meta-roj

the subject of googlejuice has been pretty hot with the rise of blogspam and my two major [performance marketing, ltd.] offenders [william m cooper]. so, i looked at the logs of the past week and decided to see what’s hot at the end of 2003. sort of a meta-roj zeitgeist, if you will…

first, i want to talk about the “doing good things” juice here. in one case after observing the meta-roj googlejuice phenomenon, i actually tried to get a post ranked above the “noise” (booksellers and such), and i’m happy to report that rafe esquith is #1. it’s bounced around in the top few positions since appearing, but it seems to be pretty solid now. i can’t say i did a lot of work to get this ranked – basically, i just wrote what i wrote and watched where it went. as a contribution to “substance,” and a tribute to this great person’s work, i’m happy to push rafe. i am humbled by his work. the hobart shakespeareans also scored high, at #4.

hope stout (#2) also got my attention this year. i’m quite happy to direct your attention to that story. some come already aware that she’s in charlotte (#3). some even know she’s hooked up with make a wish (#23). so, the more you know, the lower meta-roj ranks :)…

in other important-people developments with googlejuice, i’m happy to report that i’ve gotten some attention for (and even some discussion about, which is even more amazing) about two young women who understand bold individual action. these two women, stephanie haaser and katherine pecore (who actually visited meta-roj once) each alone and paired together, all landed at #1. when it happened, this was barely a blip on my radar, but when the big media picked up on it, i felt it was important to get past the superficial scandalous garbage that made the story (straight girls kissing! honor students disciplined! hot lesbian action!) and give a little recognition to what i think is the bigger picture (without getting too obvious or serious, of course 🙂 ).

in the realm of the one-line obituaries (always a popular feature), mohamed choukri is a big hit at #1 and #3, annalena tonelli (#5), katherine bidwell (#1), patrick dalzel job (#5), harold von braunhut (#5), teddy randazzo (#4), wally hedrick (#10), peggy singleton (#14), brightman bernard (#2), ben metcalfe (#3), ivan getting (#6), addie byers (#6), johnny cash (#10), florence curl jones (#3), ray patterson (#5), george ushindi (#4), buddy arnold (#6), and fred berry (#13). it is the nature of obituaries that the recently-dead are more popular, so this really reflects more of the public’s interest in people i think merit a line in my space. i’ve done about 60 of these since starting the blog, and amazingly enough (considering the limited content), they consistently place pretty high – these are just the ones that people came looking for this week.

now on to some bits of fun…. i’m still an expert biochemist, ranking as your source for epigallocatechin gallate (#3) and polyphenyls (#1). i’m also a gemologist (#4), theologian (#1), philosopher (#2), electronics technician (#1), weapons inspector, (#5) soft drinker (#4), telephone network analyst (#1 – figure that one out 🙂 ), tropical storm expert (#1), linguist (#22), gothist (#7) and physicist (#1).

since i’ve written extensively on the business of music, it’s a good bet several people wander into my web looking for those comments. comparing music sites (#8), weedshare (#3), metajam (#3), magnatune (#4), tracks magazine (#6), pop charts 2002 (#6), weed sharing (#22), music industry blog (#7), kelly clarkson earings (#4), mp3.com going out of business (#8), blog beatles (#7), universal job cuts (#1, but it may not be what they were expecting), number one hits (#19), wma music sites (#2), spam music (#1), cds will never be obsolete (#4 – well, i wouldn’t go THAT far!), how can the riaa track us now (#1), posted internet music sales (#3) and truefire (#4).

social software was big in 2003, and even at the end of the year, people are still looking. blog livejournal (#1), livejournal syndication (#5) friendster fake testimonials (#3), and, of course, social networking sites (#6).

business issues include the hollywood model (#1), both how to run a company (#9), and how to run a company well (#2), attention market (#4), the perfect model (#6), commercial interests (#1), crack disney (#4), bbc archive (#6), and a perpetual favorite, sunncomm (#10) – which is, of course, how NOT to run a company well.

