A few thoughts actually sums this up very nicely.  On Saturday I attended ProductCamp Berlin – an unconference for product management and product marketing professionals.  The unconference part simply means that nothing is decided until the day and then, essentially, upon the whims of those who turn up.  For something as unstructured, it worked really well (despite the local alternative left’s attempted protest at all the new media buildings, much like the one we were holed up in, cropping up along the riverbanks) and the day was full of interesting conversation.

I particularly enjoyed a thought-provoking dissection of pricing strategies by Mark Schiefelbein and a surprisingly controversial talk on building products people love by Darryl Feldman from Nokia.  Some interesting stuff to take straight back to the office – although the product vs. marketing split wasn’t quite 50/50… maybe next time I’ll shoot my mouth off.  As a Berlin newbie, it was great to know that there are events going on like this all the time across the city and that there are people doing cool things.  It was also nice to meet a few of the locals.

Thanks again to Heike, Holger & Lars for organising so well.

One other side note from the day which I think sums up Berlin (and SoundCloud for that matter) quite nicely.  On my way to the venue at 8am on Saturday morning, I was walking along Holzmarktstr. by the river and was invited into a fairly nuts looking party.  It didn’t look like it had just started or that it was going to stop any time soon.  I presume that I had been invited in due to my SoundCloud t-shirt (which I’m learning is quite a powerful commodity in this town).  Sadly, I had to decline and explain to them that, contrary to rumours, we’re not a party company.

It’s been a lot of fun – readership is growing slowly and it has been added to the list of top resources on Spotify’s website. Most of all it has exposed me to a lot more music in my quest to find new and interesting things to post. Also, I discovered quite an active community of bloggers, developers and fans in the Spotify ecosystem and it’s been great to be part of that as it grows. Hopefully with a US launch not too far off everything will take one step further towards a digitally enhanced, musical utopia.

But for now, here’s some numbers on hotspotmusic’s reach today.

• over 500 visitors per month to the site (according to Google Analytics)
• 112 twitter followers and on 25 twitter lists with a reach of many more across the web
• 68 facebook fans
• 46 RSS subscriptions
• 39 followers via Tumblr
• over 1,500 plays for all my playlists that have been regularly featured on sharemyplaylists

It’s a humble start but even if those numbers were 10x lower, I’d still enjoy it.  Here’s to the next 6 months.

I’ve tried – believe me.  I have the Long Tail, Wikinomics, umpteen books on Google, the Innovators Dilemma, White Man’s Burden and countless others sitting on my shelf and, as much as the blurb fascinates me, I just can’t get past chapter 2 or 3.  I don’t think I’m alone here.

Let’s face it, management books are just plain dull.  They’re long and boring. They’re repetitive and labour the point.  What should be a simple message becomes over-complicated with unnecessary case studies and poorly fitting frameworks.  Don’t the writers understand that their target reader, the average business-person, has little free time and an even shorter attention span?

Management books have traditionally been long enough to justify the 2 year study that the author has inevitably undergone or just simply to compete with novels and not appear bulimic on the shelf at the book store.  Maybe they need to beef up the pages to make the fixed costs of production worth it.  Whilst all of this is speculation, it’s undeniable that changes in digital distribution can actually mean big changes to the consumption of non-fiction literature.

Authors can now look to package their research and content in different ways.  The main thing I’m looking forward to is the 50 page version of their books.  Given the promise of brevity and clarity, I’d be willing to pay a higher marginal price per page than having to read 250 pages of management verbosity (I could use the term bullshit here instead but I’m aiming to be polite and objective, ahem).  Say £5 for the 50 page summary instead of £15 for the full thing.

Releasing works in a variety of different forms and lengths could be quite liberating for authors and selling different levels of depth could capture a lot of value or attention that’s currently being missed.  Perhaps they could release samples that get part of the message across but leave you wanting more – similar to buying tracks on iTunes.  Disaggregating the book in this way and selling different types of content is a much better model for ebooks than selling the chapters individually – unless it’s some trashy, page-turner like the Da Vinci code.

Other media can often be a better glimpse into the point of a management book than actually having to dive into the whole thing.  Take an 18 minute snapshot of the key messages courtesy of TED or perhaps follow the author on Twitter.  Both of these will return much more insight for far less of a time investment.  And there’s a nice return to the business theme – improve your ROI by not reading these books at all.  For now…

This seems like a foolish move from Warner in the long run. Music is clearly in a transitional phase right now and if you want to be a part of the new era you have to play by the new rules. What’s even more curious is that they demonstrated their so-called forward thinking by investing in Spotify (or perhaps this was just a hedge) and now they’re trying to undermine its US launch. This seems like an attempt at a power play from Warner on an industry that isn’t really listening. By doing this they are trying to strong-arm the other labels into following them because if they don’t then Warner are in even bigger trouble.

