A former colleague of ours, Tristan Ferne in the BBC's Audio & Music Interactive department was interviewed by the Guardian this week. We're particularly intrigued by Moose 6... looks like yet another cognitive surplus moment...

I've hugely enjoyed the Sublime Frequencies label's almost willfully eccentric compilations  - revolutionary proto-Rai from Algeria, Bollywood steel guitar - but have only just caught sight of their equally willful website. Less user-centred than dada-centred design.

The value of Top 100 lists is always questionable - and why always in multiples of 10?! That said, the Guardian's list of the 100 best websitesis worth a peek. Still no Weebly though? Why hasn't it made an impact in the UK? Weird...

TED's European director Bruno Giussani has all but decommissioned his always-thoughtful blog Lunch over IP. His reasons for for doing so are as clearly thought through and articulated as one would expect.

Another former colleague and a good friend, Nick Reynolds discusses the highs and lows of the BBC's iPlayer Day on his personal blog.

Game Politics points to at least three low-fi Flash games based on the Bush/shoe incident. Hardly as controversial as the suicide bomber game - nor frankly as funny - but they made me chuckle for a few seconds.

We try to avoid Powerpoint as much as humanly possible at Double Shot, going generally for a much more nail-biting live online demo approach to our presentations. For all that, it can be deployed well (indeed, only this week we witnessed Jem Stone deliver a riveting 50 minute PPT-driven presentation at one of the BBC workshops we've organised).  Anyway, I thought this 11 Rules of Powerpoint  post  was a pretty nifty guide to how to do it well. Also, take note: 11, not 10! Yes!

Paid Content report on the Beta launch of emi.com. I suspect we'll have more to say at a later date - once we've had a good play - but on first glance I have to say I'm impressed; it's certainly the best thing any major has done in the field so far, with customisable playlists, a pretty solid recommendations service a free live streaming. A really impressive start.

This is really, really old, but came up again in a conversation J and I were having this week: Gizmondo's report on the utterly fallacious figures bandied about about the impact of P2P on IP-based revenue.

We won't add our voice to the Scorpions/Virgin Killer/Wikipedia noise here. But we will point out this typically insightful piece by The Observer's John Naughton in which Naughton points to the fact that the web, far from being the libertarian free-for-all so breathlessly anticipated a decade back has turned out to be rather easy to control by special interest groups and self-appointed moral guardians... and there's plenty  of them waiting in the wings.
Simon

We've never really got Second Life. With Reuters now pulling out, the hype might actually be coming to and end.

Russian games developer Russobit-M is apparently about to release a game pretty obviously based on the recent  Russia-Georgia war. Naturally enough, Confrontation: Peace Enforcement features Russian protagonists and Georgian enemies - backed up by NATO.

From the Guardian: an amusing audio precis of Gladwell's Outliers by Jim Crace.

Channel 4's exit from digital radio is still in confusion.

No idea whether this is even vaguely relevant/useful/indicative, but former MTV  "exec" Courtney  Holt has been named as Head of My Space Music.  Like we say, possibly doesn't mean anything at all, but it certainly feels weird.

Universal are crowing about half of Q3's revenue coming from "digital". Meanwhile, Bob Lefsetz is sceptical.

The Guardian talk to Peter Gabriel about his recently-launched ad-funded music download service, We7. He talks a good game, but we have to say that so far, the offer looks a bit weak to us. Still, all experiments are welcome at this point.

We've been working with the great Sir Ken Robinson of late, and in amongst all our research into, er, thought leadership, the name Seth Godin keeps coming up. From a UK perspective that's interesting as it's fair to say he's less well known in the UK.

Anyway, by sheer coincidence, our favourite music industry, er, thought leader, the frequently pusillanimous Bob Lefsetz, posted this nice little nine-point plan to success in the contemporary music industry, based on some of Godin's thinking in Tribes. Here are the headlines...

1. Who Is The Leader Of The Tribe? 2. The Key (It’s the music, stupid.)

3. The Format

4. Tools For Spreading The Word

5. Establish Community

6. Play Live

7. Make It Affordable

8. Tie-ins/Sponsors

9. Innovation

Check this piece out in full. As ever, it's a really engaging and thought-provoking read.

Amusingly, although Harmonix, the developers behind  Rock Band have announced a Beatles game in development, albeit not actually a Rock Band game, it seems that there's still no settlement in sight over the whole Beatles/Apple/'t'other Apple/EMI iTMS mess. Macca seems to be claiming that it's about Apple Corp and EMI, but whatever, certainly seems to say something about the  relative import of games and recorded music.

Simon's in New York as he writes this... which is relevant.

We've spent a lot of time this year talking to large UK-based arts venues, perhaps most significantly the Barbican and The Royal Opera House... very fine people all.

Anyway, as a result, we've done a lot of thinking about what makes an arts venue's website really work, and always trying to avoid being seduced by aesthetics and instead worrying about functionality. (Our challenge to arts bodies has always been: is your website as easy to use as the Mean Fiddler's?)

Now then, I think it's traditional for we Brits to have a slight inferiority complex when it comes to some media stuff. Yes, yes, we 're bizarrely arrogant when it comes to TV (go figure). But we can feel a bit under-par compared to the US when it comes to a discipline like web design. And often fairly.

But Simon has to report that in trying to get along to the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater to catch a rare screening of Michael Snow's 1968 minimalist classic  Wavelength, he had to use their website, which, it must be said, is a fright.

Yes, they've got the problem facing dozens of large arts organisations: a plethora of venues, programmes and sub-organisations, but really, this site is an object lesson in non-User-Centred Design: non-standards compliant, all-over the place in Firfefox on the Mac (hardly a minority platform) and shockingly bad IA. Simon reports that just finding an address for the cinema was an uphill task.

So there you go. We hope that the current significant physical renovation of the venue(s) is accompanied by an uplift in their web presence.

We're big fans of what Manchester-based specialist music etailers Boomkat are doing with their 14 Track "imprint". It's worth a mention here because amongst the plethora of business models being tried out in the record industry, they've got a pretty convincing one.

Each 14 Tracks edition is to all intents and purposes a compilation album - but available only online. Each one is based on a specific theme, genre, label etc. All tracks stream for free from the site, are available as DRM-free downloads individually or as an album.

Now we weren't sure about the pricing structure initially, and we still feel - instinctively - that 99p is a bit steep for a single track, although the DRM-lack is a big plus. But with the bundled "album" price they're on to a winner: £6.99 is a killer price for any 14 track compilation, and especially so for one as likely as not chock full of rarities. Sure, you'll be able to track these down for free somewhere... but with no guarantee of quality, and certainly not with such ease.

So hats off to them in general... and in particular for their latest edition, which delves into the archives of (another Double Shot favourite)  and Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald's Berlin-based techno-dub pioneers Basic Channel.