I will try to describe an alternative way of handling social media and marketing-buzz. We are clearly entering a new phase. Today we are sharing without limits. I didn’t manage to get any exact numbers on how much content on the web that are created by bloggers, tweets, facebook, etc. but it’s a significant number and it’s growing every minute.. ..And all can be described with the foam on top of a Latte…

If the full volume of a latte is all the tweets out there, the foam is the posts that will make it to the public news-arena.

Let me explain how I see it…

The 4 Steps

Before I go to the coffee-talk I will describe 4 steps:

1. A new media for the same content with the same players – Corporate domination – Traditional Newspapers or other companies dominating the content on internet.
2. I can also write that, and I can do it better – Blogs domination – The time where blogs where dominating. Some bloggers became superstars and got a lot of influence in several areas. The news organizations suddenly saw the problem and started to attack the bloggers for being subjective and inaccurate. However. .. The bloggers are first. One example of that is the PerezHilton – Celebrity blog that was so fast that newspapers quickly started to use it as their source. A good example of a cool news-page using blogs as sources are Newsy that create video-news from multiple blog-sources.
3. Look what he wrote.. . And I saw it first – Twitter domination – The Twitter boom. Some twitter-users could profile their tweets and make huge follower lists in days! It went so fast! A new internet-era was born. From this stage it’s actually valuable and respectful to find and read content created by others. Watch out google .. your automatic search engine have competition by humans that want to be first. The result? You can actually find content much faster on twitter than on google even though google has thousands and thousands of computers watching the internet all the time. . . Google engine doesn’t have the social skills, it doesn’t have the follower network. . . And google mostly search on content created in stage (2) above. . .blogs. . .blogs are slow. Blogs vs. Twitter is more like Newsweek  vs. Reuters.
4. People wants social, let’s give them social – All-in-social – Dominated by Facebook, Twitter, Google, Gowalla, Blogs. Newspapers and other organizations are turning social. Now you can “like” everything from a product to a page or a comment to some local news. You share your friends, pictures, locations, favourites. Thanks to all social sites there’s no need to communicate by email any more. This phase is more or less the second wave of something that started by Twitter.

The phases are not competing with each other but we have added more reactive states on top of the old ones. (1) is less reactive and so on. (4) is the most reactive.

The Social step it’s more or less “look what I am seeing now”. We now have live-videocasting with Bambuser and live-location services from Foursquare or Gowalla. They are inspiring the twitter-layer that are reporting “Look what he’s watching”. If the tweet is interesting enough it will be transformed to a blog and maybe even an article in the newspaper. One example of this flow is the “Antennagate” iPhone 4 antenna scandal that started with a couple of social discussions, tweets, video-casts and then was transformed to big detailled blog-posts and articles in the biggest newspapers.

The Long Tail

The Long Tail is a theory based on a statistical property that could be applied on everything from record sales to economy models or marketing. I recommend the book. If you have a large availability of choice and a large population of customers, the buying pattern will follow the Power Law / Pareto Distribution meaning that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. I recommend you to read more about it on thelongtail.com or on Wikipedia. It is really amazing statistics!

The 4 steps explaining The Long Tail of Buzz

So, fistly. . .Let’s all agree that every step has a large availability of choice and large population of customers.

(4) to (3) – Let’s say that only 20% most popular social posts/videos/staus messages make it to the next step.

(3) to (2) – In (3) all the step 4 updates will be mixed with all the tweets out there. 20% of the most popular tweets will get 80% of the attention. The 20% most popular tweets will be re-tweeted and totally dominate the twitter-landscape. They will probably be denoted and inspire bloggers out there.

(2) to (1) - In (2) all the step 3 updates will be mixed with all the blogs out there. The 20% most popular blogs will get 80% of the attention and traffic. They will also inspire newspapers and news-sites.

Conclusion

If an article in a newspaper is based on a blog or a social update is sometimes hard to tell. However, you can clearly see that you need to be in the 20 most popular percentages to get attention. 0.8% of the tweets will make it up to newspaper-articles if this simple model is accurate.

According to FoodNetwork a Grande Caffe Latte contains around 25% foam which will represent the most popular tweets that takes around 85% of all attention. It’s the foam that make it to the next level. So. . ..are you the milk or the foam of the social landscape?

1. You don’t need it, do you?
Maybe this is the reason to why the tablet-pc-business has failed ever since microsoft and pc-vendors tried to market it in the beginning of 2000. You don’t need it, right? You _can_ manage with the original pc-style of working…

… The iPad is definitely something you can survive without and it will never be a replacement of your PC/Mac/Laptop. It is too constrained and more like a thin client. It is, however, a completely new way of doing computing… It is the easiest gadget on earth that is a complete web-station with everything you need regarding media viewing/web/email/messaging/sharing/caring. It is also the best gadget on earth if you want to show stuff over a table.

