Justin, John and myself have been looking at some of the work universities and colleges are doing in the digital arena - especially using the iTunes/U platform; this Don "Wikinomics" Tapscott piece makes the point that colleges which don't adapt to the new technologies are going to go the same way as the newspaper industry.

"One thing is for sure.  The smartest students want to get an “A” without having ever gone to the lectures.  They understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process.  When the cream of the crop of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy, the writing is in the wall."

We're intrigued by the premise of New York's ARChive project, and tantalised by its online potential. In their own words:"The ARChive was established because for decades the record industry has done little to preserve its own heritage, and over the years many irreplaceable recordings and artifacts have been misplaced or destroyed. Even as the new medium of CDs has placed many out of print recordings back in circulation, many re-issues have different or truncated material, and many CDs themselves are already out of print. The record industry has yet to act to preserve its own heritage, as the film industry recently did after realising that nearly half of all films produced before 1950 have been lost."

Reminds us of the deeply fabulous Ubuweb archive of avant garde and experimental film.

Simon

It's all music and IPR today...

Yes, we go on a lot here about Trent Reznor (amusingly, we're not even especially big fans) but for good reason: no-one else in contemporary popular music is quite as vocal (and articulate), visible and imaginative in their engaging with the new recorded - and, increasingly, live - music business. In this intelligent and honest post on the NIN forum, Reznor explains his take on the whole practice of ticket scalping (or, for the UK, touting) - and the somewhat furtive role of promoters and artists in it.

At the other end of the, er, hard rock spectrum, meanwhile, it looks as though a Guns N' Roses/Chinese Democracy uploader may well go to jail for his misdemeanors. The interesting thing in this Register articleis the disparity between the RIAA's calculation of lost revenue and the CIA's, the latter coming in at a third of the former. (We're sure NN Taleb would have something to say about either calculation. We're also pretty sure that whatever the true figure, Chinese Democracy's poor sales are the result of several phenomena, among them an audience which has moved on and an media environment which has rather more distractions than in the late 80s. Oh, and that it's a piss poor piece of work.)

The World Service's excellent Business Daily took an appreciative and intelligent look at Spotify this morning.

We are loving ThuYou, Israeli collage artist & musician-composer Kutiman's video project, essentially an EP of pieces made entirely from (utterly unrelated) clips on YouTube. It's a thrilling piece of appropriation-art, an essay in creative IPR-abuse... but, perhaps rather more significantly,  a collection of joyful funk pieces and soul ballads. Check the CREDITS link to see a creative attribution at work. Lovely.

This excellent and clear-thinking/straight-talking editorial in the Telegraph takes apart the push from the European record industry to extend the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years.

Wall Street Journal Europe reports that Guy Hands has stepped down as CEO of Terra Firma in the face of investors' anger over the EMI, well, fiasco.

And finally, a bit after the fact, I'm afraid, but here's Norman Lebrecht reflecting on Dutch station Radio 4's free Bernard Haitink downloads and how they rather show up the BBC's "capitulation" to the UK record industry in the wake of Radio 3's Beethoven downloads success/scandal (delete as your standpoint dictates... you know where we probably stand).
Simon

Also in the news today...

In a move not dissimilar to the BBC's launch of Backstage a little while back, The Guardian has announced that it will be opening up some of its back-end as part of the Open Platform project.

Nielsen's evidence of the rise and rise of social networking has been making headlines everywhere. Here's Hypebot's brief take on it.

A UK gov campaign aimed at getting parents to take their kids' health a little more seriously has provoked a storm of protest from the UK games industry for a pretty daft poster portraying a kid sitting on a sofa, clutching (a barely disguised) PS controller under the headline Risk an Early Death, Just Do Nothing.

Rory-Cellan Jones has interviewed Media Molecule co-founder Mark Healey about Little Big Planet for the BBC's excellent dot.life blog.

U2 go from intellectual strength to strength by, to all intents and purposes, ditching their relationship with Apple because of their indirect investment in the Palm Pre. The regular reader will be unsurprised to learn that Bob Lefsetz is pretty amusing on the matter.

Lord Carter has announced the launch of a Digital Rights Agency to help the digital media industry sort out ownership and distribution issues and "combat illegal file sharing". Somehow or other.

Oh, and follow-ups on the YouTube/PRS fall-out... The Guardian asks whether MySpace will be next... and the Times has dusted off a story from January, in which the PRS's pursuit of public performance licence revenue seemed to be getting a little, er, heavy-handed.
Simon

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

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

Talk about zeitgeist. About half a dozen friends have  effectively yelled 'Spotify" at me over the course of the last week. Then I got an invitation to join this rather nifty little P2P-based streaming service, and, well yes, it's pretty fabulous on first look. Lovely, intuitive drag-and-drop interface, easy-to-build playlists, recommendations radio and a lot of music in there. The free version plays you the odd ad, but nothing too intrusive - and not that often. Tonight it's all been about metal and jazz rock: Mahavishnu, Perfect Circle, Opeth, Weather Report, Can and Meshuggah. Couldn't get hold of any Benea Reach or Fell Silent, but still... It's pretty fun toggling between a specialist show on the BBC iPlayer and checking out Spotify to see if they have stuff you liked on said show.