exploring politics a bit, we have patriot act prosecution (#1), shame punishment court judge (#2) and free speech meta (#1).

the arts are underrepresented, but that’s probably my fault. in any case, we have a few bits of film, music and poetry that captured someone’s interest… 2001 space odyssey funk (#1), on michael jackson (#4), shujaat husain khan (#1), tagore let my country awake (#3), music video database (#10)

walmart is the big draw here. i have mixed feelings about this, because generally people come in here (which doesn’t have much substance) instead of here (which does). but, that is the nature of the net, and i’m just along for the ride. walmart, of course, is still my most popular search-engine-hit, with the #37 position on google, and accounting for 23% of search-engine visitors. adding walmart online to the mix (ranking #3) brings it to 26.6%, and adding in the various other walmart-based searches (walmart online music (#4), walmart studies (#10), walmartization (#29), evil walmart (#7), online walmart (#8), walmart is evil (#16), walmart itunes (#2), walmart evil (#8), and walmart blog (#1) brings it to about 27% of google-originating visitors.

finally, a few jabs at performance marketing, ltd (the fecal pill people!): 1pill (#3), and american pharma (#3).

[a few more that were interesting, but didn’t fit a narrative included below]
(more…)

it is the end of the year, and there’s no doubt that a lot of wrap-up stuff is going to appear. since i talk about the high end of the music business here, i thought this set might be worth echoing.

pollstar says these are the top-grossing concerts of 2003. just to give you a tiny bit for thought, consider how many of these would be considered “new” acts… to that end, i’ve expanded on the pollstar data by including the date of their first album release, according to the all music guide (we run a value-added service here at meta-roj!):

1. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band $115.9 million. (1973)
2. Celine Dion $80.5 million. (1990)
3. Eagles $69.3 million. (1972)
4. Fleetwood Mac $69 million. (1968)
5. Cher $68.2 million. (1965)
6. Simon & Garfunkel $64.5 million. (1964)
7. Aerosmith-Kiss $64 million. (1973 / 1974)
8. Dixie Chicks $60.5 million. (1992)
9. Billy Joel-Elton John $50.9 million. (1971 / 1969)
10. Summer Sanitarium Tour with Metallica $48.8 million. (1983)
11. Dave Matthews Band $47.1 million. (1993)
12. Toby Keith $44.2 million. (1993)
13. Shania Twain $40.8 million. (1993)
14. The Rolling Stones $38.5 million. (1964)
15. Phish $35.8 million. (1988)
16. Kenny Chesney $34.5 million. (1994)
17. Tim McGraw $32.7 million. (1993)
18. Justin Timberlake/Christine Aguilera $31.8 million. (2002 / 1999)
19. Jimmy Buffett $29.3 million. (1970)
20. Pearl Jam $29.1 million. (1991)

justin’s cheating a little, because he got a 4-year headstart with ‘nsync. anyway, i just want to leave you with a thought about the value of longevity in this business of music. once you find your audience, they can be yours forever.

i’m going to drop this in here, simply because it’s a foundation concept that i hope to build on in the [near?] future.

you remember the band, not the label.

a month ago, i came across this bbc article announcing digital jukeboxes with 2 million tracks and all kinds of other neat net-enabled widgets. surprisingly, there isn’t much more in the bbc story than in the press release, so i put this on hold for a while hoping some substance would appear.

i haven’t been well rewarded in this regard. i did find a nice quote to share,

top40-charts

Norman Crowley of Inspired Broadcast Networks commented: “This is the most significant announcement to hit the music industry this year. We have spent a great deal of time researching the market place so we could launch a product that would change the way consumers listen to music outside of their homes. Our jukebox will give venue owners better ways to entertain their customers and will also increase revenue for the music industry.”

more significant than madonna kissing britney? more significant than the turnaround? well, i guess it’s all a matter of perspective.