2. Why should you have it if you don’t need it?
The iPad could be pretty handy if you want to show pictures to a friend on a café, read an e-book, browse the web in your bed, read news in the bus. It is also complementary to your smartphone since you can write emails faster and get benefits from the bigger screen.

3. Why not just bring a netbook/notebook
Sure.. do that… But you won’t get the same flexibility. An iPad is just like bringing a lab notebook with you. It’s thinner, sleeker and more robust. I own a netbook (eeepc 901 9″). It’s great and of course it has some really great advantages compared to the iPad but it doesn’t enable: Web browsing on the run, instant access to the email with the same simplicity as my smartphone, 10h battery time (even more since you don’t use it 10h in a row), simplicity of touch.

4. Tell me one killer use-case tht is enabled only by the iPad
I can give you 2 use-cases:

5. I have an iPhone/Smart phone so I don’t need an iPad
The smartphone is for other use-cases. The smartphone is by name a smart phone. It is optimized to maximize the number of use-cases you can bring with you in a pocket. The killer use-cases for a smartphone is: Phone , Smart messaging (sms, mms, email), Camera, photo editing/browsing/sharing, music player, Managing your Social Networks by telling where you are and what you’re doing.

The iPad is mostly for browsing the web, reading RSS news, reading e-books, magazines, reading and writing longer email, working while on the run, creative working, showing your pictures for your friends on a café (you can show one picture to seveal people instead of passing around your smart phone), showing presentations while on the run. Basically it’s a merge between a phone and a computer.

You don’t need it but you will smile when you’re using it! I think this is the new way of using computers. You are mostly browsing the web anyway. Why don’t you do it in your most comfortable chair in your favourite book-reading-position The big touch-screen enables thousands of new use-cases. I think it is perfect for DJ-applications, controlboards, media centers and cash register machines for waiters. It could also be a better device for elderly people that doesn’t understand or want a computer.

blogged from my iPad

I want to wish you a calm and peaceful christmas!
In the same time I am opening a video blog (see it as a christmas gift if you want ). This is only experimental but through the video blog i will share interesting moments that i can capture when I’m on the run. I will use the excellent swedish service from bambuser that enables live video blogging from a wide range of mobile phones and from any computer. Give it a try. All my video blog posts is available under “video blog” on the sidebar.

Last week i was on a christmas concert with Malmö Musikhögskola. That is my first post in my video blog. Enjoy!

Hi there, long time no see

History:
Actually I have been doing lot of things lately but not blogging. Soon 2010 is here and I have to write something that concludes this decade. I don’t know what this decade has meant to you? I entered this decade/century/millenium as an 18 years old student on high school. For me, 2000 was the entrance to the new world outside of school. I got a part time job at Europolitan, one of the 3 biggest Mobile Operators in Sweden, located in my hometown Karlskrona. Since I did not need to do any military service i started to work there full time when I had graduated from School.

Europolitan:
I worked with phone services at Europolitan. I was working as a phone operator (phone directory assitance and switchboard services) for 1 year. That was interesting itself but the intranet and all mobile devices and services that was all around me was even more inspiring. I got in charge of a phone pool service for our department and started to help my collegues to try the new phones such as: Nokia Communicator and Ericsson T68. I got some comments like: Why do you need a color screen? and What’s the point with MMS and mobile internet? We know that now right?

My Phones:
All my phones the last decade has been collected in the image on top of this post. I have been studied each and every feature in all of my phones. Buying a new phone is all about finding new functionality, hidden treasures and customizing the phone so it’s taylor made for your everyday needs. My T68 is by far my most tailored phone. I had special ringtones for almost every close friend and family member. It was the first phone with color screen and that ment that I could have fun pictures for each and every person in my phonebook. Customizing small gifs and jpegs took much time. Was the time worth spending? Actually .. .no. . .but it was fun! I have also been writing a lot of custom made ringtones for all my ericsson phones. It is cool to see all these phones side by side.

University:
When I started studying Mathematics Engineering a new world opened up. Now I could understand each and every feature i was amazed over as a user. Speech recognition/Voice compression technology/Jpeg/MP3/MMS/GSM/UMTS was even more inspiring from a technical perspective.

Did you know that the person you hear through your mobile earphone is not the true voice? It’s just a synthetic simluation of the true voice.