People will torrent music unless they have simply, quality and legal solutions and this has been proven time and again. By making their content unavailable on these solutions when everyone else’s is, Warner are risking even greater cannibalisation than they already claim. The lesson here will be: don’t try and exert power on an industry in which you have little influence or respect left, engage the small players, learn new models and different distribution channels and develop something akin to a strategy for the future instead of crossing your fingers and hoping everything will work out fine.  Let’s see if Warner can learn it in time.

As for the Google debacle, the blogs (which are clearly an incredibly important part of promoting new releases on the net these days) that have been majorly affected are those that appear to have been playing by the rules.  But the rules are so complex that the record labels themselves don’t know what’s going on. Blogs such as I Rock Cleveland (click on the link and you might not find much) meticulously clear every track they post with the labels and yet it seems the A&R men promoting their artists aren’t talking to their own lawyers who have just opened up the machine guns and started firing in any direction.

Google must accept some complicity in this even if the labels & RIAA-induced confusion does not make it particularly easy for them.  They seem to have let their standards of an open web and a Don’t Be Evil attitude slip under pressure and uncertainty when they could be playing the role of protectorate or change-maker in the industry.  The blogs that don’t tread such a careful path are just going to move elsewhere, constantly moving where the labels can’t track them down (and, most importantly, can’t track what’s going on with their own music).  Both of these events actually brings a about a great opportunity for companies such as SoundCloud that are trying to serve bands and labels by giving them control over their content and distribution and bring them closer to their fans.  This is the future of labels – not whining in their ivory towers writing lawsuits.

News Reading Apps: Feedly, Read It Later & Magazines?
As well as surfing the net, these two tools in particular are perfect for running quickly through a large amount of news sources that are a key part of my daily web habits. Feedly is not yet on iPhone but is a superb Firefox add-on aggregating and prettifying all my feeds and whilst Read It Later works great on a small screen, it’ll work even better on a large one.  While these are great for aggregating various web content, the iPad holds much more potential for saving the publishing industry by magazines actually controlling and releasing their content in beautiful, interactive apps.  I can see myself flicking through the pages of Wired, the Economist or Fast Company on this device.  And, most importantly, paying for it.

Photo Editing Apps: Photoshop, CameraBag, etc…
There’s so many good photo editing apps on the iPhone that it’s a little hard to keep up – personally, I have about 8 of them sitting there waiting for the right opportunity. However, photo editing software on your computer has generally been expensive to acquire the software and time consuming to learn how to use it. And this is where the iPad steps in. With a multi-touch interface, photo editing is going to be incredibly easy for a layperson to learn and I can see this leading to a great increase in creativity, expression and good old fashioned time-wasting fun.

Productivity Apps: WordPress, Keynote…
Here is a great example of where the inability to multi-task is actually a great thing – without any distractions and a big screen iPad users will be able to focus on writing. With a touchscreen drag-and-drop interface, pulling together a good looking presentation should be a matter of minutes instead of hours too.

Music Apps: The Hype Machine & Last.fm
Stick the machine in its dock, turn on the music app and go – new music streaming all the time, artist information, blog posts, gig listings, social networking features… it’s all here and I expect some awesome music apps for iPad. Not to mention the possibilities for music creation apps…

Diary Apps: Momento
Momento is a diary app but it’s not just meant for old fashioned Dear Diary stories. It pulls in all of your social media updates (Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm & Flickr) to produce a record of what you’ve been doing each day on the web. And when you add brief ‘moments’ or stories from your day, it could be quite a compelling way of tracking what you’ve been up to. It also has a great design too which always helps.

Games
Why would you need an entire cupboard full of board games when you can just fire up a couple of apps. Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Monopoly and many more already exist on the iPhone and porting these to the larger form makes them perfect for sticking in the middle of the living room table and playing. Just don’t spill your coffee on the board.

These are just a few ideas for now – I’m sure we’ll see some great innovation in applications for the iPad.

Closed network
Buzz is limited to people on Gmail and as much as I love Gmail (because it is an awesome webmail client) it does not represent my social circle in its entirety.  Add to this the rather bizarre asynchronous friend/follower relationship model that they’ve built in by analysing the most popular connections on your email and you have a confusing and closed social network – not the best way to spread virally.  Essentially, since it doesn’t support Facebook connections, to see updates from all of my friends they all need to sign up for new email accounts.  The same charges could have been levelled at Facebook when it started but we’re not at the beginning of the social space now, everyone already has a profile somewhere else.  It seems like this is a power-play by Google in preemption of Facebook’s upcoming webmail client – one which has the potentially to really shake up the email space if they do it well.

