Archive for May, 2007

Will there be a Tag 2.0?

Published by
KwangErn Liew
at May 17, 2007 in General. 1 

It is no doubt that tagging is central to most of our Web 2.0 experience. It’s there to supposedly make our lives easier and organised on the Internet. But really, does it? Tag 1.0 started way back in 2004 when Adam Kalsey did his exploration in tagging. It’s useful, (relatively) fun, provides an additional eye candy (tag clouds) on websites. Better yet, it is a personalised organisation of content, from blogs to ANY socially-oriented sites! It is without problems.

Will there be an improved Tag 1.0? Perhaps Tag 2.0? The improvements I would expect are…

Personalised flexibility for organising categories and tags. Going through the discussions on categories vs tags from the Wordpress community is refreshing to see usage disparities. Flexibility is needed. In short, since categories can be tags, so can tags be categories. Down to basics, they are just identifiable keywords or descriptors with a purpose. To create extraordinary flexibility for the user, it’s a matter of UI, content permissions and type. The million-dollar question is, how? ;)

Cross-reference and clustering tags that are alike with a twist. Back in 2004, Matthew Gray looked at tag clustering when he found del.icio.us. And so it was that del.icio.us started bundle tags in mid-2005! Flickr followed similarly in providing suggestive tags. LibraryThing is also focusing on the tag system. The feature I like the most is their advance tag searching. How else can you search through all the tags that you’ve assigned to data? Another cool implementation I see is on Michael Daum’s BlogUp for TWiki. Amazing! Expect to see more of these. It’s only natural.

Automated tags on content. ZoomClouds and tagthe.net are out there for blogs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a seamless integration with ANY blogging application. Maybe AutoMeta can be tweaked for WordPress? For image tagging, research has been done. Automatic video and music tagging seems to be coming around soon too! But nothing has come to light yet, mainly perhaps because of the nature of tagging, i.e. private-based. A potential solution is Flickr’s tag clusters implementation because it’s suggestive rather than intrusive, and can benefit from such technology.

Above all, I hope there will be a defined standard before tagging becomes a huge mess for users on different systems.

Maybe we are just over-rating tags. Maybe we just haven’t found an efficient and effective way to explicate tags, in terms of usage and UI, on the Internet. Maybe TagCloud will be the 2.0. ;)

Update: Maybe Veotag’s funding on deep tagging will boost the tagging system?

IFPI 2007 Music Report

Published by
silent
at May 11, 2007 in Media. 1 

In one of those days off, I decided to pick up IFPI’s 2007 Digital Music Report. As a quick glowing summary:

  • The pace of transformation of the digital music industry is breathtaking;
  • Digital music business continues to grow;
  • This is a $2 billion industry;
  • Almost 500 legitimate online music services across the globe.

Globally, IFPI estimates there were almost 800 million single tracks download in 2006 from over 498 online music services in over 40 countries. This represents a growth of 89% since 2005. This pales in comparison with an estimated 20 billion pirated tracks downloaded in the same period.

On closer inspection, the lion share of the market is held within the U.S., U.K. and Germany with 83% of the single tracks downloaded in 2006. There are also currently 320 online music services in Europe ALONE, holding almost 65% of the global represented online music services.

Japan viewed by many as a success case study of mobile music with over 95% downloaded digital music via mobile… I can only guess the revenue impact is minimal.

In the same report, Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group was quoted with “In this internet age, the consumer is using music content more than ever before – whether that’s play listing, podcasting, personalizing, sharing, downloading, or just simply enjoying it.” This was followed with a comment that acknowledges that “Consumers are changing the way they discover, access, and listen to music.”

With digital music experience strongly centered in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, are the characteristics of music fans across the globe similar? e.g. Brazil versus China versus India? Because business models shown so far across the globe seems similar especially how online music services are presented!

The same way how Japan, Korea and China rate ringback tones…is it experiencing the similar high adoption rate in Europe and the US?

The Dragon Is Still Asleep

Published by
silent
at May 8, 2007 in Media. 0 

August 2003 marks the start of the recording industry’s unprecedented litigation campaign against its own customers, i.e. against music fans for using P2P file-sharing software to swap music over the Internet.The goal of these lawsuits “is an important part of the larger strategy to educate file-sharers about the law” In the words of the RIAA, the lawsuits are intended to also “encourage music fans to turn to legitimate services”.

By April 2006, RIAA’s initiative was aimed on university computer networks or aiming towards a whole new generation of music fans. Once upon a time, college students used to be the music industry’s best customers. Sounds like a great marketing ploy, suing your best customer.

I remember when CD-RW drives first appeared, the RIAA was lobbying for vendors of CD-RW drives to conduct background checks and require a 3 day waiting period before the drive can be sold. The RIAA President Hilary Rosen liken CD-RW to be “a dangerous weapon when it falls into the wrong hands” and goes on saying that “You wouldn’t sell a gun to a convicted felon”. I never knew the severity of my music listening habits could draw comparison to shooting a gun!

What’s next?

RIAA at iPod

So what about authorized music services like Apple’s iTunes Music Store? iTunes announced in January 2007 that more than 2 billion songs, 50 million television episodes and over 1.3 million feature-length films have been purchased and downloaded from iTunes. This sounds very impressive until it is held up against 5 billion files that move across the Kazaa networks (ONLY) every month back in 2004. Not to mention, the lawsuits meant to educate us file sharers has only led to a growing audience… where traffic on peer-to-peer networks has nearly doubled since 2002.

P2P traffic

When will RIAA ever embrace Internet?

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