Reid Dossinger

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Showing posts from March, 2010

Add any site to your Google Buzz feed

I was looking around for a way to do like those folks at Mashable did and create a Google profile page for The Org so that folks could follow us in Buzz. I wanted to attach our Wordpress site (which, by the way, is NOT a blog if anyone asks) so that it would update automatically, so I added it to the list of links on the profile. But when I clicked on "connected sites" in Buzz, the Wordpress site was, unsurprisingly, not in the list. After scouring the internet for clear instructions on how to add a Wordpress site to a Google profile so that it would feed into Buzz automatically, I finally came across these instructions . While they were useful, they were not the most clearly written instructions in the world, so I thought I'd simplify a little: Add your site to your Google Profile (Edit Profile > Links) Add in the following line of code to the <head> section of your website, replacing the link with the link to your public profile page: <link href="http:/...

What can the music industry do to slow piracy? Improve the product

Last week brought my attention to a couple visual jabs at how DRM encourages piracy ( here and here ) in books and movies. The bottom line: piracy's reach is larger because it provides a better, easier product than the legit stuff. The music industry has learned a lot of lessons in the last ten years, but it still hasn't figured out that the wall-less world we now live in requires that the industries think of illegal sharing not as piracy, but as a competing product. And the legitimate businesses are slow to compete. Here's what the music business need to do to provide as good a product as piracy offers (and provide the kinds of lessons that the sellers of movies and books can really learn from): Offer high-quality versions While bitrates have gotten better over the years in mp3 stores like Lala and Amazon mp3, there's still no variety. The only way you can legally get a fully lossless digital version of an album is to buy the CD and rip it, leaving you with a CD you d...

Some scattered thoughts on the money of digital music

If you haven't already read Digital Audio Insider's interview with Camper Van Beethoven's Jonathan Segal ¹, it's a must read for anyone with even a slight interest in digital music and the money of the industry. Segal has tons of thoughts on just about every aspect of digital music, but best of all, he brings in these thoughts as someone whose initial music industry experience was in the days of purely-physical media, when "pirating" meant copying something onto a blank tape. My main takeway is general and obvious but an important reminder: we are in a transition time for music, and what it will become is anyone's guess. I think Segal's take on merchandise and live performances taking the place as artist's primary source of income as "asinine" is too harsh to be true, but I do think that we're in such a state of transition that any shot at predicting artistic income in the future is completely in the dark. Such predictions are really ...

The first apps I installed on my new iMac

My shiny new iMac arrived on my doorstep last week (in spite of Fed Ex's inability to deliver it to the correct address), and I started up the Mac migration assistant to pull all the files and settings from my laptop, but...well, long story short, I decided to just start completely fresh: install the programs as I need them. It's a decision that's made my new computer surprisingly fun, even if it's made me swear angrily at it more than a few times as the judgment of the iSight beats down on me as if to say THIS IS THE LIFE YOU CHOSE. It's been interesting to me to see what downloads I went to first; a clear indicator of what's most important to me on my computer. I moved over my iTunes library first, and then got to downloading. In order: 1. Google Chrome Because Safari sucks. I mean, it doesn't IE suck, but it Blogger sucks. At least. And seeing as how this is where I'd be going to get everything else I needed, it was a clear stop one. 2. Dropbox All t...

Takeaways from Tools Of Change

I spent the earlier part of last week at the Tools Of Change for Publishers conference in New York. I was a first-timer at the conference and was thrilled to be with other people who are at the intersection of publishing and tech, since I'm completely comfortable with the latter, but still feel like a bit of an outsider with the former. Here's a few thoughts from the conference (with an aside disclaimer that these are my opinions entirely): Don't panic! Oh. Good. Well done, then In contrast with the Book Expo America (BEA) conference in New York last year—where publishers were frantic to know what they could do to at least slow their impending doom—this conference was largely panic-free. There was a feeling that the changes upon us are exciting; to be embraced and not feared. Now, the road ahead still seems far from clear. There are a lot of people with a lot of different ideas, and the future of publishing has just started forming, but there was still an exci...