Scalado:
I’m glad I have the opportunity to work at Scalado in the mobile area. Every workday counts and it is important to be open minded and think outside of the box. With Scalado, I reached my goal to work and be a part of this mobile revolution. This industry is changing how people communicate and it helps people to make their everyday life better.

Industry:
The mobile industry is the most dynamic industry in the world right now. Think about other areas and the transition during the last decade. They are not even close… Now the mobile industry have started the new era.. I find my phone more modern than my computer. . It has an app store, it is fun to use and it’s always with me!

The Wired CD was shipped together with the newspaper in november 2004 with the sloagan: “Rip. Sample. Mash. Share”.

These musicians are saying that true creativity needs to be open, fluid, and alive. When it comes to copyright, they are pro-choice. Here are 16 songs that encourage people to play with their tunes, not just play them. — WIRED magazine, November 2004 issue (CD was included with magazine.)

Wired highlighted a license form that is very common when it comes to photos and videos thanks to sites like Flickr.com. However, it haven’t succeeded in the music world. Maybe piracy can be one reason?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration. You can Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally.

During one cold night in August i decided to try to find all the creative commons music i could.

I found a site Jamendo.com that was pretty good. A lot of music gathered. I downloaded about 10 albums that I liked but that was pretty much it.

The amount of music available with creative commons license is still very small. I don’t think it will be a hit. We will get free music anyway with services payed by commercial or monthly fixed fees (Spotify/Pandora/last.fm). Creative commons will still be a niche.

But the 10 albums i found was great!

The number of people that is online can only move in one direction, _up_. The way people will use internet will differ every year.

Example 1: newsmap.jp – News, Now!

With newsmap you can see the news that are big at the moment. Bigger news means larger space on the newsmap. Great example of the reality web. Big news is not decided by any specific news-source, it’s decided by a big number of sources.

Example 2: TwitScoop

A snapshot of Twitter, now! (Image to the right) Come back in 5 minutes and you will see a different set of scoops. I would request a twitscoop that takes snapshots for the latest minute/hour/day/week/month. If you could base your scoop on location/interests/age/subject it would be even more amazing. That will probably be available tomorrow. Otherwise I have to make it myself!

Example 4: Aardvark
Ask anything and get the answer within a couple of minutes. Aardvark is a real-time information community where you can ask anything for free. They call it social-search and it is exactly where I want the internet to become. When you register you insert your interests and some topics that you know about. Aardvark will tag a question and suggest it to a person that fits. You can get questions by email/IM or directly on your iPhone.
I am aardvarking a lot and since they also have an iPhone app i use it when I’m on the run. The other day I got a question when I was on the trainstation. It was about online Address-books. I had the answer and within minutes the man from Florida got his answer. Luckily he knew a couple of swedish words and was very happy to get in touch with a swede since his grandmother was from northen sweden. He made my evening and hopefully I made his. For free and I is surely worth the time spent.

Besides all those examples, communities are a big part of reality web.

The Twitter movement combined with facebook have in one way been more revolutionary than the IM revolution (IM = Instant messaging like MSN, ICQ and Skype) since it is more about information sharing, realtime! IM is more a free alternative to something we already had in SMS and Phone Calls, with a big twist of course. Services like last.fm that is all about music is one example of communities more focused on some special interests. You can get recommended new music, discuss music with other people and also check what your friends are listening to right now. Why don’t we have that kind of communities for movies/books/location and other interests. Tomorrow maybe?

Internet have turned from an information source into an information stream powered by the users. The large amount of users means that each and everyone only has to contribute with their presence/interests and thoughts.

Where in the stream are you today? Where in the stream are you in 2 years?

The new mobile trend is Facebook/Twitter etc. integrated in the Phone. With a phone with Facebook included you can easily check the facebook status before you call someone. The pictures of your phone contacts will be in sync with the latest ones on Facebook and you never need to worry about out-dated phone-numbers since they will be upgraded when people change them on the net.

The future is now and now is history in 5 minutes. Internet is going faster and faster and the potential is what we want it to be.

This was my version. Want to know more? Check New York Times article: Hey, Just a Minute (or Why Google Isn’t Twitter)

Once the quick-and-simple design is deployed,
it can then evolve as needed,
driven by user requirements

I think good enough market segments are kind of new but they are easy to find if you look for them. When it comes to technology during the 90′s, the market was mainly focused on 2 segments: good or cheap.

