using my head

A few days ago I posted my own definition of the semantic web on the NESTA blog. I tried to explain what the next generation of the web will be like, in terms that even my mother could understand. I guess I did a pretty good job of it, because as of today it has been linked to several times, and translated into Italian and Portuguese. People seemed to particularly like this handy diagram I did:

If you’ve never understood what this term means, have a look at my definition and let me know if it makes sense to you. Because I predict you’re going to hear a lot more about it soon.

Following on from my earlier post about the death of internet radio as we know it, the UK has once again followed the US model and hiked the royalty fees paid by internet radio stations to levels that will make it nearly impossible for niche stations to exist (legally) anymore. What they’ve really done is killed off one of the cheapest marketing tools the music business has ever seen. More details are in my post for the NESTA blogs:

What stations like Pandora do is provide an excellent way of selling more records. Here’s how: you type in the name of a song or musician you like, and Pandora plays you music that is similar. You may never have heard of the artist or song that Pandora plays to you, but if you like it, you can buy it from iTunes or Amazon at a single click…

Read the full post here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

This past weekend, The Guardian sponsored a virtual festival in Second Life, the online alternate reality environment. Here’s a few snippets of what I had to say about it on my work blog:

On the whole, it looked just like a real-life music festival: several stages, a campsite complete with tents, drinks stalls and whatnot. But this is exactly what let things down in my mind. Why would you build an exact replica of a real-life festival in an environment where you could have virtually anything?…

… Audio and video streams were intermittently dropping, and many newbies who didn’t know how to do the SL-equivalent of banging the top of the telly when it loses the signal, were disappointed. And the rest of us were even more disappointed to find that many of the acts weren’t actually ‘performing’ at all. The organisers simply played a recording and broadcast it into the festival. Seeing and hearing a live performance is the core reason for going to any gig, so this was a real let down. Had I paid anything, I would have felt royally ripped off. Fortunately, some of the artists who did perform live made up for the others…

Read the full story & comments here on the NESTA blog >>