baffled many in the room with his description of the new USC as "an aspiration to a floor of up to 2Mbit/s".

Also in the Guardian, Negroponte on the trials and tribulations of One Laptop per Child...

...and Charles Arthur on Spotify.

Oh, and while we're on that subject, Techcrunch point out that the record industry isn't necessarily feeling as well-disposed towards the streaming music service as the rest of us.

Oh and here's a BBC News report on various approaches to lo-fi and/or DIY approaches to music "TV".
Simon