One of the big launches of last week was that of MySpace Music, the latest salvo in the Social Network wars. This new feature of MySpace has actually grown into something much larger, and is a direct competitor to just about every music service out there. Of course, there are few dominant music players out there. Napster in its heyday eight years ago comes to mind, but since the only major music player has been iTunes.

iTunes and its music store offers a way to manage and purchase songs for portable audio devices, namely the iPod, iPhone and the iToaster. That’s a given. The value proposition is simple; it makes buying and downloading legal songs very very simple.

MySpace music is pursuing a different model, one imagines that it is largely advertising based. Through this new service, just about every song that has ever been published is now available to be streamed for free via the website. In this day and age, I think the term “free” and “ad-supported” are interchangeable. As Heinlein wrote, TANSTAAFL, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” This goes double on the internet.

MySpace users can use these songs legally in their profiles, post their track lists and of course, share them. Music has been one of the prime drivers of internet media (following of course pornography), and it is interesting to see how different companies are trying to monetize it while protecting themselves against piracy.

On-line music has always been a tricky situation, being at once the origin of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology AND scandals courtesy of the RIAA.

Even those who aren’t already MySpace users will probably visit the site to just hear that song that gets “stuck in their head.” I for sure will dust-off my long dormant MySpace account.

Someone asks:

I was wondering if you could share you experience of setting up a successful affiliate scheme for a s B2B website. 

I imagine that there are some similarities between B2B and B2C affiliate programs, though my understanding is that affiliate marketing really is more for the direct market. 

A successful B2C affiliate scheme needs to just do one thing, make the affiliates happy. Including: 

1. Money (/obvious) - This includes quick payment and clear and transparent processes. 
2. Creative support - providing a selection of banners, advertising, etc. Some affiliate networks actually have in-house design teams to support their affiliates. 
3. Tracking - Affiliates love their reports. Real-time updates of how much traffic they send, how much converts and how much money they are making. 
4. Management support - A good affiliate management team is vital, to answer affiliate questions and support them and their customers.

Someone asks:

Does the amount of information on a webpage affect Google page rank?

The funny thing is, I believe that Page Rank doesn’t matter very much in the scheme of things. It used to be fairly useful of a page’s value when seen from the google toolbar, but as search gets (or has become) embedded into browsers (Chrome, Firefox), PageRank becomes invisible to end users. 

Page Rank actually has no effect on how well your “page ranks” funny enough. If it’s invisible to the end user, and has no effect on your Search Engine Page Rankings, why should you worry about it? 

And with regards to the amount of information on a page, focus on the end user. Make sure there’s enough on the page to make it worthwhile for the user to visit, while not overwhelming them. 

I would love to see some studies about the maximum length of content that people can read on-line before losing interest, and needing to interact. I like to keep content around 3-400 words in length. It keeps your content targeted, and should keep you keyword densities under control.

One of the things I always here from budding web developers is “how do I come up with an idea for a website?”

Something like:

I am an engineering student. I wish to develop a my own website to gain a bit of experience in this field. So, which topic should I select so that the website becomes popular among almost all age groups.

I think “popular amongst all age groups” is setting yourself a pretty difficult goal.  Of course you want to reach the largest audience possible, but without any information to really frame the content of your website, you will find yourself trying to come up with some sort of technology solution, and trying to compete with every internet startup on the block.  If you have a target audience, you will find yourself empathizing with them and trying to relate to what is important to them content wise.  And the content will lead to some sort of web idea, either as a display product or an actual web application.

I think you should take a look at what interests you and use some keyword analysis tools to see if there is some interest there. If there is some unmet demand, then you have an opportunity to learn about writing/presenting content, SEO and creating even creating a community around something you already enjoy.

One of the big pieces of Internet news this week was that Sarah Palin’s account had been hacked.  Even before being hacked, her Yahoo account had come into the limelight as being used for official government business, but well outside mandatory government processes.  The government shouldn’t be using free e-mail accounts to transact its business, from a security standpoint alone.  Besides, it feels a little underhanded, though without looking at what was being discussed, it’s hard to really know.

