David Emery Online

"Love Interruption" is the first taste of Jack White's debut album, Blunderbuss, out April 23 on Third Man Records/XL Recordings.

Firstly: new Jack White solo record! I am a massive White Stripes fan, so this is a Very Good Thing. Also, we made a widget for it that spins at 45rpm:

I’m not sure if I’ve really mentioned the widgets we’ve developed and have been using since last August – they’re quite nifty, if I do say so myself. They’re HTML5-based and work on iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices; they get detected by the lovely HypeMachine so they show up when bloggers post about them; they’re completely fluid (using both media queries and a dab of JS) so they should work at any size; and lastly you can use them as little iOS web apps (if you have a data connection) – try saving this page to your home screen for example.

The short version is that Google search results are going to be automatically personalized (to a greater degree than they were already) for each user, with signals drawn from your Google+ Circles being used to highlight things your friends — or you, yourself — have shared. Any of these personalized matches will appear alongside ‘normal’ search results. And Google will also pull in photos shared on Picasa or Google+ (they’ll even show up if you’ve marked them private, but they’ll still only be visible to you).

It seems like there’s an ever growing opportunity for someone to come in and do search much better then Google does it, stripping it back to basics and focusing on the quality of results (which are appalling for so many search types – anything product focused just leads to page upon page of retailer sites, for example).

I think the attempt to (badly) add social features to all of their platforms could be the undoing of Google.

Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.

Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.

In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!

This is cross posted from the Music Ally blog, which has a new strand focused on industry opinions and analysis. It’s also a response to this post, also on the Music Ally blog by Darren Hemmings, so you might want to read that first for a slightly different take.

I feel like something of an rebel at this point as – unlike seemingly the rest of the tech community – I quite like Facebook. They’re a developer powerhouse, and with their recent acquisitions becoming increasingly a design powerhouse as well (the new timeline is a lovely piece of work, for example). They don’t always get things right, but they try lots of things and that’s far more interesting then being cautious – just look at the amount of development and change of Facebook in the last couple of years versus Twitter, for example.

The new ticker, and associated “Frictionless” sharing is a great example of them taking a chance on a concept, and to me it makes a lot of sense but could do with a bit of refining. The idea of sharing more things to Facebook opens up all sorts of possibilities (and not just for advertisers) – aggregating this sort of data together and using it to surface trends amongst your social group could be very interesting, and is obviously the direction they’re heading but they’re only part of the way down that road.

I don’t see this kind of activity having a noticeable impact (negative or otherwise) to existing pages, and I mean that figuratively and quite literally – delving through the Facebook stats across all the different pages we administer (from ones with millions of likes down to ones with hundreds) there’s no noticeable trends since the F8. Yes, obviously there are now some new story types popping up in the news feed which presumably means you’re less likely to see stories from pages, but I don’t think this is significant – it’s no worse then if the user has liked a couple more other pages; you’re always going to have a lot of other content to contend with.

And it is worth remembering that these posts are the most important thing on Facebook – it is, at it’s heart, a communication platform. People don’t really go to Facebook pages, or at least not as a primary source of information; they like the page and then get all of the content through the news feed. You can spend a lot of time pimping out your Facebook page and turning it into something akin to a MySpace page of old but that’s like pimping out your email signup page; people are probably going to only see it once (if that, as there’s so many ways of liking a page that don’t involve going to it).

Of course, with the way the news feed works not everyone that is a fan of a page necessarily gets to see an update that you post – it optimises what you see depending on a whole bunch of factors, like what you and your friends have previously engaged with and how old the post is. This on the face of it seems like a big problem – “I’m not getting to half my audience!” – but is actually 1) exactly what you really want and 2) no different from other platforms (it’s just we get better stats from Facebook so we know about it).

How is it actually what you want? Because Facebook is doing all the hard work figuring out who your most engaged fans are for you, the ones that will click stuff and react the best. It’s so very easy to get caught up in a numbers game, especially online where numbers are so easy to come by, and it’s easy to forget that more does not necessarily mean better. What you want are genuine connections to genuine fans, and that’s the platform that Facebook is providing, and that’s why Facebook is – on a like for like basis – so much more powerful and driving traffic and interactions then other platforms in my experience.