For every “good enough” product there will always be a small group that wants a high fidelity version. All the big volumes will be in the good enough segments and the high fidelity versions will be expensive and targeted for small groups. In the same time it will be a big market for “a bit better than good enough” targeted for people that wants a little extra. This means that you will create 3 markets from just one! This fragmentation will go on and on and on. Then you have a market that is more fragmented than ever with: cheap, cheap but a bit better, good enough, good enough but a bit better, cheap almost high fidelity and high fidelity. At some point you will have too many “small segments” between good and high end and finally some markets segments will disappear.

What if the high fidelity buyers will find benefits in the lower price segments?
When reading the wired-article “The good enough revolution, when cheap and simple is just fine” I noticed that sometimes you can create other values in the good enough segments that you cannot in the high fidelity range. A couple of examples:

Mobile cameras – always with you.
TheFlip video camcorder – cheap and easy to use.
Youtube – Free with lots of content.
Netbooks – Cheap and small.
IKEA – Why pay more?
Skype – Free and border-less.

When it comes to music you can store more compressed music in one device. Compressed formats also allow streaming and infinite music for a monthly fee. That kind of services and possibilities is not available for lossless formats for the moment..

Music, one market where good enough probably will out compete high end.
Let’s compare the music industry from the 90′s with today’s “good enough” music market. On the 90′s we had CDs. The industry was focusing on quality and Digital Remastered versions of the old LP-versions. Quality and convenience was the sales arguments for the CD.

When the mp3-format arrived during the mid 90-s it was a revolution. It had a good quality compared to the other digital formats and was possible to download even with a 56k modem. With services like Kazaa and Napster people started to download music (mp3 files with 128kbit). People got used to and accepted the quality decrease since they got the music for free and it was more convenient than buying a cd. The noticable quality decrease that you got with 128kbit mp3 was ok, since it was… yeah… good enough…

With Itunes Music Store the digital music went legal, but the sound quality was only 128kbit/s AAC. That was quite far from CD quality. Even if people where paying money for the music, they still recieved quite bad sound quality. Why did we accept to pay for bad sound quality? Probably because it was good enough for some. Around 2 years ago Apple increased the quality to 256kbit/s AAC VBR that sounds alot better. For the most of us, it is good enough.

The Spotify music streaming service uses OGG 160kbit/s compression in their music archive. Their OGG settings has some really disturbing differences compared to uncompressed music when it comes to cymbals and intensive parts that starts suddenly directly after a silent part, but for many people it is good enough. For premium users Spotify gives the possibility to listen to the music with a 320kbit/s compression mode that sounds very good. It is hard to tell the difference compared to the uncompressed original, it is good enough to even more people.

I think it is a big difference between compressed and lossless audio. A cd or FLAC (lossless audio) file sounds a bit more natural and not so “tense” as compressed music. For me the difference is worth paying for. I think I’m heading closer to the high fidelity group when it comes to music.

According to Wikipeida, good enough is an adapting process.. . It will be improved when it needs to (when it’s not good enough any more)… For every improvement it will be a bigger threat to high fidelity (or better quality). It will attract more and more customers. At some point the number of high fidelity customers will be too low. What will happen? It will become a very expensive niche or the product will disappear. I am wondering what will happen with the CD in a couple of years?

This is a post regarding the subject that has been discussed widely here in Sweden since the Pirate Bay Trial. We also recently got a new anti piracy law, IPRED (After the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive proposed by the European Union). IPRED made it easier to aquire persional information about users that are suspected pirates.

This law change was not popular. Weeks of debates helped the Swedish Pirate Party to get one of Sweden’s seats in the European Parliament. We also could se decreasing internet traffic and fewer pirates. People got scared and maybe didn’t want to take the risk.

“It’s obvious that those who are using file-sharing have been scared and moved somewhere else, like streaming music sites,” said Daniel Johansson, a researcher at KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm. (source)

They recently have proposed similar laws in Great Britain. It will be very interesting to follow if the result will be the same there.

This is my opinion: Music … could … be free! But let the authors/artists or the music industry decide the details!

We have a society that is based on intellectual property like patents and copyright laws. We also have licence models like creative commons and GPL that make it possible for the creator to choose which license model the product should be released with. The Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil have released music under the Creative Commons license form.

Gil means that Creative Commons is good when you want to “democratizing the distribution of intellectual property rights”
(source).

Everyone cannot do like Gilberto Gil and give away their music but I think that with free distribution channels like Spotify, MySpace and Last.fm you have everything you need to release your own music as artist or listen to music free of charge as consumer. Don’t forget that music artists need to make a living as well. Since consumers are not willing to pay the price, maybe the future income will be more dependent on concerts and ad-supported radio and streaming solutions than before, but piracy is not generating any money itself, it is generating attention.

