gary’s web sofa

Yawn! Yet another press release masquerading as news. This time StatCounter, an Irish provider of web bugs are bemoaning the fact that the majority of Irish publicly quoted companies aren’t using their service. Instead they’re using their server logs to track visitors, which is “complex, time-consuming and limited in what it revealed about visitors”. This is patently untrue. Even free stats packages like AWStats can track everything StatCounter can, and more besides. Now I may be a bit naïve, but why would you place an advert on your company’s website for a 3rd party (they track page hits by means of an embedded image, which just happens to be an advert that you have no control over), when any competent server administrator can install and configure AWStats in 10 minutes flat?

SiliconRepublic.com: Irish Stock Exchange firms not tracking web visitors

The company’s Google apps deployment went mostly fine. The one pain in the ass is with our smartphones. We all still use Nokia e61 phones and used to rely on push IMAP for email on the go. You’d connect once and stay connected all day. The Blackberry platform is great if you need centralised management and control, but total overkill on a small technology company where there’s a reasonable technical competence across the board.

While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s “reconnect every X minutes” function seems to be a bit of a crock and isn’t fixing it……

At work we’d been kicking around a migration from our IMAP/SMTP hosted email service for a good while now. Our provider was top notch, but we wanted shared calendars & workspaces too, so we needed to move on. We could have deployed something like Exchange internally, but that means buying in another server, Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and anti-virus software, getting it all put together, and then spending the time maintaining it and fixing it when it breaks. Our engineering resources are a) pretty much fully committed and b) not Windows specialists, so we’d probably end up subbing it out to a contractor. We’re a small bunch (9 inboxes and another 20 distribution lists and email aliases), so the €7k+ spend over 3 years (€260/inbox/year) to deploy this solution didn’t make much sense.

Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.

Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!

We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:

• Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
• Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
• The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.

Like many I read a lot of web sites. Back in the day almost the first thing I did every morning when I sat at my PC was go in turn to The Register, Slashdot, Dilbert, ENN, BBC News, ZDNet and about a dozen more to get my daily fix.

RSS was a lifesaver for me. I went out and bought FeedDemon and for a time I was happy. It would fetch all the headlines for me and display them in a list. I could click on the ones that interested me and they’d open up in the built-in browser, and I could mark everything else as read.

A short while I bought a laptop wanted to read my feeds there too. Fortunately FeedDemon had an answer. As well as using an internal database to store your list of feeds and what was read and unread, it could connect to Bloglines, a web based feed reader. Now I could read my feeds using a web browser and on my desktop and laptop PCs where I had FeedDemon installed. It wasn’t 100% perfect. Adding feeds was clunky, and it had issues if more than one location was accessing the data simultaneously (i.e. if I forgot to close FeedDemon on my desktop PC when I was on the road), but it was better than nothing.

Then Google Reader came along. It was entirely web based, and had decent hotkey support, so I could read stuff almost as quickly as with FeedDemon, and a lot faster than the Bloglines clunky interface. It was also 100% bulletproof. Being an AJAX application, activity was communicated back to the server in real time, rather than at the end of the session, so I never had to mark the same headline read twice. I preferred FeedDemon’s way of displaying feeds, where each feed had it’s own folder, and it was easy to go back to read headlines for review, but Google was overall an improvement, but still slower than FeedDemon.

FeedDemon have since been bought by NewsGator, who are another web based feed reader service in the same mould as Bloglines and Google Reader. The software can pull it’s subscribed feeds and read article data from your NewsGator account, so you can install it anywhere and view the same feeds, and what’s marked as read in one location gets marked as read everywhere, and more importantly, it does this reliably, unlike Bloglines. It’ll do nicely for the moment…..

Nick Bradbury: Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?

MTV have a great three part article on the current state of the record industry. They’ve identified 2007 as “year zero”. The traditional music business had a single method of generating revenue, the CD/vinyl/tape sale, and needed a massive apparatus (the “music industry”) to operate. In the past this was the only option if the musician wanted to reach a large audience and maybe make a good living.

Three things have ben brewing over the last few years, and have now formed a perfect storm. 1. You no longer need a big expensive studio to record music. You can do it on a laptop with the right software. 2. Internet distribution has opened another route to market for the bands to get their music into the hands (well onto the iPods anyway) of their fans and form closer relationships. 3. New products, such as phone ringtones, lucrative stadium concert tours and product endorsements have eclipsed the CD as the principal source of income for the band.

I no longer need a large dedicated studio to record music. I would still need talent behind the mixing desk, but that mixing desk is now an Apple Mac running GarageBand. A €2,000 laptop with €100 of software is all you need to make your masterpiece.

Back in the day a band would play local gigs and build up a fan base in the hope of being spotted by a music publisher. They’d get a “deal” and make some money. If you weren’t spotted a life of playing in a wedding band awaited. Now a band in outer Mongolia with 5,000+ MySpace friends could easily get noticed and signed by an A&R rep in a Los Angeles.

But not getting signed by a major label is not the end of the world. A small band can record their album on their MacBook, promote it on their MySpace page and sell it on one of a hundred websites dedicated to selling music unsigned bands online and you’re making money. The costs of entry into mass distribution are now so low that the bands can finance it themselves. All it takes is a computer and some low end software to manufacture it. Because the website sales process is totally automatic they can afford to charge a % of the sale, rather than look for up-front money. Once you’re up and running you might even be able to get your music offered on iTunes, where you’re mixing it with the big boys.

The other thing that has happened is the realisation that there are other ways for musicians to make money. Nobody under thirty has a ringtone on their phone that was there when they bought it. Everyone now has either an amusing sound clip, or a 15 second clip of their favourite chart hit which they’ve paid €3+ for. You can now buy video ringtones, where your phone display plays the music video at the same time.

At the height of his fame Michael Jackson made a staggering amount of money endorsing Pepsi, but it now there are specialist brand agencies pairing up products with stars. Everyone of note is endorsing cars, drinks, shoes. The Police made $142,000,000 touring this year. They haven’t released music in two decades and they still raked in $3m for a nights work! I even paid my €138, plus a €35 t-shirt when they came to Dublin!

Most of these new, non CD related activities do not require the help of a record label to pull off. In fact unless they all work in concert (i.e. the ringtone being in place when the single is released, along with web promotion, and a tour ready to go…), the band’s income will suffer. In recognition of this Madonna has famously signed a “360 degree” contract. A single company will manage all her activities for the next 10 years across CDs, touring, TV, movies, ringtones etc., and vitally, this company isn’t her old record label, who she left after 25 years, it’s a concert promoter.

The Year The Industry Broke – News Story | Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV News