You gotta love it
2,307,418 hits and 12000 rating!

And…
in case you weren’t sure that the music business is changing, the link below is from my good friend Mitch Joel:
Mötley Crüe Song Sells More on Xbox Than On iTunes

I had a really great time doing the panel this afternoon at MESH. Thanks for all the great audience questions. It was amazing to be on a panel where everyone is so passionate.

Fact or fiction.
Robert Scoble wrote a great post in which he theorized that the reason Facebook rebuffed Google Connect is because Microsoft is planning to buy Facebook, Yahoo and Yahoo Search. This would give Microsoft, through Yahoo search, access to the wealth of information that is contained within Facebook’s walled garden. In essence a large private part Internet, with information that is not available to Google search on the World Wide Web.

“…these two moves would change everything and totally explain why Facebook is working overtime to keep Google from importing anything. First, let’s look at what is at stake here:
Loic Le Meur did a little test with me a couple of weeks ago. He listed his Le Web conference on both Facebook and Upcoming.org. Here’s the Facebook listing. Here’s the Upcoming.org one.
The Facebook one can’t be seen if you don’t have a Facebook account. It’s NOT open to the public Web. Google’s spiders CAN NOT REACH IT.
He put both listings up at exactly the same time and did no invites, nothing. Just let people find these listings on their own.
The Facebook one is NOT available to the Web. It has 467 people who’ve accepted it. The Upcoming.org one IS available to Google and the Web. It has 101 people on it.
This is a fight for the Web. We all just crawled inside a box that locks Google out.”

Now Facebook is not the whole web by any means with “only” 70 million users, but it would give Microsoft a toehold and might well bring competition back to search. We all know that Vista is a bust and that computing is moving to the “clouds”. Microsoft needs to get on the web to stay relevant.

Why should we give a sh%t:
Because whoever controls ‘search’ has immense control and power to determine how we connect to each other and to the world online. Search is our relationship to everything on the Web. It is amazing realize that what Facebook has really created is a privately owned and controlled part of the Internet. All our informations locked in their shoebox.

Do you worry about BIg Brother controlling what you see?
Is this all fact or just good old conspiracy theory fiction?

People talking about this:
Mathew Ingram
Mike Arrington
Umair Haque

I found this via my net friend Chris Brogan’s blog. It really is amazing!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

So I’ve gone over it, and my number is 15. That’s the number of creative ideas I can have in my head at one time. I’m not talking about ideas that have gone to “step 2″ (things that have entered the revision process). I’m talking about raw ideas, creative inspirations. I have 15 spaces in my brain that can hold a new idea without going back and cannibalizing an older one.

In the old model of music I would have to hold on to those ideas and wait. Wait till the record was completely written, produced and released. New ideas would be blocked because i couldn’t free myself from the older ones. For a creative person, well that just sucks!

And that’s why l love the creative freedom the web gives me. I can take that impulse and let it out online. By letting the idea out I free up one of my “boxes” for a truly new idea. I will continue to refine the idea thats been set free on the web, but it has been cleared out of that part of my brain that creates new ideas.

I know it sounds a bit hippie (and I ain’t no hippie) but really believe:
“The more you create, the more you create.” There are no gatekeepers, why not let it out:)

So…How many boxes are in your head?

The value is in the conversation. As the monetary value of the the final product goes down. The value of the rest the content, of the conversation, has gone up. As the mass becomes the niche and we are all racing to find our place in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, we have inadvertently flipped the value curve on its head. We use to be only concerned about the end result, that could be monetized. Artists are guilty of buying into this as well. Now we realize that whats important in the new world is building, engaging and yes, valuing our communities.

Another factor in the change in the measure of value is the of the decline of the Mass Media. As the dollars drain from the intellectual property business our ability to buy mass advertising has gone away. Those dollars we do spend don’t have the same penetration into the market place they once did. Too many magazines, too much cable, too many movies, video games and then there’s that pesky interweb. It’s really hard to get the attention or retention from mass media anymore.

Bottom line…You cant buy attention with ads anymore. You have to earn it.

So as the game has changed the measure of value has also changed. Everything that you put out that engages your community now has greater value. Every blog post, demo, inspiration, micro blog, photo, video are all more important because they are the things that bind your community together. The final product is just the climax of the story.

So, if the real value is in our everyday content, and the community we build is so important, what does this tell us about our how we should conduct our online lives.
Here are a few thoughts…

1. Treat your online community as you want to be treated.

2. Give them content they want.

3. Stop spamming your ‘friends’ with your crappy ads. (I rarely even send my community emails, it always feels like spam to me)

4. And finally. Give them content they want! An honest thought means a lot in this noisy world.

What do you think?

Enough of all this chatter about NIN and Radiohead. They are both doing interesting online experiments. Free music, pay what you want, remix my song, make my video for me. Yes we get it, they both have a truck load of money and are experimenting. I think thats great but…

Both those bands grew up in the old model and their recent stunts dont have any implications for new artists looking for a new model. All they tell us is that the old music business is so f*%ked that established artists with hardcore tech savvy fan bases don’t need an old school label anymore. That is not a model that is going to carry new artists forward. Not every new artist that makes great music is also going to be good at building an online fan base and doing all the things it takes to create Kevin Kelly’s 5000 true fans. There is a money gap in the incubation stage in an artists life. What is going to take those brand new artists with promise and invest in them enough to take them to the next level? It doesn’t happen by “magic”. Now that the money has moved from music business to the isp’s, social networks and mobile companies. Who is going to reinvest in new artists to help them grow? When all the big trees are gone and you haven’t spent anytime replanting, then what? So enough about NIN and Radiohead please. Thats just rich kids rolling around in their money and having fun online. I love to watch but lets not mistake it for a new model for the music business.

Yesterday i got a warning from Facebook that I was spamming. Well of course i wasnt. I have reached the 5000 friend Facebook limit and i was emailing the new people that contacted me wanting to be friends and letting them know that they could join my Facebook Musicians Page instead. All those emails must have triggered a Facebook filter which sent me a spam warning.

If it had been Myspace they would have just deleted my account as they have done twice in the past. I was happy to get the warning and stopped sending my redirection emails.

Robert Scoble has been talking a lot lately about people getting kick of of Facebook with no warning and no recourse. Well this is an example of a welcomed warning. (Also Facebook has also been amazingly good at responding to my emails when i have questions about their rules. “Can i start a second personal page?” answer “No”.

I’ll take a warning over getting deleted any day. I just wish I could have more that 5000 friends. Feel the love:)

Whats your experience been with Facebook?

My friend Fred St-Gelais and i were talking about the last post and he said something that sparked me.

“We spend more time on facebook than talking to our mothers…”

Think about it. What do you do first thing in the morning instead of or while your talking to someone you love. Are we focused on whats important in life?

Im going to hang up now and call my sister in Norway:)