pampelmoose: sparks + innovation

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June 12th, 2008 by Moose

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a takedown notice and my reply

May 10th, 2008 by Moose

06 May 2008
Pampelmoose.com
Email: info@pampelmoose.com

Ref: R24241
Re: http://www.pampelmoose.com/mspeaks/audio/Portishead-Silence.mp3

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am contacting you on behalf of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and its member record companies. The IFPI is a trade association whose member companies are some 1,450 major and independent record companies in the US and internationally who create, manufacture and distribute sound recordings. Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the IFPI is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

We have learned that your service is hosting infringing files on its network. These files contain sound recordings by the artist known as Portishead. These sound recordings are owned by one of our member companies and have not been authorized for this kind of use. We have a good faith belief that the above-described activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. We assert that the information in this notification is accurate, based upon the data available to us.

We are asking for your immediate assistance in stopping this unauthorized activity. Specifically, we request that you remove the infringing files from your system or that you disable access to the infringing files. In addition, please inform the site operator of the illegality of his or her conduct.

You should understand that this letter constitutes notice to you that this site operator may be liable for the infringing activity occurring on your service. In addition, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if you ignore this notice, you and/or your company may also be liable for any resulting infringement. This letter does not constitute a waiver of any right to recover damages incurred by virtue of any such unauthorized activities, and such rights as well as claims for other relief are expressly retained.

You may contact me at IFPI Secretariat, 10 Piccadilly, London W1J 0DD, United Kingdom or email Notices@ifpi.org, to discuss this notice. We await your response.

Faithfully,

Jeremy Banks
Vice-President, Internet Anti-Piracy
IFPI
10 Piccadilly
London
W1J 0DD
United Kingdom
Email: Notices@ifpi.org

My reply:

Hi Jeremy,

Thank you for your letter of May 6th. The Portishead files have been removed from the Pampelmoose music blog and server. We apologize for any wrongdoing as we thought the files were made available to us in good faith as many other music blogs were hosting the same file. We are huge fans of Portishead and will continue to support them.

Best, Dave.

Dave Allen

My blog thoughts about this and the DMCA.

6 Comments Tags:

holistic findability vs seo vs director of search?

March 31st, 2008 by Moose

By Justin Spohn, Interactive Director – Nemo Design

Sometimes things are just in the air. And sometimes those things are nerdy. This week is one of those times. On the heels of reading this article just published on A List Apart – Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, I was forwarded an article about a large local Portland agency adding a Director of Search. Later in the week, I sat in a conference room going over marketing requirements for a client, near the top of the list was â€œSEO strategyâ€. This got me thinking again about why we in the industry do the things we do and who weâ€™re doing them for. (Really, Iâ€™m the life of the party) Looking at the sort of prototypical web application, something like Wikipedia, the mechanics and reasoning of search are obvious: weâ€™re searching for a specific piece of information, we find an entry on it, weâ€™re happy. For those of us who work in marketing though, the reasoning can become muddled.One of the things that makes interactive attractive to our clients is that itâ€™s very easy to define and retrieve success metrics. If we launch a digital media campaign, itâ€™s nice to be able to tell our client that the banners we made got a .8% click through. We can show charts of drop-off points. And of course – we can show search results. But what do all these things really mean? It shows that people are seeing the message, but says nothing to what they think of it. And even when we can infer some type of opinion, what they donâ€™t show is what the viewer wanted and didnâ€™t find. Our goal is to craft a message, and then try to get as many people as possible to view that message. Itâ€™s TV, with craftier Nielsens.

But by viewing the web as a channel, like TV or radio, weâ€™re missing one of the things that is fundamentally great about the web: its a conversation between our clients and their customers. Itâ€™s the first and best chance to help our clients create the sort of relationship dynamic that converts the curious into customers and makes customers fanatics. If all weâ€™re doing is helping people find our one way broadcast message, then arenâ€™t we really just finding new and creative ways to say and do the same old thing? On the other hand, if we change the goal from getting our viewers to listen to our clientâ€™s pitch to providing viewers with a meaningful experience, and if we start making our clients a part of the communities theyâ€™re selling to, then it becomes necessary to expand our conversation from the tactical methodologies of SEO into the more holistic notion known as find-ability.

