Kevin Kelly has some substantiation and additional thought to address questions in the wake of his 1000 True Fans essay. The bulk of it is actually a response that Kelly solicited from Robert Rich. He describes Rich thusly:

Rich was an early pioneer in ambient music, and a force in the Bay Area new age music scene in the early 1980s. He’s prolific, issuing about 40 albums in the past 20 years, many in collaboration with other ambient musicians.

One of the topics I discuss here and on the podcast is new media. Much of this media is created by independent creators and distributed predominantly or exclusively on the web. A sizable portion of it also is available for free or under liberal conditions, such as any of the Creative Commons licenses.

One of the challenges with this new media is finding it. The folks at Creative Commons do a pretty good job spotlighting works that use their licenses but so far, I have found few other sites doing a good job making this job of a potential audience any easier. Most of the efforts outside of CC are centered around music and aren’t as concerned with the open or free aspect of much of this independently produced material.

My good friend, and new and open media creator herself, Mur Lafferty, approach me a few weeks back asking if I would be interested in a new site she was planning on launching. Before she was laid off from Lulu.tv, the ill fated video division of Bob Young’s print-on-demand venture, Lulu, among other things Mur was working on a portal site, Open Media Watch, trying to draw attention to the openly accessible portion of all this new, independent media.

She had a feeling then, and still does, that as much press as the Creative Commons itself gets and generates, this is still an area that is under covered by online news sites, blogs and other sites otherwise of interest to independent creators and their fans. I tend to agree with her. As great a job as CC does in this department, I think there is room for much more.

This past week, Mur announced the launch of this new site, Open Media Review, with the goal of bringing much deserved attention to the best that open media has to offer. She is uniquely qualified to run this site, having seen some of the best and worst of open media endeavors first hand. She is also extraordinarily well networked within the podcast fiction world, a thriving and lively space within open media. I have also been privileged to see the well deserved success of many independent authors enabled through an appreciation for what open access can do to promote works and build audience, whether that open-ness is based on a formal CC license or just an informal condition on traditional copyright.

For my part, she asked me to participate given the strong overlap in my interests with her goals for the new site. She has given me a great deal of discretion to participate as much or as little as I like or am able. I often feel that many of the more interesting new and open media stories don’t fit in as well as I’d like with the content I produce here, so welcome the opportunity to expand my reading and research to contribute to this complementary forum as well.

She has welcomed my insights as a technologist, I will try to live up to those expectations in my contributions. I am also an avid fan of all forms of open and new media, so think I can contribute much, there, as well. I have opted, initially, to act as a contributing editor as I have a lot of ideas for pieces I’d like to write and contribute. She’s also been very generous in not demanding any sort of exclusivity so I will be cross posting pieces of interest to both Open Media Review and my own readers and listeners.

So go check out Open Media Review and subscribe to our RSS feed.

It hasn’t even been a full day since I gave Mur her props for doing such clueful promotion when I spotted that a special preview of chapter 1 has appeared in the wild. Check it out and if you like it, go to the official web site for Playing for Keeps and subscribe.

Say what you will about the differences between traditional media and “new media”, but its hard not to notice just how much more the most visible adopters of online distribution and amateur produced content get the fact that success hinges on engaging with your audience and giving them a more compelling experience than just transacting for a pre-packaged, impersonal good. (Here I use amateur in the sense of one who does for love of the work, definitely not the more modern usage that connotes lack of skill.)

Nowhere is this more evident than in the full court press currently underway by Mur Lafferty for her podcast novel, Playing for Keeps, set to launch this Thursday, November 1st.

I’ve known Mur pretty much since I started podcasting and with this latest endeavor have had opportunity to peek behind the curtain. Beyond the interest she has been able to generate through sharing her experiences first hand finishing, editing and shopping the novel on her writing podcast, I Should Be Writing, she has found a motivated core of contributors that are building an engaging experience around the audio of the novel itself. All of this, the novel and the fan built media, is free to the listener.

Mur could have continued to shop the novel or have trunked it after her first attempt to find a publisher. I am not sure this even occurred to her. Early on in the process of trying to get her work out through traditional publishing, she was already discussing with her audience sharing the work through podcasting if she did not find an outlet within a ten month span.

If you enjoy comic books, especially some of the more literate and sophisticated ones like Astro City, then you’ll almost certainly enjoy Playing for Keeps. And by subscribing, you’ll be supporting and encouraging more such clueful and innovative works of all genres and varieties.