My hunch? It's going to be massive.

I think I'll largely avoid downturn stories here; they're pretty much ubiquitous, after all. Still, Google shedding staff seems to be, well, something.

It seems the iTMS has already shifted 500 million iPhone apps, a staggering 2 million a day. They don't say how many are paid for or free, but still... We particularly like the look of synthpod. Lovely.

Various bits of news came out of MidemNet, a lot of it a bit ho-hum, I thought. We were taken with the notion of the Isle of Man being a testing ground for a broadband "tax" to reimburse downloaded copyright owners. Not entirely sure it's going to get offf the ground though...

I'm the Brighton-based bit of DS, so feel duty-bound to point out these two bits of, er, Silicon Beach coverage in New Media Knowledge. Our good friend Daniel Nathan of, well, everything (but especially of totallyradio) talks about radio and web. And in a more general article the mag talks to some other South Coast notables.

One thing Daniel certainly wouldn't be surprised by is the news that DAB sales are properly flatlining, despite the DRDB's best efforts to obscure the fact.

Uh oh, big hair metaller in not-getting-the-new-world alert: Skid Row's Sebastain Bach is apparently well pissed off with being downloaded for free. To be fair, he's a pretty cogent interviewee, but he does seem to be missing the point here: if the kids really are downloading shitloads of your music for free (and really, Seb, are they?) can't you figure out a way to take advantage? File under "The Metallica approach to the web,".

Oh and one last mention for The Reg's Andrew Orlowski. Orlowski's no free-for-aller, but he points out that Virgin Media's proposed monetised P2P approach had a lot going for it and that the UK record industry's (sadly successful) assault on it before it even had chance to launch is a missed opportunity.
Simon

There's not a little fuss being made about the joint announcement from Google and the Prado in Madrid that some of the masterpieces in the latter's collection are going to be viewable in ultra-hi-res on Google Earth.

Matador Records' Patrick Amory tells Hypebot what is working for the label in marketing terms right now. We were especially taken with his approach to running a label blog:
"Our own label blog. Filling it with as much interesting stuff, non-musical as well as musical, non-Matador as well as Matador, has doubled our website traffic in the past year and vastly increased business on our webstore. It is also a highly effective method of syndicating promo content."

Of course, the record industry isn't always that smart... and often seems to bring others down to its own level. In a move which uncannily echoes the opening anecdote of Lessig's Remix, YouTube have announced that they'll be muting any UGC clips which feature un-licenced third party music. That'll definitely save the industry then.

And in a move (similarly) by turns desperate and, well, somewhat too late, New Labour has apparently opened an "office" in Second Life. Again: that'll do the trick.

Ahead of his upcoming report on digital Britain, Lord Carter has hinted that he'll be pushing for 100% broadband penetration as vital for the UK economy. Apparently he's also considering the merger of Channels 4 & 5 into a larger public service commercial broadcaster:

Over at Google, they've launched an addition to their maps of dozens of cities: public transport routes, but meanwhile have announced that they're ending the ability to upload to (the perpetually beta) Google Videos, one assumes in favour of YouTube.

On the BBC Audio & Music Our Radio Labs blog, our former BBC colleague Michael Smethurst writes with typical insight about the difficulties in creating unique idenitifiers for "works", be they books, records or radio shows.

The inexorable transition from physical to virtual product is demonstrated nicely by the announcement that Blockbuster will be working with Sonic Solutions' CinemaNow to deliver a Blockbuster-branded online and mobile video service.

The upcoming trial of Joel Tannenbaum, who's apparently being sued by the RIAA for a million dollars for illegally downloading, er, seven songs, is going to be webcast, a US courtroom first.

The convergence of the internet and the games console continues apace with YouTube optimising its content for the PS3 and Wii.

The World Service's great finance & industry correspondent Peter Day this week interviewed Wired's Chris Anderson about his "Free" theories and upcoming book.

Talking of free stuff... Andrew Dubber maintains the excellent New Music Strategies blog. This week he discusses the whys and wherefores of giving away recorded music. I've not read anything quite as succinct as his riposte to a musican asking why they should "give their music away":
"1) You’re not giving away music, you’re giving away RECORDINGS of your music; 2) Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music; 3) Economics works differently for bits than it does for atoms."

Oh, and one more Anderson-related nugget. There's a big old Long Tail backlash going on at the moment, but it seems eMusic's consumption figures still bear him out...

Finally, The Independent's web offering has never really stood up against the competition - especially the Guardian (and I write this as an Indy, rather than Guardian loyalist). The inclusion of Al Jazeera video content, however, is a significant enhancement.
Simon

A busy few days on the news front, not least with CES in Vegas, so here's a quick trawl through some stuff which caught our eyes over the weekend.

Copyright thinker-reformer-activist Lawrence Lessing is something of a hero around here. Here he is on the Colbert Report talking about his latest treatise, Remix. Colbert does his usual "whatever" schtick, but Lessig holds his own.

Oh, and here's Gladwell at AIGA Business and Design Conference walking us through his 10,000 hours thesis, cutely using the history of Fleetwood Mac to illustrate his central tenet. (Apologies - this is a couple of months old, but I've only just caught up with it...)

The Guardian report that Eidos have lost a further 28% of their share price principally as a result of disappointing sales of Underworld, the eighth installment of that poster child of the British games industry, Tomb Raider.

Justin's getting a post together about the high end classical music world's engagement with comms tech, but here's a couple of bits of news we've come across in brief. The Berlin Philharmonic have announced the launch of their "Digital Concert Hall", essentially a paid-for, high-res live video streaming service. And Wired report that cellist Yo Yo Ma's posting of a solo performance on music community site Indaba has received a pretty staggering 125,000 accompaniment contributions.

Mind you, for that Berlin Phil business you're going to need a pretty fast connection, and according to Ofcom, the speeds many of us are getting at home are somewhat less than advertised.

We've mentioned tilt shift photography here before - the manipulation of photos to look like close-up pics of models. Tilt Shift Maker is an online app that allows users to upload pics from their library and tilt shift them  - with remarkable ease. Here's a pic I took in Rio a year back, before- and after-tilt shifting...

Hours of fun.

Urban modernist style bible Monocle has launched a new online radio programme,  The Monocle Weekly, hosted by the magazine's founder Tyler Brûlé.

Over at CES...  Sony CEO Howard Stringer announced that by the end of 2011, 90% of its products will be internet connected.

Meantime, Apple have finally announced a variable price structure for songs in the iTMS and that they're gradually dropping DRM. (Like most of us, I can't say this has happened soon enough: for no apparent good reason I discovered mid-set on NYE that I couldn't use any iTMS-acquired songs on DJay until I'd downloaded the latest Quicktime update. Not stressful at all.)

But it seems Palm really stole the show (much to everyone's surprise?) with the launch of the Palm Pre. I have to say, as an (inevitable) iPhone user that I have some serious envy going on...

We've been thinking a lot about the relative merits of Guitar Hero and Singstar for some time; it strikes us that a much better case can be made for the latter as a music teaching tool, as you've got to improve your actual singing to progress. Plainly progressing on the former is only going to make users better at, well, Guitar Hero. But we've felt it's only a matter of time before someone brought together GH-like game play with playing an actual guitar. Seems Disney have got in there first with a tie-up with Washburn guitars: Star Guitarist.

And ending on a sombre note, but stressing that it's not all toys-for-boys, increased convenience for tragically time-poor first worlders or vanity-driven social networking... Here's a Facebook campaign to raise awareness about the devastation in Gaza right now. The real world...
Simon

We took a couple of days off over Christmas, naturally... but we didn't turn the radar off, so here are a few things I've picked up on recently, with a bit of an emphasis on end-of-08 round-ups and predictions for 09.

There's been quite a bit of hoopla about the RIAA giving up on prosecuting file sharers and apparently working more closely with ISPs. Bob Lefsetz takes  a typically sceptical look at the announcement.

Web Pro News's Chris Crum has posted three hugely well-informed 08 retrospectives, looking in turn at the year in social media, music and video.

There's been widespread reporting of China's crackdowns on both Google and homegrown search engine Baidu. It's all about porn, allegedly; the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre is purely coincidental, of course.

As a parent of teenagers who keeps in touch with the little darlings as much through  Messenger, Facebook and the mobile as, well, in person, I was unsurprised to read this article in the Guardian about the increasing number of parents using Web 2 tech to keep an eye on their offspring (and recall with wry amusement an argument with a Somethin' Else colleague a couple of years back in which I held fast to this being a paradigm shift in inter-generational relationships... something I maintain.)

I was as puzzled by ITV's acquistion of Friends Reunited as I was about CBS's purchase of Last... as good as the services were I couldn't see what these particular companies would do with them. Anyway, according to the Times, ITV have fessed up to FR being worth less than they paid for it.

John Naughton has written a typically insightful set of predictions for the upcoming year in tech and comms. We certainly concur with his claims for cloud-based working, "small apps and the rise and rise of the netbook.

And on a related and slightly tongue-in-cheek note, The Reg points to the increased use of online services by larger and larger companies being accelerated by the recess/depression and speculates on the attendant  devastating impact on traditional IT departments.

Wired rounds up its ten favourite iphone Apps of 08; I have to get the ocarina!

Justin has been thinking and writing a lot about cognitive surplus projects... about the notion that there are millions of smart people out there who businesses and governments can tap into for ideas and problem-solving effort. I'm not sure Google's call for ideas from the public fits Justin's definition exactly, any more than Facebook's translation project, but they're both impressive approaches to crowdsourcing.
Simon

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.