No ecosystem
Google have made a wise decision in making sure Buzz is an open platform with an API and that might mean people start to develop some interesting tools with it but at the moment it’s a little sparse.  The reason why Twitter has been so successful can be in large part put down to the surrounding apps and services that enhance the service in every single way the Twitter team itself doesn’t have time to.  At the moment that ecosystem doesn’t yet exist for Buzz and it will take months, even years, before it is providing the same level of functionality.

What is its advantage?
There’s one simple charge I can throw at Google Buzz and that’s that it doesn’t really do any one thing better than anyone else.  I don’t see its key advantage – why should I use Buzz over Twitter or Facebook (because I’m really not sure I have time to add another social network to my already heavy arsenal).  Sometimes aggregators can be an effective and powerful tool but given its other shortcomings it might struggle to build up a critical mass of users much like its obvious inspiration, Friendfeed, did.  For now I’ll ignore the fact that it seems to have zero business model with the assumption that, if Twitter can figure out a way to monetise this type of service, then I’m sure Google can too.

It’s still early days of course and there will be iterations, add-ons and enhancements that may make it a better tool (remember the hype over Google Wave – me included – and how much that is used now).  The fact that it is sitting in my inbox gives Google an immediate advantage (i.e. 176 million instant users) and that will probably mean that I check it occasionally.  I can envision using it for having extended discussions on various topics with selected friends (e.g. taking Twitter conversations a little more in depth or discussing with friends not on Twitter) but it certainly won’t be my social home or information source.

For me, one of the main uses and applications would be music. And one company that could do this would be last fm. I already use them and trust them with my music data (despite last years controversy over TechCrunch’s claim that they handed listener data to the RIAA – one I don’t believe for what it’s worth). In fact, across the internet and beyond, they could become the de facto login for any music access (and that’s really what music is in the digital age: access) and it would be awesome. A lot of companies already support scrobbling (information about what’s being played) but not all do.  In a perfect world, they would also receive a huge amount of additional information about listener habits (recommendations, user history, social networks) which some already access in part via the API but it’s not yet a standard.

The benefits for both parties are clear. Lastfm get a wider footprint on the music web (beyond the 30m+ they have now) and other services get access to a wide and richly defined level of user data up front.  Of course this doesn’t have to be confined just to the web – as more and more appliances become Internet enabled and services are sent to the cloud other forms of music delivery can benefit from the immediate advantage of accessing years of data from the start.  If you think about it, the opportunities are almost endless: a player on your home stereo, car stereo, your MP3 player, scrobbling music from films, a geo-location app that scrobbles the exact set-list you hear at a concert.  Too much?  I don’t think so…

What about the consumer benefit? Well, the user gets to have one centralised home for all of their music habits (not to mention that single sign-on and password).  Personally, I shy away from services that don’t scrobble – it’s become a crippling addiction but I need my library to reflect me and my tastes.  My usage of MySpace and even random blogs has declined radically of late (although The Hype Machine and, fingers crossed, version 2.0 of Peel will solve the latter).  Last.fm would become your musical home,  your musical Google, your musical Facebook – the one place where you go to find out everything about music.

Last.fm, like Twitter and Facebook, is more than just a service, it’s a platform. And it’s platforms that revolutionise.

1. It can’t live up to they hype
Can it?  There’s been so much talk about what this device will be able to do (a new medium for news, playing games, cure cancer, turn back time) and how many industries it’s going to save (publishing, television, pigeon racing) that it can’t do ALL of that.  Surely.  Remember all the excitement over Google Wave (granted Apple doesn’t really share the same ideas on ‘beta’) and how quickly that faded away when we could actually play with it?  In fact, I’ll bet that on first look the Apple device will probably seem like something of a disappointment.

2. Whatever it is, I won’t be able to afford one.
Now this is just a sad fact of my personal situation than a commentary on the device itself but at a reported price of $1000 I, and many others, will simply not be able to join in on the big Apple party this week.  Prices will come down over time and eventually I might get a job that will give me such a disposable income but at least for now it’s not a £100 iPod nano – it’s a long term investment.