I think this is mostly wonderful news. I do have some questions, though. Will the format be proprietary? The mention of custom editing software leads me to believe that it will, a simple fact that will restrict certain freedoms right away. They are allowing posting of the finished product to any number of sites, so it could be worse. Lucas is still exercising a certain right to censor, one for which I do not blame him. However, that is already two limitations, reasonable as they may be, that removes this from the ideal play it may have otherwise been. In Lucas’ favor, unlike past projects, the permissions granted go well beyond fair use and it is about original clips from his work, not new works based on his characters and settings, so he does genuinely deserve a good amount of credit in my opinion.

The criticism of social media sites existing solely to exploit their grass roots contributors has always bothered me. This Techdirt article share a counter example that help balance the discussion, I think, at least from one perspective. I think the key here, though, is that the contributors clearly have a stake in the particular system, a distributed lost and found, something more tangible than the promise of shared ad revenues or mere reputation. I think it is important to remember that qualities other than money drive value, in this case efficiency.

Thankfully, it looks like it is not just NPR that is soliciting the Copyright Royalty Board to re-consider their recent published rate hike. That offsets my concerns that a public radio only effort might yield a lopsided solution, an exception for not-for-profit that did nothing to help the new media folks out. According to the article, the last time this happened, it played out pretty much the same way. This reinforces my growing instinct to assume that in any of these conflicts, it has all happened before, with only minor variation. The article does not speculate on how to repeat the balanced outcome at which things arrived last time, though.

There are quotes from Sporkin VP of Communications over at the industry site, FMQB. The Chicago Tribune also has an update with quotes from staff at KCRW. So the predictions of this happening were, not surprisingly, pretty accurate.

Unfortunately, it may not be as helpful to new media as hoped. Most of the quotes are careful to make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial radio. NPR seems to be framing their objections not as a broadside against the CRB but in terms of an exemption for not-for-profit operators.

We all know the number one reason is bogus. It’s the bogey man the trade associations march out to get their captive legislators in a froth over legislated TPM. But here’s a nice piece that suggests some other reasons. I would roll the ones with which I most agree under the category of discovery. Although the inability to cherry pick the tracks I want is a close second to that cluster.

I would hesitate to suggest this is unique to CDs, however. Jamendo, with which I’ve been experimenting, also has this limitation. Granted, with a donation driven model like Magnatunes, its not like I have to pay for an entire album, morally, when all I keep are the very few I like best.

Forgive my myopia, that when I read about the exorbitant royalties, I immediately thought about the impact on podcasters and other new media types. Of course it makes sense that NPR would hugely feel the pinch. I only listen to their podcasts but I am well aware of how much streaming they do. I am encourage at their apparent response to the rate hike and the speculation that this may lead them to fight it.

Boing Boing has the story. Not surprising, if you read Lethem’s Harper’s piece which I talked about on the podcast after it came out. It is very encouraging to see him so boldly following through. I look forward to the day when this sort of deal is not so unusual.

Technorati Tags: copyright, intellectual property, remix culture

In most ways the story remains the same even for a new player. The article has the relevant details but the net-net is that Viacom seems to be basing the figure in the suit, one billion USD, on its own revenue streams and model. I am still unclear whether this is justifiable, regardless of the number, because Viacom thinks YouTube has reduce its revenues by that much or, more likely, Viacom feels it could have expanded its revenues by that much if it owned YouTube.

Based on their announced intention to launch a YouTube competitor, I’m guessing the latter. If so, though, then how are they justified in extracting that sum from Google, if that’s entirely new revenue that would not have existed if YouTube didn’t exist??

This story has already made the rounds amongst most podcasters. Of course, for those who avoid RIAA music, it’s a non-issue. It is also unclear as to what, exactly, constitutes streaming.

According to Techdirt, this is yet another consequence of market concentration. Cory Doctorow expressed the same idea in his essay, How Copyright Broke, that the big labels would rather license to large outfits for larger sums. It’s not much of a stretch to read the retroactive nature of the rates not only to filter out the smaller, less worthwhile players, but to active shut them down. The precipitous rate at which future rates are set to increase lends weight to that interpretation

If ever there was a case to be made to foregoing big label music and adopting so called “pod safe” music, this would be it. In my experience, there is a very wide world of wonderful independent music out there that gets what the labels to do not. As the Techdirt article explains so well, the conversational connections that can be made between artist and listener are much more powerful than traditional one way broadcasting.

Technorati Tags: RIAA