 
Until of course last week when someone actually went in and hacked her Yahoo accounts.  On wikileaks, they posted some of the e-mails and information gleaned from the her Yahoo account, including e-mails to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and to various Alaskan Republican officials in various capacities.

Veteran “calm-headed” news commentator Bill O’Reilly argued that people re-posting her e-mails should be prosecuted as the hackers themselves. 

The hackers response?  THey hacked his e-mail too.

Now I do not condone hacking of anyone’s e-mails, but the fact that Palin was using a free e-mail account to transact the business of the most powerful government in the world, and Bill O’Reilly is a staunch defender of privacy ONLY when it suits him, makes it very difficult for me to condemn the hackers either.

Can I just say that I’m just entertained by the situation?

Looks like my favorite internet company is becoming even more ubiquitous.  Having successfully launched Chrome a couple week’s ago, they are stepping it up from applications to operating systems.  Google Android is set to be released on the 23rd as a mobile operating system to compete with Symbian, Windows CE and of course Apple’s iPhone.  

The first handset running Android will be HTC’s Dream on Tmobile for $200 with a 2 year contract.

I think Q4 2008 is the season of the mobile application developer.  Smart money is on those companies that are just starting to code mobile programs now.  Making sure they are coding cross platform and delivering good innovative applications aimed squarly at Web 3.0 memes (localization, semantic) should be each and every company’s first order of business.

Sufficed to say, I’m looking forward to this release with a lot of anticipation.

Microsoft unleashed a new ad campaign last week. In the eyes of many, it is an effort to counter the sleek “Switch” campaign from Apple over the last five years. Instead of using the idea that hip and chic are for everyone, they’ve instead gone for, well, I’m not sure what they are getting at.

Ad # 1 = Shoe Circus

Ad # 2 = Domestic Bliss

I just don’t get these ads. I am almost tempted to use the word “hate” as I feel like not only have I wasted a couple minutes of my life watching and talking about these ads, the money behind this campaign must be mind-boggling.

Somebody, somewhere probably got into a lot of trouble because of this campaign.

From the good people at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I came across this video.  It’s fascinating in both content, but also how it is put together.  They did not have to create very many images I think, but were able to articulate an interesting, entertaining and educational video.  

Oh, the video itself is about the two schools of gaming - education and entertainment, and how games can be used as an environment to enable learning.

From the guys at Springwise, I came upon Authonomy. I love projects which draw upon the “wisdom of the masses” or in other words, crowdsourcing. I remember back in the early days of P2P sharing, a lot of the buzz was about removing publishers from the music industry. Back then, the rational was that if you take the distribution part out of the industry (i.e. P2P), then there’s little value in having publishers.

Of course, any member of a failed garage band will tell you that the general public not only needs someone to get music to their doorstep (now via iTunes), but also tell them what’s good, and what they should like (almost literally). Publishers act as a filtering mechanism, helping to increase signal and reduce noise in this ever increasingly “noisy” world of ours.

But in filtering, publishers probably leave a lot of good, quality content on the cutting room floor.

Authonomy intends to stop that waste, or at least, leave the responsibility at someone else’s doorstep. The model is a simple one, authors post their manuscripts on-line to be read and voted by the public. Manuscripts that are highly rated probably are then evaluated by editors for publication.

It’s an interesting approach to a traditional problem, using a system that is proving itself with the music industry.  My biggest concern is that the investment in evaluating a manuscript is much higher than that of a song.  It takes just a couple minutes to evaluate a song, whereas the quickest anyone can really read a book is in one or two days.  An investment most of us are unlikely to make un an unproven property.

So what will probably happen is that budding authors willl ask their friends to be raters, or the power of the site will eventually be controlled by the few reading fanatics, and most of the “crowd” will pass on this opportunity.

Reading and evaluating an unknown book simply takes too much effort and feels too much like “work”

This is just too cool.