Back in 1993, when I was still a practicing lawyer, I went to lunch with a good friend of mine. He was the head of the Cable Television company, and my law firm represented his company. At the time everyone seemed to be preoccupied with the notion of 500 channels of TV, and he was troubled by this. During our lunch, he turned to me and said,

Now remember, this was before YouTube. It was before social networks. It was even before email and the web were in common use. Nobody was talking much about user generated content in those days. But the truth is, the elements were already there, the groundwork already in place, to precipitate a revolution.

When Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web and Marc Andreesen and his buddies at NCSA created Mozilla, the first really important graphical web browser, they laid the groundwork for an explosion, a big bang in the universe that is “content.” And ironically, from the moment that happened, content has ceased to be “king.” You remember the expression, of course. But “content is king” only when content is scarce, controlled and meted out. Today content is cheaper to create, cheaper to store, and cheaper to distribute than ever before. And there are many many more “producers” of content than there were in 1993. The world will never be the same.

All of this has an enormous impact on music and on the music business. There is more recorded music available today than ever before. Orders of magnitude more music. People listen to more music today than ever before in the history of the world. And increasingly, they’re distributing that music (sharing) and even creating it themselves.

Every copy of Apple’s OSX comes with a copy of Garage Band. Programs like Garage Band, Logic, Ableton Live, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reason, Sonar and others have made it possible for nearly anyone to record or compile “music” that may be completely original (and fall anywhere on the scale from sublime to unbearable) or utterly derivative. Artists have long been treating this vast collection of content as source material for the inspiration and support of their further creative efforts, including Grandmaster Flash, Dr. Dre, The Bastie Boys, Eminem, Moby, and a legion of artists with names that begin with “DJ” and end with pretty much any other word or expression you can imagine.

And the thing that amazes me most about all of this? That the transition from mere spectator to full participant hasn’t been more widely understood, embraced and appreciated. I’d like to introduce you to someone who does get it: Suzanne Lainson. Suzanne writes the blog “brands + music (bpm),” has some interesting things to say about this in the context of music. A week ago, some people from the music, tech and marketing/advertising space got together as part of the Jim Lewi inspired “First Thursday,” here in Boulder. Suzanne was among them, and during the course of our discussions, it became apparent that (a) she’s tired of hearing so many people in the industry say the same things over and over again, and (b) she has a different point of view about what needs to happen – a perspective I happen to share.  Rather than steal her thunder, I invite you to read her most recent post, “Involving Music Fans at Many Levels” for yourself.

One of the things I particularly appreciate about Suzanne’s post: she wants to know what you think, and she asks you to respond. Instead of simply speaking her mind and leaving things at that, she has invited you to join in a conversation – precisely the thing she things needs to be happening in the music industry. And I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

Facebook has provided a new attention-getting tool that you’ll want to know about if you are an artist, promoter, or venue responsible for promoting events, You already know that you can use iggli’s invitation services to leverage the power of email. Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Now Facebook lets you use the @ symbol to get the attention of a particular person. You can read more about the service in the September 15, 2009 edition of Inside Facebook.

Here’s how the new feature works. Suppose you’re posting an update to a band’s status and you want me to know. For example, Crosby, Stills and Nash are playing the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 23rd. You go to the status box and type: Hey @ . . . and you’ll be given the option to add the name of any of your Facebook friends. So, you type, Hey @ Tom Higley let’s go see Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Greek! Presto, I get a message saying I’ve been tagged by you in a status update. Give it a try!

A note about CS&N. Their 1969 release was one of the first two albums I ever bought. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. While Young wasn’t yet a member of the group or featured on this recording, he made his appearance on DéjåVu and who could forget Ohio in 1970? Released when I was still a junior in high school, it had a pretty powerful impact on me and on everyone I knew.

Ahh the iphone. That lovely sliding interface has infected the web. Here at iggli, we’re doing the “iphone slide” whenever we can. One of our current development projects is to try to capture a user’s RSVP to an invitation with a similar “sliding” interface technique. By using the “slide” we can drive the user to more screens to try to gather more information from them as to why they’re in, out, maybe without overwhelming them with a huge questionnaire up front.

Depending on the user clicking "I'm in", "Out", or "Maybe" the appropriate next screen slides in.

For instance, a user might RSVP for Donovan Frankenrieghter and say “I’m OUT!”…that’s great information…but WHY? Do you hate Donovan or do you just already have plans? It’d be great if we could capture that you really hate…I mean HATE…Donovan Frankenrieghter. So your RSVP status might be something like “I’m out. + I hate Donovan Frankenrighter”

We’ve seen some of this around the web more and more. One site that we found kinda nice was the panic.com “coda slider”. They use it to market the “coda ide”. This was developed by Niall Doherty as far as I can tell. Also, Joe Hewitt’s IUI , which attempts to mimic the native iphone TableView component is also useful.

This is how the typical slide viewer works

A typical slide show viewer works by having a fixed set of slides that move back and forth behind the “slide viewer”.

The slider developed by Niall Doherty works like a slideshow viewer but automagically adds a set of tabs on the top to move directly to any particular slide. It’s fun to use. And works good if you know before hand what the content is going to be.

But we need to change the content depending on what path the user takes through the process of an RSVP to an invitation. Similar to how the iphone TableView component works. For instance, the might say “I’m IN! + I already have my tickets.” or “Im IN! + I’ll get tickets for anyone that wants to go if you pay me back.” It’s kinda like choose your own adventure.

This is a grid viewer...a slide viewer on steroids!

Well, this means a decision tree or “grid” of slides backing the slide viewer. The only problem is that the “slide” is not just left to right, but up and down and sideways. That’s a little weird and doesn’t mimic the iphone “slide” which we’re trying to do.

We couldn’t find anything out of the box that supports exactly what we need…So we are building our own. Here’s the concept we’re working with right now. We want the slide to move left and right like a slide show viewer. But we want the user to drive the interface like a decision tree. So we’re combining a slide show viewer with a grid of slides.

This is a slide viewer backed by a grid of slides

So as the user selects different actions from any slide, the next slide (which may not be next to the current slide in the grid) is copied into the “on-deck” position of the slide show viewer, and then slides into view.

We’ll keep you updated on the progress and are hoping to release the code for all to use. Stay tuned.

Dehru Cromer

an iggli developer