So, on the topic of other platforms it’s easy to compare news posts to tweets and start to wonder about the stats you get from Facebook saying that only 5% of your fans viewed that post, which could lead you to the conclusion that maybe Twitter is better. Its feed doesn’t have the optimising logic and multi item types of Facebook and hence has less competition for your news, so you can make more impact, right? That has its own, more powerful downsides though, that simplicity causes just as many problems as it solves. The twitter stream moves very quickly, and hence unless your followers are all checking once every 10 minutes they’re liable not to see what you’ve posted, and Twitter is purely time-based, so you don’t have the benefit of an algorithm bringing your post to the top if someone is likely to want to see it. Of course, Twitter does have the benefit of retweets and trends, both of which don’t translate to Facebook (yes, you can share posted items but it’s not as ingrained as retweeting).

So, all in all it strikes me that Facebook is still massively relevant for music marketing – in fact, and think its the single most powerful marketing channel online at the moment (although that’s not to say it should be your only one). Of course, it will not be in that position forever, and having said all of the above I could see that the current level of unease with Facebook could definitely leave a space for someone to take their dominance away from them. I’d be surprised at this point if it was Google+, as they seem to be coming at it from a “me too” angle, and it just doesn’t seem to be working. Time will tell of course, but I imagine whoever takes Facebook’s crown will be doing something slightly different, and I bet you anything they’ll be doing it on mobiles first…

“R.I.P.” – about 3 minutes ago

Last Sunday, at around lunchtime, my Twitter feed spontaneously filled up with tributes to the late Gary Speed. It seems as though he took his own life at the age of 42, which is tragic whatever way you look at it. That kind of instant, mass outpouring of sadness is like a punch in the gut; you can’t help but be effected.

Up until lunchtime yesterday I had no idea who Gary Speed was. Now, I was grieving for him (albeit in only a relatively small way).

This is not a unique experience. In fact, it’s almost becoming a daily experience; if you keep an eye on the trends on Twitter you won’t go to long without seeing one for someone that has died, and the subsequent stream of tweets – of remembrance – that got the term trending.

There’s two angles on to why this is so affecting; social recommendation power and the instant nature of the modern Internet. We’ve long talked about how much more powerful a recommendation from a friend is versus one from a more traditional media source, and the same goes for death – a “R.I.P.” from a friend means so much more then a solemn statement on the 6 o’clock news (“And now, the weather with Carol”). Multiply this by the way this sort of news spreads incredibly quickly and you can be staring at a timeline of tributes that all mean something to you, even if the person they’re about doesn’t.

This last point compounds the loss; this person has died, and I obviously should have already known who they were and why they were worthy of tribute. And now it’s too late. It’s a different kind of loss – and in this context quite selfish, really; but there it is.

In contrast as much as this online social interaction can make you greave about someone you’ve never even heard of, when it’s someone that you do have some form of connection to it can act like a videogame-style combo-multiplier of grief.

There’s no doubt that the death of Steve Jobs was the online world’s Princess Diana moment, but for me on a personal level it had a massive impact. Yes, I’m a big fan of Apple and the products they release (with the notable exception of iTunes Ping, of course), but when you get down to it he was just the CEO of a company that makes gadgets. I’d never met him, nor met anyone that had, but yet on the morning of his death I shed a tear (and I’m not one for grand gestures of emotion).

Twitter was the cause.

Tweet after tweet after tweet of sadness, tributes, simple messages and multi-tweet outpourings added up to a tidal wave of grief. Apple fans and critics, tech geeks and luddites alike. Every single tweet in my timeline about the death of a single man.

Social media – a term I’m not fond of, but at least well understood – is perfect for the rapid dissemination of information, and also for powerful, unique personal recommendations. It is the ultimate distribution medium for sorrow.

Grief begets grief begets grief, in the (tearful) blink of an eye.