I was unexpectedly at Futuresonic in Manchester on Thursday, and I’m pretty glad it worked out that way. I can’t recommend strongly enough that if you get the chance to go to this sort of thing, that you make the most of it. Attending seminars and conferences is how you’ll get that one little bit of knowledge or insight that’ll give you the edge you need. It also means you can strike up a conversation with whoever’s presenting and pick their brains.
You’re probably aware that I attend a lot of these sort of things as a speaker. I try and get to as many as I possibly can as an attendee as well. It can be invaluable stuff and I always learn a lot.
In this instance, there were some really great people there, and some interesting talks — particularly the session on social music.
So I didn’t quite get to Chicago yesterday. You may recall that I “won” a trip to attend a blogging conference. Well, I missed my flight. And since I was in Manchester for an extra day, I went along to Futuresonic, which seemed a pretty good use of my time.
The conference was interesting. If I wasn’t heading to the States, I’d have loved to have stayed and attended more sessions. Bigwigs from Last.fm, The Orchard, Dopplr and a bunch of other organisations were in attendance, as was my ‘nemesis’, Swiss media futurist Gerd Leonhard.
Gerd and I have had debates online in the past. At first, my problem concerned the very nature of what he purports to do. It’s like he’s selling himself as a music business fortune teller. I’m automatically distrustful of people who start a sentence “In the future, we will all…” — because a) it’s entirely speculative and unprovable; b) it’s bumper-sticker thinking; and c) it’s always wrong and usually unhelpful.
We’ll return to our regularly scheduled series of ‘questions I keep getting asked about music online‘ after the weekend. In the meantime, I just wanted to follow up this thread of video services. I tried all the ones that were suggested to me - and a couple of others too. I’ve ended up at blip.tv.
I like the interface, I’m happy with the video quality, it has some nice podcast-friendly applications - but it’s also very simple and very user-friendly. I’ve grown to like the idea of the 90-second “long photograph” of Flickr - but for my purposes, this will do me. And besides - quite a few readers reported problems with the image embed in RSS readers.
And to those who’ve asked “why not Vimeo?” (the closest contender): It’s the typography. The font they put over the videos themselves is kind of ugly. Until something better comes along (or unless this proves to be a feed-reader unfriendly move to make), I’m hitching my video blogging wagon to blip.tv.
I’m looking forward to putting some whole seminars up there. Next addition is the tripod and a decent mic to attach. Recommendations?
I did a Strategies For Success seminar in Plymouth today for the Musicians Union, and I did it along the the theme of the ‘Questions I Keep Getting Asked About Music Online’. I managed to get some of it recorded, which has allowed me to experiment with the fact that Flickr now has video.
Since Flickr only (inexplicably) does up to 90 seconds, here’s a very brief snippet from today’s seminar.
How much should an mp3 cost?
There are some other bits of video that are longer, and if you’re interested, I can post them as well. I really like the look of the Flickr video, and I’ve been reasonably happy with Viddler - but can anyone recommend The Best Video Sharing Site in terms of clean presentation, interface, picture quality and usability? Flickr’s the best I’ve seen so far - but the 90 second limit is unhelpful.
"Music futurist", "Music thought leader", "Music business innovator". Whatever jargon you might want to use to describe Andrew you'll be using the word 'Music' and wanting to know what he has to say about the subject.