Is piracy really profitable for the record labels (and how to measure)?
I don’t think so. . .You don’t pay for the content. Attention is profitable and i think that software like Spotify or last.fm can be more attention-generating than piracy since they can use more social-network-connections (it is a white industry after all). Several years ago when Napster and Kazaa was spreading free music as never before we didn’t have any iTunes music store or free music services at all.. Downloading was more fast and convienient than the legal way of getting music. At that time I think that piracy was good for the music industry overall, since it was generating much attention to the artists and music industry. It also showed the way to the new market. I also think that the percentage of download-and-then-buy users was quite high.

It is our human right to be able to listen to music?
Today, when we have free legal music in every corner I cannot understand why you need to pirate any music…

It is more convenient to download music since i don’t need to bother about copy protection (DRM) and compatibility between mp3-players.
DRM has no future. iTunes has skipped their copy protection and music stores like amazon, 7digital and emusic already has pure mp3-files on their music-stores. iTunes music can be played in most of the mp3-players and phones on the market. Even RIAA says that DRM is dead.

The legal alternatives are not good enough…
Great, then you can make millions by creating it.. . Take a look at Spotify/iMeem/SimplifyMedia/iLike/Last.fm/Pandora…

What about the future?
The free-music-sharing race has already started. I expect that companies like Apple will release something similar quite soon. Gerd Leonhard has written a great post about what he calls Music 2.0 that is a music industry with less income in the distribution but more revenues based on the attention. I don’t think that artists will start to give away their music. . .why should they do that? Free streaming music is here to stay and that is pretty enough for most of us. . . For ownership or commercial-free alternatives you will need to pay…

What is mine is mine, what is yours is yours… In the real world that is perfectly clear. . .

File formats come and go. Harddrives does not last as long as we want to. New software means new formats. Formats that can be unreadable if they don’t get big enough. Are you sure that you still can open your old Ms Works 3.0-documents or your Kodak Photo CD’s…

15 years ago i had an Atari 1040. I used it to write essays and other schoolwork. This data will only be readable with that old Atari-software that I used to create it with. Since the disks are formatted with some old file-system I will need an Atari (or some compatible OS) to be able to get the files. Kind of tricky!

Some formats will live longer than others. If you have Word Documents, Mp3 files, Wav and PDF-files, they will probably be readable in the future (but we don’t know how long). If you have documents made by software that is not so common, I recommend you to keep the program or convert the data to a more common format.

Wired have written an article about this subject. It is available here.

Ok, so now we have gone through the file formats… But the format does not matter if you loose the file, right? Do you backup your data? I would recommend the following:

1. Use Dropbox or some other file sharing for the files you use daily. (And that is not too private to share on internet servers in “the cloud”). If your harddrives will fail they will be easily restore
2. Keep your important files such as photos and music on at least 2 physical disks. The propability that both will break at the same time is not that high. That will keep you safe.
3. Backup your burned DVD’s and CD’s at least every fifth year. Actually one DVD of mine broke in just 3 years without using it.
4. Place a harddrive at another place (a relative or a friend) to prevent data loss caused by theft or fire.

I have spent a big portion of my vacation backing up my CD archive to FLAC (lossless audio files). The music archive will be stored on 2 harddrives.

So… If you, like me, don’t know what to do during your vacation: Back it up!

First of all I must point out that i am not organized when it comes to personal appointments and such but I’m really working on it. I think it is more interesting to find out solutions that make it impossible for me to not organize. These posts are the result from my investigation in some tech that will make it easier for you to organize your life…

Today we have lots of devices around us. Mobile phone and at least one computer. It should be able to control your calendar items in all of them. I think that the web-page-calender-solution is not good enough and want to use calendar applications and sync them all together.

This is possible by using one mother calendar that all your devices sync from. My choice is Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar because of their syncing abilities. There is a standard called CalDav that is supported right out of the box in many calendar software and mobile phones . Both Yahoo and Google calendar supports CalDav.

Mac OsX: iCal sync out of the box with CalDav. guide

Windows and Linux: Mozilla thunderbird or Sunbird (calendar only). They support CalDav.

Mobile device: I use goosync and it works great with my SonyEricsson G900! Another solution to use googles own google sync that should work with many different mobile phones.  Iphone supports CalDav right out of the box.

Widgets: Many widgets are available for google calendar or yahoo calendar. I use an Opera Widget at work to check the upcoming activities.

All the calendars will be in sync. If you change in one device, all will change the next time you sync them with your online calendar. Hope this was helpful for you.

By the way .. this solution does not require any cables.