Free Yourself From Your Inbox

I was inspired to link this entry from the NY Times due to taking the lead from Tim Ferris (author of Four Hour Workweek) to make an attempt to rely a lot less on email.

Email as a communication tool is broken. Whilst services like Xobni help make Outlook more userable and interactive it is inevitable that we are now communicating and retrieving more and more information with social networks, wikis, RSS feeds, and emerging technologies like Twitter and Haiku.

I think these tools will really help leverage the potential of cloud computing, empower the mobile worker and the future of the workplace, as physical location becomes more and more irrelevant

Shameless self promotion...

is what the blogosphere is all about right?! Tack!Tack!Tack! will be djing at this year's Lovebox Weekender festival on the Last.FM stage.

Surveillance Society

In the 21st Century, the more actions we do which are logged and digitized as data, the greater the potential for our behaviour to be tracked.

My belief is that it is fine for companies to do this to consumers if we are getting something equal or of value back in return. However, quite how you quantify a fair exchange is somewhat harder to muster. Increasingly it seems the way of Web 2.0 is to offer data in return for a service. At this rate we're going back to the bartering system.

Read the Home Affair's latest Surveillance report here

Shoutouts for Tesco and Phorm.

Subscription based music services

This is an interesting model. Currently two such based services areSrvice Records Co-Op and Marit Bergman's direct subscription service.

This is a great way to hook in micro tastemakers. I.e. long tail djs and bloggers who want to get their hands on the freshest content.

Whilst a shade unethical, there is potential for music bloggers to post exclusive subscription only tracks and generate enough money from advertising to cover the cost of the subscription.

The subscription based model in all likelihood will be hard to scale but is a good way of monetising attention from a small but fervent fanbase.

In other (sort of related) news, this weekend I was lucky enough to be shown a demonstration of Spotify Spotify is an on-demand streaming audio service and right now is just about the slickest thing out there. Cloud computing is the way ahead. Currently its only in beta mode and limited to just 1000 testers. It was first brought to my attention by Martin Thornkvist of Digital Renaissance and Nic Brisbourne of The Equity Kicker Props to Henrik from Physical Interaction Lab for the demo.

Feedburner to incorporate ads into RSS feeds

This was always going to happen. It's just a bit frustarting that the powers that be haven't waited to introduced this until RSS reaches a critical mass. Hitting the consumer with yet more advertising, is hardly going to entice non Generation Y users (basically anyone over 30)to adopt the technology.

Feedburner have just announced they will be inserting ads into feeds. In the main these will be incorporated through Adwords and AdSense. Kind of nifty no doubt, but as an RSS user it's gonna make the experience a bit more cumbersome as the process of keeping on top of feeds is time consuming enough as it is. (click)