i gave these guys a month to do something, so i’m going to give you what i have and get them off of my watch list. they’ll have to make “news” again to get my attention.

with eyes wide open, and hopefully some measure of the fascination and acceptance of youth, i keep trying to insinuate myself in fields within which i know little or nothing, looking for hints, clues and other shiny objects that might be somehow relevant to my own work.

fireworker

doughboy daddy

it’s been a while since i felt inspired to share a business model of the hour with my good readers, but this came up in a conversation, and i just have to share…

starting with the observation that the “riaa sues 12-year-old girl” meme got a lot of traction, i think there’s an opportunity to take this to the logical extreme with a combination of technical and legal hacks. if you think suing kids is newsworthy, wait’ll you see the riaa suing rocks.

here’s the general theory:

1) find someone who is a) dying and b) sympathetic.
2) set up the most voluminous file-sharing copyright-violating server possible in the name of the dying person, but keep it off-line.
3) code the server so that it has a “dead-mans switch” and doesn’t go “live” until the dying person’s estate is settled.
4) arrange in the will of the dying person to leave the server, which should be prepaid, maintenance-free and fully automatic, to a pet rock.
5) wait for the dying person to die.
6) wait for the server to go live.
7) wait for the riaa to find it and start filing lawsuits.
8) run to the media with the headline: “riaa sues rock.”

why would you do this? i dunno. just to score a great headline, i guess. as with most business-models-of-the-hour, there are huge gaps in this plan. i leave that to a crack team of technogeeks and legal geeks to make it work.

of course, there’s another approach, and that has to do with the crazy googejuice around here. the “riaa sues rock” meme might just get traction without ever happening. i guess we’ll know… in the future….

the six

i frequent an irc channel that has, over time, collected an array of bots that do various things that someone might find useful – some of them are just geeks testing their bot-coding prowess, but some have stuck for a long time. it’s accepted that bots are part of the channel, and as with any software, there is turnover and upgrades and bugs that come with them.

often, very smart people drop into this channel, many of whom are completely new to this so-many-years-old irc thing. as with any new thing, walking into the “lion’s den” can be a bit intimidating – if not because of the human residents, then for the less-than-elegant technology that is irc or even the “what the hell is that?” moment that happens when a bot first does its thing in front of someone.

the channel has also evolved some fairly non-irc-like social norms – perhaps in part to accomodate these new people, and perhaps in part because most of the regulars also have outside-irc context to draw on with each other. anyway, precisely how the channel evolved isn’t really what interests me at the moment.

tonight, as i glanced in, i noticed a behavior from a recent bot-addition to the channel that has, in the past, resulted in days and weeks of time wasted explaining how “/ignore” works, or why something is the way it is, or this is just someone testing something or how the client they’ve chosen “sucks” and they should use something else or other various garbage.

unsurprisingly, gently mentioning a behavior that we’ve seen in this channel before, and the trouble (if it can be called that – more like “noise”) it has caused was met with a rather stiff, geek-paradigmatic response: that’s how it’s supposed to work according to the rfc, and that’s how it’s going to stay. i didn’t make a very effective case, and i’m going “backchannel” precisely to avoid prompting a debate on the subject. this was just another dead end conversation. compliant bot behavior isn’t what interests me at the moment either.

i just want to drop an observation into the blogosphere and say that context matters. in this channel, we have the same discussion, the same education process, the same complaints and questions every time a bot displays this behavior. conforming to the “channel norm” is, i think, more important than comforming to the “letter of the rfc.” for now, i’ll watch the noise-to-signal ratio creep up until everyone has adjusted to the new bot (or the new bot is upgraded, replaced or removed, as the case may be).

occasionally when discussion breaks down into yet another explanation of this bot-behavior, i’ll see it and think to myself that we’re spending a lot of effort to adapt the humans to the bots, and not enough adapting the bots to the humans… and then i’ll realize that it’s pretty common to get that backwards, particularly with technology and geeks, and i’ll smile a little to myself and wander off to something interesting.