Louis Gray’s post on his social media day depressed me. I went straight to the guitar and started to write a song:) Seth Godin writes about the fading signal to noise ratio

My relationship to social media is love - hate

Love
-the interaction, the learning, the reading, the ever changing exchange of ideas…the community we create

Hate
-that its addictive and self perpetuating
-that it becomes the end, that all the reading, all the feeds, all the comments become so consuming

I spent yesterday looking at how i spend my time.

How does the web and social media effect your creative life? Tell me about what your making and if and how you engage the world online.

The best thing about the web for me is that its still the wild west. If you can dream it you can be it. The big thing today may be yesterdays news by the time the sun goes down.

The money has not left the music business, its just moved around a bit. Its gone from the labels and retail that use to distribute content to the isp’s, mobile and social networks that now distribute content. Music drives traffic and artists hold the keys to musical content. If artists could organize they could redefine the metrics of social networking. Imagine a social network that routed most of the ad revenue back to artists. Even more important that cuts artists in on the equity and multiples of the social network, based on traffic. (and just for fun add non profit component). Metrics are not cut in stone

We artists are an unruly bunch. Individualistic and usually selfish (in that we are possessed by our own work above all things).
So…lets imagine and let our minds wander. If artists could organize.

Thats it, I’m starting my Ning.

I live in information overload. I blog here about art and technology, at davidusher.com about music, emails, IMs, twitters, facebook, myspace. writing songs, recording, producing, consulting, speaking, never mind the rest of life.
I am not alone. I think we are all in a desperate search for balance. How does all this noise effect our creativity?
Does the web add value to our lives or just a billions distractions?
I’m divided. I have trouble keeping up, cutting out the parts of the web that cloud my creative headspace. I end up compartmentalizing my life into small boxes, always reorganizing and prioritizing them, looking for value and meaning. With so much ’stuff’ coming at us all the time its easy to get lost in the ‘freedom’ of it all.
In the end though, I think that ‘freedom’ wins. The ability to have a free flow of creativity and connection between us all is worth all the spam and videos of drunk guys falling down. The fact that we all get to create things and put them out there into the ether is very powerful.

Does the web make you more creative or is it all just noise?

I was thumbing through the March issue of Dazed and Confused, one of those try to be uber hip magazines. I tend to look though scores of magazines of all kinds looking for words and headlines that might resonate and seed a song.

As i was looking though it i realized i was having a really difficult time telling the difference between the ads and the articles. Even the subjects seem to mesh together. Fashion, music, art, writing and advertising all flowed seamlessly together crossing over into one another. It was one picture with no distinction. The final crossover.

Has it all become one? Does it matter? Do we care anymore about the distinction between art and ads?

I think it matters.

What about you?

I spend a lot of time testing, playing really, with different tools and applications and seeing how they can be used for my own website, davidusher.com. Honestly most of them don’t add any value, some add tons of value but have some fatal flaw that makes it usable. (Mogulus is a great example of a tool for streaming video…but because their player crashes internet explorer and 60% of my users are using explorer Ive had to stop using it.)

There is a lot of conversation these days about how integrated the main stream is in social media. Mitch Joel wrote a good post about Oprah and his suprise at how she admitted to not really knowing too much about it, Chris Brogan just posted about Friend Feeder tools. Mathew Ingram talks about twitter verses facebook news feed. Robert Scoble wrote about the important thing about Twitter is how many people you follow, not who follows you. (yeah right, im sure hes spending a lot of time pouring over the streams of his 4000 followers:)

My question and one i ask myself often is what tools work for the mass and what are really just for those in social media. Most of these apps are really for the echo chamber. I like this stuff and I dont have time to follow my friends feeds. I hardly have time to keep up with google reader. The reason Facebook works is because its a mass tool. Its a fully functioning ecosystem that works for the mass. I hate it because its a walled garden but to communicate with my 5000 friends, it works. Thats were they are.

I think its really important to differentiate between the tools for the mass and the niche.

Thoughts?

I don’t know when it happened. Slowly over time. Without even noticing.

I stopped watching television.

I’ve seen the stats of how the web is killing television but its been very interesting to wake up this morning and realize I’m part of that statistic. I spend more time online, writing and reading, searching and discovering. If I want to see a show I usually buy it on itunes and watch it on the laptop. I still have those 300 channels but i find it tedious to navigate and the commercials are endless. I have been spoiled by the web. I want what I want, when I want it. I set up the filters I trust to deliver me content I want.

I think its time to cut the cord…

What about you, are you still watching?

Chris Anderson the editor of Wired magazine, in his blog The Long Tail wrote a response to Cory Doctorow rant on Boing Boing about Crown Publishing’s released of Scott Sigler’s new book, Infected

Cory writes

Publishers are schizophrenic and often end up acting really dumb in the service of trying to do something smart. Crown is putting Scott’s book online for free as a PDF, but they’re taking it down after only four days — presumably just in time to kill whatever momentum the downloads are generating. If you happen upon this blog-post next week when it shows up on Digg, you’re out of luck — no download to use to figure out if you want to buy the book.

Chris writes

My take: the important thing is that Crown believes that free digital books can sell more hard copies. Exactly how to do it is a work in progress, but the philosophical hurdle has now been crossed. Now we can expect more and better experiments and less hand-wringing about FREE. Which is quite an advance, any way you look at it.

Chris is the king of Free, in fact that’s the title of his new book and the cover of last months Wired. I love the concept. In music we have been dealing with the idea of Free for years, liked it or not. When the digital copy is identical to the original with no reproduction costs, the result is Free. And when Free hits you have to find other things to monetize. Radiohead does pay what you want, a deluxe box set, then a CD. Nine Inch Nails does 9 songs for free or $5 for 36 tracks or…ending with Ultra deluxe package for $300.

