So part II of my academic week wasn’t even planned at the beginning of the week. After my panel contribution at Wealth Of Networks II, I was having a conversation with Marina Jirotka of Oxford Univerisity, who said they had another conference on Thursday entitled ‘Innovative Media For the Digital Economy‘ and wished she’d known about me earlier so I could’ve been involved… so I did what any conference loving solo bassist would do – moved my teaching around, and cleared space in my diary to be there!
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Three new things to look/listen/learn.
V .quick post this, just to highlight some fun stuff that’s happened in the last couple of days.
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A Week in Academia pt 1 – Wealth Of Networks II
I’d intended to write about this last week, but all the G20 stuff got in the way.
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"Art First" – Why the 'Present of Music' is the Best it's Ever Been for Musicians
From Thursday to Saturday last week I was following Andrew Dubber’s tweets from a music industry conference in Finland called Is This It?
The premise of the conference is that it’s a ‘music seminar about music‘, though there was a baffling and conspicuous absence of actual musicians speaking at it. The overall tone, it seemed – as drawn from the various tweeted quotes – was that it was a bunch of music industry people desperately trying to come up with a way to continue ‘business as usual’ – marketing strategies, ways to feed more data to collection agencies to get paid, and the usual crop of should’ve-been-left-in-the-70s ideas involving scantily clad women as a marketing draw. So far, so heinous.
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Women in Technology (Ada Lovelace Day)
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace was the “first computer programmer“, and an inspiration to techie women the world over. The idea for Ada Lovelace Day is to highlight the role of women in tech, flagging up particular women who we find most inspiring.
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A World Of Potential – Why Social Media Won't Fix Us.
One of the common mistakes made by people considering the ‘usefulness’ of social media is that value measurements are somehow detached from any acknowledgement of just how much of what human beings do is really screwed up.
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Youtube Vs. The PRS: A very 2.0 Solution
One of the biggest “music on the web” stories in recent months has been the breakdown in relationship between the UK Performing Right Society (PRS) and Youtube (owned by Google). It’s over the share of Google’s ad revenue that should go to the writers of the songs in ‘premium content’ videos on Youtube. (for some background, here’s An article from The Guardian, and the PRS’s latest statement).
So, who’s in the wrong? Not surprisingly, both are, at least partly.
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In Defense Of Twitter… The video!
Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I found out at about 12 o’clock today that Andrew Dubber, author of New Music Strategies, was in London for a conference. Andrew and I met at BrumTwestival, a Twitter-organised charity event, got on great, and so I tweeted him to see what he was up to. 30 mins later, we were having lunch together at the British Library. Such is the immediacy and flexibility of the twittering life 🙂
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Twitter sucks, so change your friends.
It’s a while since I blogged anything about Twitter, so maybe it’s time for a response to a couple of the prevailing misconceptions about the micro-blogging service that has substantially improved my life over the last year.
There are three broad themes coming out in the Twitter critique:
- That it’s full of trivial rubbish
- That’s it’s reality TV without pictures
- That is for narcissists and fosters mental ill-health (WTF??)
To which I, not surprisingly, say ‘Bollocks’.
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New Adventures In Mobile (CSS)
So, for the last couple of days I’ve been working on a mobile version of this site. It’s the same site, same pages, just the design is tweaked to make it look better on a mobile handset. It’s easy enough to do, using CSS. CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’, and is a way of labeling elements on a web page, and then controlling the way that everything that has that label is formatted. But because the machine you look at a web page on can be identified as a computer or as a mobile, you can have a different stylesheet for each type.
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