Online holds the future of music

Jonathan Bowers, July 26th 2006, 11:39AM

The title of this post would immediately suggest I might be referring to the buying and selling of recorded music - but actually my work with the Manchester Jazz Festival this week has highlighted a very different area.

UKFast is making a short series of podcasts from the festival and it's a real eye opener talking to a lot of the musicians. In a niche genre like Jazz there are a lot of bands making their name solely through live performance, as opposed to album sales. Many of these talents are not shall we say of the Internet generation.

Despite this, they are becoming better known through a collection of websites that bring them to a wider audience. North West Jazz Works and the Manchester Jazz Festival are two resources that are allowing a wider audience to discover musicians and talents that may not have leapt online if left to their own promotion.

If you're in Manchester this week, I can strongly recommend the free events. Have a look at the calendar to see what's on when and maybe I'll see you there.

Tags: marketing, podcasting
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A serious spate of security concerns?

Jonathan Bowers, July 25th 2006, 9:46AM

The technology headlines are dominated this week by security issues. Specifically in the UK, the government has produced guidelines to educate on the issue of cyber-bullying while globally the latest Sophos report reveals that Asian spammers are more now prevalent that US spammers for the first time ever.

The anti-virus companies are of course riding high on the reports. Symantec has teamed up with Yahoo to reach more users with its Norton software and Kaspersky labs is adding heat by warning us that malware is getting more sophisticated.

I think it is great that the government sees better technology education as a step to avoiding Internet crimes but I am often dubious when reports come out that are generated by the firms gaining the most from our heightened concerns. Often with no firm statistical evidence we are asked to accept that we are in more danger than ever before.

A quick search shows that we may be moving in this direction - the US Department of Justice is currently creating an extensive Cyber Crime survey to assess the impact on US businesses. It would be nice to see the UK government taking similar steps for the 1,500,000 businesses online in this country, not to mention the millions of home users.

Tags: cybercrime, security, spam
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Blessed be the blog

Chris Norton, July 21st 2006, 10:37AM

A while ago the Web was in the grip of robots. Take two of the classic web searches (no, not those two, this is a family blog) - consumer electronics and celebrities. I'd be searching for a USB powered keyboard warmer and the latest pictures of Brian Blessed, and all I'd get was a hundred price comparison websites and some generic celeb-pic site with only a couple of fuzzy pics of Brian and a hundred links trying to sell me junk I didn't need, USB powered mouse-mat warmers? Useless!

These searches are bound to still have Google spit a lot of the old rubbish back at me, but nowadays the blogging explosion means that quite a lot of information on the web is now back to being produced by real, living, breathing people. Amidst the auto-generated pap, I'll typically be able to read someone slagging off the latest USB powered keyboard warmer (and saying that Apple are about to come out with one that'll revolutionise PC interface heating), and a few reviews of Brian Blessed's astonishing performance on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes.

The web is being repopulated by real content, now that it's finally possible for totally non-technical types and geeks alike to get involved. As of this week, India can get involved too - now that the Indian government has lifted its recent blogging ban, that's another billion people to contribute some real content to our web. Now, considering I was lying in the last paragraph and can find hardly anything about Brian Blessed's astonishing performance on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes, I'm hoping at least a few of the billion can get writing about this important matter. Real content! Let's go!

Tags: blogging, content, users, worldwideweb
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Believing the skype

Chris Norton, July 17th 2006, 5:36PM

Much to my relief and much like Pink, I'm not dead. Good day once more, UKFast blog fans.

Voice over IP, or VOIP, is quickly gaining popularity. I have my ridiculous Captain Scarlet-style headset waiting at home, in order to talk to people half the world away about our respective brands of reality TV and chocolate bars, and it seems that millions of other people are sailing with me in this good ship that we know as 'HMS Free Internet Phone Calls'.

As the technology develops, it's fairly certain a lot of telecommunication bods will be running a bit scared, or at least trying to hop onto the Skype bandwagon. I'm not worried about that - they'll be fine, modern life is all about telecommunication, these VOIP systems still use the same sets of wires and all that, and hey the people working at massive telecomms companies can probably look after themselves.

What does bother me about this, and sometimes about internet technology in general, is the inexorable increase of complexity that advances tend to entail. Where art is frequently driven by the pursuit of new levels of simplicity and elemental forces, technological advance piles on complexity after complexity. Put simply, we now have phones that can crash and leave us shouting into a useless black box, and I can't see the rise of VOIP making phonecalls any simpler.

It's the old trade-off, stability and simplicity versus extra features and the wow factor. Ultimately I always believe in progress, but I think I'll always feel unsettled that my phone conversation isn't just passing through a couple of phone company exchanges, but through tens, maybe hundreds of computers. Pass the paper cups and string!

Tags: communities, phones, skype, voip
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Will PR need journalists in 5 years time?

Jonathan Bowers, July 11th 2006, 4:53PM

An interesting question came up last week at the CIPR Northern Conference in Leeds.

Julia Hobsbawn had just been talking about how new media has changed the landscape in terms of reporting news and the rise of the columnist within newspapers.

The question was 'We know journalists can't do without PR, but can PR now do without journalists?'

I agree with Julia's answer, which was that we will need journalists as they are still a quality gauge and as such consumers have built a level of trust with them that the Internet is still some way off reaching.

Even when a business press release appears almost unchanged in a paper, it is much more credible for the public, because it has been chosen to appear on the pages of the publication than if it were on the company's website.

Trust is still the most important commodity in terms of reaching an audience, but I wonder how long will it be before the Internet and globalisation make this less important and if they do, what might the world's most important commodities become for reaching consumers in our global marketplace?

Tags: pr, trust
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