But, does Free really work for books I’m not saying they can run and hide from whats coming, because they can’t. They need to be out their exploring and trying new things. But I think Chris and Cory and Crown are debating the wrong question. Its not how Crown uses free pdfs to market this one book thats interesting. The real question is.

What the hell is Crown going to be selling in 5 years when printed books go the way of the bank teller?

I know a lot of you are going to say that you can’t replace the feeling of a book in your hands, the pages. I love the feeling of a book as well but the killer digital Reader is coming. There are lots of companies racing to develop the perfect reading tablet and when your brand spanking new portable reader that holds 10,000 books, works in the sun and is as cool as the iphone arrives…its going to mean the end of books as we know them (and Im not talking about the Kindle).

At least in music we always have the live show, an experience you can’t reproduce digitally. What will Crown Publishing be selling when everyone is walking around showing off their new ireader and wirelessly trading digital copies of the latest, greatest ebook . What will they use as added value? A private dinner with Scott Sigler with every hardcopy purchase? Scott best prepare himself for a lot of nights out.

What do you think? Will you still be at the cafe with a paperback in 5 years?

Well, do you exist? Sure you do, in the real world, but what about online.
Lets talk about two ideas, “Everything is Miscellaneous” and how “you are what Google says you are”. These two concepts combined formulate your “online existence”.

In David Weinberger’s book he talks about the reorganization and re-categorization of information in the new digital age. The way we have traditionally found things is much like a search in a library. A hierarchical, linear path of information, neatly stacked that leads you from one place to the next till you find what you were looking for. In the digital age that hierarchical organization has been blown away by tagging. Now there are a million different ways to find any single item, because there are a million different ways to tag any single item. The more tags out there about you, your art, your ‘insert your passions here’, the more ways exist for people to find you.

Because so much of the world uses Google, their algorithm determines what people find when they Google you. The spiders crawl around the chaos of the information web and look for tags, meta tag and links creating a picture of you, ranking you. If the spiders dont find you, for most people the search ends there and you don’t exist. In so many ways you really are ‘what Google says you are’.

These days your online existence can foreshadow your real existence. Your online story will determine your real story. If I’m looking for you and you dont appear, I cant hire you, watch you, read you, hear you, see you.

So, do you exist?

or if you want it from David Weinberger directly!

Now… do you exist?

Michael Arrington in his response to Billy Bragg’s article in the New York Times said “Note that Bragg neatly sidesteps the fact that music was uploaded to the site by artists (or their labels) themselves, with full knowledge that they would not receive payments of any kind (except free marketing, of course, and access to Bebo’s tens of millions of music loving users).”

Are you kidding me. Artists signed and understood the terms when they joined Myspace or Bebo and they get to use this great network so they shouldn’t expect to be paid. Artists have been signing and getting screwed forever by the old model but that doesn’t mean they should, doesn’t mean its fair and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for something better. The money is still in music, its just moved from the record companies to the ISP’s, mobile and social networks. It’s gone from copyright holders to ‘the pipe’.

Music is a big part of why social networks are so big and there is no reason artists shouldn’t get a piece for the traffic they drive.

Its been proven. Just because a model exists doesn’t mean it cant be flipped on its head. (example see perhaps- THE MUSIC BUSINESS). In my fantasy musicians would band together, create their own Ning, host their own ads and get a cut of the revenue and the equity, in my fantasy.

Billy Bragg has it right. We need the social networks to give back something to the music that brings them so many eyeballs. (I’m sure he would agree but he’s probably getting ready to go on tour. Its the only way we musicians can make money).

Ive been a professional musician for 18 years now. I’ve done pretty well, sold 1.3 million ‘records’, toured the world and I’m one of the lucky ones, I still love making music. In fact I’m am still obsessed with it, trying to write that perfect song.

At the beginning everything was crazy and exciting, creative and new. Rock and roll crazy. Then digital hit and the money started to drain out of the business. Like the air leaking out of a balloon we watched all the grease that makes this business run dried up. People started to get scared, and rightfully so, for their jobs, lives and for the business they had spent so much time building. This was not a fun time. Being around people in a dying industry is very depressing. Music was still great but the atmosphere of the music business was poisoned by fear.

I started getting heavily into the web a few years ago and the light bulb switched on. I mean it, a light bulb moment. Since then understanding the new principles of the web has become my ‘other interest’. I was school by my good friend Mitch Joel over lunch(s) and the rest of my education comes from Google reader and Google share (amazing what you can learn from reading what the smart folks think is important). I read a lot.

And Voila, there it is. The new world right in front of us.

I love it for 2 reasons.

1. Hope
We don’t really understand how its all going to wash out but the possibilities are incredible. It’s like we have landed on the moon. Its out in front of us. You can stay on the ship or… you can explore (worry about ‘the model’ later)!

2. Creativity
As a musician i love it. There are no gatekeepers, no one has the keys or the money, you really can do what you want, release what you want. You are free to try. It gives you the opportunity to be creative in so many ways the old write, record, release, cycle did not. The trick is figuring out what to do and how to do it.

In this blog I’m going to talk about the convergence of art and tech. Were intellectual property meets the digital domain. how ‘everything is miscellaneous‘ has changed the way we tag and organize the world, walled gardens and data portability, open social, permission marketing and advertising overload, ‘free‘, purple cows and meatball sundaes, six pixels of separation and shed salads, how bob is a genius and how bob is a whining again about the same things, ‘1000 true fans‘, SEO, blogging and micro blogging and why you are what Google says you are etc.

We have landed on the moon. you can stay on the ship and dream of the days when life was good and the CD was king (all intellectual property), or you can walk out onto the surface, and start to explore…