Whatâ€™s the difference? If you go and read the article on A List Apart (and you should, but then come right back) youâ€™ll see that there are many things, both technical and non-technical, that go into making a site find-able.What really makes the notion of find-ablity stand out for me though is that at its core, it requires us to consider the relative value of our interactive projects through the lens of the user rather than ourselves or our clients. It makes us ask the question: Are we simply trying to get people to the site from a Google search? Or are we trying to help them find the content and experiences within our site that are meaningful to them? It asks us to look at our sites as more than one monolithic exercise in marketing and instead see it as a collection of content that in some way benefits the user. It transforms the notion of SEO from a metric to a service. It changes the way we look at content, from being something that we create that is consumed by the viewer into something that reacts to the community that views it, that is portable and contextual. We stop writing the narrative and realize that the brand is the vessel into which the community pours its own experiences. At its foundation, the notion of find-ability is far less about technology, and more about a genuine empathy for the people who use our products.

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the demise of starbucks’ hear music program while thom whalley defends the role of a&r

March 27th, 2008 by Moose

Two articles that I read back to back recently, point to two different themes in the music industry’s fight for survival and how two people involved in the discovery, marketing and selling of music are going about their business; one trying to have a positive outcome for the music industry and one apparently turning what was once a positive into a negative for the music industry and his company. Both people here also affect how music fans will react to the music business and its offerings going forward. The back story is about how people discover new music. Let’s begin with Starbucks’ Hear Music program.

Starbucks: In the late 90’s Starbucks purchased Hear Music, a small chain of music stores based in the San Francisco Bay area. I remember well shopping for CDs at its Santa Monica store as it offered selections that appealed to my eclectic tastes. Soon Starbucks was offering CDs in its stores around the country and the most compelling part of their offerings were the ‘music discovery’ items as I’d call them. I am no stranger to reggae so it was heartening to find a reggae compilation in Starbucks that had been put together with care by someone who obviously understood that genre; I also liked the idea that I would be able to discuss the merits of Peter Tosh with someone who had never previously heard of him. For some time the Starbucks Hear Music program became a convenient way for thousands of music lovers to discover great artists both old and new while grabbing a coffee; in short they had become a ‘trusted source.’ Unfortunately those days are now behind us as the NYT reports – “…for emerging talent, it (Starbucks) has raised the price of entry. When Starbucks merely stocks an album by an emerging artist on an outside label, it routinely seeks up to 50 percent of the total profit, including sales at retailers.”

What happened? Well for me the end came when I saw a Paul McCartney album being pushed heavily in the stores but here’s another explanation – “Mr. Schultz (Starbucks’ chief) decided to hire someone with a more general business rÃ©sumÃ© to oversee the companyâ€™s expansive entertainment projects, and picked Ken Lombard, formerly president of a company overseeing retail development projects for Magic Johnson, to be its entertainment chief.”

It appears that after Mr Lombard joined the company there was an exodus of talented executives from the entertainment department at Starbucks who disliked what one of them noted was Lombard’s “brusque style of management” and how he perhaps did not have a “particular creative vision.” Lombard’s focus appears to be on the bottom line and about increasing margins by squeezing the labels to take a cut in what Starbucks pays them. Which is a shame, because just as Starbucks has been criticized for losing its way with customer service and watched its stock tank, the one area of satisfaction for customers was the Hear Music program. See BBC: Why Starbucks’ Sales Have Gone Cold.
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pampelmoose: sparks + innovation — sparks + innovation

On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising

a takedown notice and my reply

holistic findability vs seo vs director of search?

the demise of starbucks’ hear music program while thom whalley defends the role of a&r