Well what can we say about our absence, nothing except we are going to get back on it and start being lot more present and trying to do a bit more thinking in public.

So just to start with a couple of things.

One, we love Weebly. This site is made on Weebly, but to be honest we love any website that enables you to build another website. Square Space does just that, and my goodness it looks beautiful and is ridiculously flexible, so much so that when when first saw it in action we thought we'd have to go and rebuild our site in it straight away. Instead of that rather rash move, we are doing some messing about with it to see how it might well work some of the people we are working for. So far I'd say it's a winner, so big thanks to Charles for that tip-off, he has a rather lovely squarespace website and an immensely readable and philiosphical blog that looks at what businesses need to do to survive.

On a very different tangent I just want to bring your attention to an event that happened a little while back but that is of much interest to us. It was called Hacking Education and was set up by Union Square Ventures, namely Fred Wilson, Albert Wenger and Brad Burnham. Brad has recently done a thorough round up post of the day and published the transcript of the whole event. The day looks fascinating and touched many area that Simon and myself are particularly excited about.

There are discussions about how technology is changing the nature of collaboration, about how the experience of formal learning is becoming unbundled in front of our eyes and the implications of that process on society. And, another one of our hobbyhorses, the relationship between gaming and learning, with some fairly mindblowing ideas from Katie Salen, including a new school based opening this year based on game dynamics.

Justin

A few things which've caught our eye of late...

We often hold up UCG centred on Swedish math-metallers Meshuggah as exemplary stuff; a little flurry of online activity stirred up by the band themselves recently demonstrated the very real paradigm shift that's occurred in terms of musicians' relationship with their fans and with the media. It seems that in an interview with Metal Sucks, rhythm guitarist Mårten Hagström was somewhat misquoted about the Nuclear Blast record label. At one time, such an interview would simply have passed by. The most Hagström could have asked for would have been a follow up letter from him to the editor, attempting to put the record straight. And even that would have been unlikely. Very unlikely.

Now, within days of the regional interview appearing, Hagström cropped up right across the metal blogosphere/webspace politely informing fans about what he'd actually said. We noted Heavy Metal News, Loudside and Bravewords amongst the fray... I think it's impossible to overestimate just how dramatic a shift this is...

Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor is another of our hobbyhorses. Here he is talking about the NIN iPhone app - version 1.0, mind; how does Reznor stay so resolutely ahead of the pack?

At the other end of the spectrum... the introduction of variable pricing in the iTunes Music Store has been much anticipated; the record industry has seized the day and reduced 90% of its back catalogue to just $0.69, realising that getting music out there cheaply would be good for everyone - them, fans and artists.  Oh hold on, that's precisely what hasn't happened. In fact the industry seems to have taken the opportunity to jack up the prices of much of the best-selling catalogue. Hypebot are particularly acute on the matter.

Talking of Hypebot, The Gang of Four's Dave Allen has written a very insightful piece for them on the death of the album as an "organising principle" for music. He rounds it of with these bullets, which struck us as on-the-money:

• First, communicate openly and ask your fans what they want from you
• Listen to what they have to say. Really listen
• Provide unique content such as early demos of new songs• Never under estimate the power of a free MP3
• Forget completely the idea of an organizing principle. Invent a new one
• Use social media wisely. Twitter and Facebook Pages are best, MySpace is too cluttered
• Don't push messages to your fans, have a two way interaction with them
• Invite them to share, join, support and build goodwill with you
• Scrap your web site and start a blog
• Remember to forget everything you know about the CD "business"
• Start to monetize the experience around your music
• Remember - the browser is the new iPod

We're big fans of Singstar; it strikes us as a proper example of games-as-learning. Check out their current online competition, a right brand mash-up between Playstation, Glastonbury and cult(ish) club night Guilty Pleasures. Users upload videos of their performances to the site, and the winners will get a slot at the festival, with runners up getting a year's access to GP. Lovely.

There's a bunch of IP/litigation stories out there at the moment. Wizards of the Coast, the people behind Dungeons and Dragons are no longer distributing PDF's of their manuals since they're being widely shared for free. Meanwhile, Discovery are suing Amazon, claiming that the latter's ebook reader the Kindle infringes a Discovery patent. And a FoxNews.com journalist has had to resign after reviewing an illegally downloaded copy of the forthcoming Wolverine movie. (Thanks to The Register for those.)

Not sure what the lawyers would make of this rather lovely album-sleeves-reimagined-as-old-Pelican-paperbacks collection, pointed out to us by our good friend Peter Marsh.

The games industry is so often held up as a global success... and one in which the UK has particularly excelled. And there's a lot of truth in that. This smart article in the New York Times looks at some of the problems facing the industry as it tackled the financial crisis, the spiralling costs of Next Gen game production and, perhaps most significantly, the rise and rise of casual gaming, especially since the introduction of iPhone apps.

Justin pointed out this nice post on the Analog Industries blog looking at the prodigious creative output of teenagers, and the way that access to digital tools has unleashed this. The comments on the post are as telling as the original point.

The Guardian's Simon Waldman is guardedly enthusiastic - if that's not too oxymoronic - about the (re-)launch of Wired UK.The magazine's predictions for the future apparently look forward decades (obviously The Black Swan hasn't done the rounds of the office), whereas self-styled MediaFuturist Gerd Leonhard confines himself to looking at 8 trends in tech over the next five years in this smart post on his always-readable blog.
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