3. Version 1.0s are never that good.
Remember the first generation iPod?  Here’s a picture to remind you.  It wasn’t that great.  I mean, it had decent functionality and a fair amount of memory but it wasn’t the ubiquitous device that it has since become.  What about the iPhone?  Yes, it was revolutionary in its form and function but it was only a year later when the second version rolled around and Apple opened its doors to external developers and 3rd party apps that it really became the breakthrough device that it now is.  My point here is that it takes time to develop these products, to build the ecosystem and to work out all the rough edges.  The iTablet 1.0 cannot escape this fact.

4. I’m still figuring out my iPhone
I think if I got another gadget right now it would just be overwhelming.  I’m still working through the thousands of permutations of different possible functions for my phone.  For example, I just spent £1.19 to turn it into a fully-functional DAB radio, £1.79 to turn it into a fully-functioning remote control for any application on my Mac (and ultimately TV) and 59p to measure and control my sleep patterns ensuring I achieve maximum sleep quality every night.  What else can be done with an iTablet that can’t be done with the iPhone?

Of course, I’ll still be tuning in to find out what it is.  And maybe I’ll be suitably blown away, who knows, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised and be able to afford one.  I officially lay down the gauntlet to Cupertino to surprise me.  But to quote Great Expectations itself:

“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”

Pick up the pace of this blog

I enjoy writing this but struggle to find the time to dedicate myself to writing up my half-baked ideas for blog posts into complete articles.  I need to spend less time making every idea or post perfect and more time just sitting down with no distractions and writing.  I might also contemplate a redesign of the website once I have more free time.

Target: Blog at least once a week on average (that’s 52 posts and I’m already behind).

Listen to more varied music

With digital music and the streaming revolution in full swing, access to music has never been easier.  But with that freedom comes decisions and the Paradox of Choice (see Barry Schwarz’s work).  In fact, since starting up my music site – www.hotspotmusic.net – I have found, listened to and blogged about more music than ever before but this tends to be mostly restricted to one, albeit hazy and rather large, genre of alternative indie music.  In 2010 I will get out of my bubble more and listen to wide varieties of music that I have enjoyed in the past or am intrigued by – West African music and Reggae in particular are genres that will see a lot of action in the coming months.

Long shot target: Go to the Festival Au Desert in Mali in Jan 2011

Read more (offline & long-form)

Over the last couple of years I have probably read more I have ever done in my entire life (thanks to lots of school papers and my addiction to internet blogs).  But this has come at a price – my attention span is shorter and my ability to concentrate on tasks to completion has decreased.  I blame the internet.  Not only that, I’m missing out on a whole world of entertainment by skipping traditional literature and am accruing an ever-increasing pile of books on my read-these-later shelf.  So I want to go back to basics a bit this year and get back into books, try and make a bit of a dent in that pile and maybe, just maybe, learn something along the way.

Target: Read at least one book per month

Get fitter

This one goes without any real need for an explanation.  I’m getting older and sometimes it really feels like it.  I haven’t made time for exercise in the last two years and that will change. I’m going to start cycling more (sometimes artificially, sometimes really) and maybe pick up one of those rackets or bats that have been sitting in the corner of the room giving me an evil look.

Target: Cycle 1,500 miles this year.  (You can check my updates on that at RunKeeper with which I cycled over 230 miles during last Summer’s to and from work experiment)

Finally, a BHAG: Improve hotspotmusic

Developing my own music website/blog has been great fun and good experience at building my own site and starting to slowly build a fan base.  But there are so many more things I wish I could do with it – most of them restricted by my inability to do any real web programming/design.  I think the digital and social music space is now at the beginning of truly opening up and will continue to grow at a crazy rate and maybe some of my ideas could have a place there.  But it’s also just an enjoyable project for me so I’ll take it as far as my free time can manage.

Target: Design and (have someone else) build my vision for the next step for hotspotmusic

P.S. Ahem, and get a job.

Bring on 2010 – a year of change, empowerment and general awesomeness.

Hans Rosling (2006)

The man who has done more for popularising statistics than anyone since Disraeli, this is an incredible talk both for content and delivery – showing that numbers don’t have to be boring.

Jeff Skoll (2007)

I like this talk because it’s about achieving your goals and what happens next.  You find new goals and go for them.

Richard Dawkins (2002)

Because I agree with the sentiment and admire the boldness of someone actually standing up and saying it.

Dan Ariely (2009)

Fascinating research into why humans act the way we do – why we tend to cheat and how we can build systems to avoid it.

Barry Schwartz (2009)

Inspiring stuff on how we lost our way and whether we can regain the right path.

In case you’re in extra need of some additional viewing material this holiday, some honourable mentions:

• Chris Jordan
• Mark Bittman
• Al Gore
• Malcolm Gladwell
• Sean Gourley
• Paul Stamets