New company [di]rec are planning on selling recordings of concerts on USB sticks as you leave the venue. This is an excellent way of selling recordings that are usually hard to monetize (you can usually only make money out of one live recording) and I think people would love to have a recording of the gig that they were at rather than buy a recording through a record store of 1 random concert. It will certainly dampen down efforts of bootleggers.
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Best of YouTube is a daily video podcast (or vidcast if you don’t mind the contraction) showing the best clips from YouTube. These are decided by the votes counted on www.bestofyoutube.com, of videos suggested by website members. The best clips make it onto that day’s vidcast. Because each episode is anything from 30 seconds to 10 minutes in length, they are ideal fodder for a quick video fix and saves me the task of trawling through YouTube trying to find the essential clips everyone is talking about. Its also great for the daily commute - just wish I had a video-capable iPod so I didn’t have to unpack my laptop every journey!
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I hate MySpace. I’m not doubting its importance or its influence, but I just hate it. I hate the lack of structure, I hate the lack of consistency and coherence between different Spaces, and most of all, I hate stumbling onto a Space that plays Trivium at full volume while your eyes are burnt out by the bright green background and unreadable font size. And this is why I love Facebook…
Facebook is the anti-MySpace. It has structure, it has functionality, it has a sensible and mature layout and does not look like a 15-year-old GCSE student’s IT project! I usually delete the invitations to social networking tools that plop into my inboxes every now and again - I once made the mistake of accepting one and I unknowingly sent out over 100 more invitations to people in my work address book! But after hearing a lot about Facebook recently I thought I’d take a look…
When you sign up you are asked all of the usual questions: name, age, sex, education, employment history, etc. Then you are invited to upload a picture, which is painless. Then thats it. You have the ability to invite people from your address books, but its not rammed down your throat or appear to be obligatory (usually the case unless you can see that tiny, tiny “Skip this step” link in writing only slightly lighter than the background). You have a nice clean Facebook homepage and, once you have some friends in your network, you are presented with a list of updates to these people’s profiles, like a mini-blog. Easily digested and filterable too.
I was suprised how easily I found a few of the guys I went to school with - makes Friends Reunited a bit redundant really, and its free. Ooh, and lets not forget about the Applications. These are like Widgets or Gadgets or whatever you want to call them. They add extra functionality to your homepage, but again they are somehow more tasteful than the MySpace equivalent. The lack of formatting options only means that the networking side of Facebook is more important than the personalisation which hampers MySpace appeal to anyone over 21.
If anyone wants to add me on Facebook then feel free. Its worth a go. I find I’m checking it as much as my email at the moment!
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