For hip-hop, sampling and everything related:

• Questlove
• Kevin Nottingham
• Whosampled
• Grown Folks Music
• Wayne Marshall
• Hank Shocklee
• Jeff Chang

For technology:

• Deb Chachra
• Tara Busch
• Paul Lamere

For the highbrow and avant-garde:

• Marc Weidenbaum
• Nick Seaver

Just generally:

• DJ Rupture
• Sasha Frere-Jones
• Sarah Badr

Happy reading.

Original question on Quora

Teenagers like music for its own sake, but they’re also using it for a specific developmental goal: to define themselves and their tribal allegiances, and to learn about the tribal allegiances of others. This is why their hairsplitting arguments about the difference between two similar-sounding genres carry so much heat — it’s not about classifying the music, it’s about classifying themselves. The visuals add a lot of valuable social context to the music. You can see what the artists look like, their age and race and class, how they dress, how and if they dance, what instruments they show themselves using, what kind of physical settings they inhabit. If the videos are stylized and fantastic, there’s still plenty of information there; it’s just more emotional and symbolic.

The only people I know who watch music videos on TV are nostalgic old Gen Xers like me. Kids exclusively watch on the computer, or on their phones. They do it mostly in their bedrooms, but can really watch anywhere they happen to be if they have smartphones. The sharing and discussion of the videos is as important as the videos themselves, thus the appeal of YouTube and its easy integration with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter etc.

Original post on Quora

Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Bitter Sweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

How nice for Mark Zuckerberg that he doesn’t feel the need to keep any part of himself private. Zuckerberg doesn’t have an identity outside of his work, which is common enough in Silicon Valley startup culture but is neither possible nor desirable for most of us. When family members have illnesses, or friends are feeling down, or I’m thinking or feeling something that doesn’t reflect well on me in that moment, how is that any of my coworkers’ business? Zuckerberg understands human psychology very well within the context of college and startup culture, but Facebook is an increasingly poor fit for the complexities of my social life.

Steve Cheney writes:

Facebook is no longer a social network. They stopped being one long before the movie. Facebook is really a huge broadcast platform. Everything that happens between its walls is one degree away from being public, one massive auditorium filled with everyone you’ve ever met, most of whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

In her essay “Facebook and Radical Transparency,” danah boyd articulates the disconnect between Zuckerberg’s values and everyone else’s.

Silicon Valley is filled with people engaged in self-branding, making a name for themselves by being exhibitionists.

In internet startup culture, typically you’re extremely proud of the work that you do, and you commit to it completely, immersing yourself in it. By the same token, you work so hard that you don’t have time left over to have other aspects to your personality. If your whole identity is wrapped up in a product that you’re proud and eager to get the word out about, what could be the harm in total personal transparency?

The problem is that most of us don’t completely identify with our jobs. We have aspects of our lives that we aren’t eager to share with everyone we encounter.

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

This sounds exactly like the privacy policy for the social networking tool I’m dreaming up in my head. And I’d rather just charge users money up front so there’s no financial incentive to share data.

In his essay “Confusing *a* public with *the* public,” Jeff Jarvis takes Facebook to task for not understanding that there are many different degrees of “public” and “private.”

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

I disagree with Jeff Jarvis about Twitter.

In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone.

Twitter does entail publishing to everyone unless you set your tweets to private. Each tweet is a page on the open web, indexed by Google. It’s a short-form blogging tool. That’s what I like about it. I’m intending my statements there to be read by any stranger who cares to tune in. I love Twitter, I enjoy it and derive tremendous practical benefit from it. But I also want something private, something for home truths and expressions of heartbreak and anxiety and frank discussion of medical issues. Twitter certainly isn’t that. Facebook could be tediously configured into that using lists, but even if it’s technically possible to use it that way, it feels wrong. It retains flavor of the dorm room, and that’s not a setting that I feel comfortable using for serious emotional issues.

I want to build something better, maybe on top of Diaspora. Who wants to join me?

The images in this post are visualizations of my Facebook friends by Ivan Kozik’s Nexus app.

Kirkpatrick had one significant advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:

I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.

Facebook as revolutionary tool

Kirkpatrick sees Facebook the way Clay Shirky and other tech utopians see Twitter: as a tool for overthrowing dictators. FB was conceived as a way to organize meeting your friends at the mall, but Kirkpatrick observes that it can be used to organize them to do more ambitious things too. Events in Egypt would seem to bear him out. However, Kirkpatrick later mentioned that FB is every bit as useful to law enforcement and other government entities. Detectives go to FB as their first investigative stop, and Mubarak’s secret police used FB to monitor dissidents and spread misinformation for years before the protest movement took off. So it’s a little simplistic to see FB purely as a way to stick it to the man.

Kirkpatrick sees FB first and foremost as a broadcast medium. A normal person doesn’t have, or want, the kind of genuinely public profile that suits Twitter or blogs. Most people are only writing online for an audience of people they know personally. FB is the first broadcast medium that automatically distributes content across your social network — you just post stuff and an algorithm handles the rest. FB’s algorithm has become opaque lately and it’s hard to figure out why a given item appears or doesn’t in my newsfeed, but the essential point remains valid.

Facebook games

FB is the biggest game platform in the world, by an enormous margin. Zuck and company were apparently quite surprised by the success of games in FB. It didn’t surprise their investors, though. I went to a talk by Reid Hoffman a few years ago and asked him if FB would ever charge money. No way, he said; the big money is going to come from in-game purchasing of virtual goods. While it seems insane to me that anyone would buy a nonexistent cow in Farmville, buy them they do. Facebook’s cut of Zynga’s revenues currently comes to about a million dollars a day, and there’s no reason that number can’t grow dramatically.

Facebook ads

Zuck doesn’t much like advertising. According to Kirkpatrick, the movie does get that aspect right; Zuck resisted introducing ads into FB early on, and even now, the ads are much less obtrusive than you might expect for a commercial web entity. FB is the most targetable advertising platform of all time. Zuck apparently hopes to have FB ads be so well-targeted that they’ll actually be a welcome presence in your life. That’s sweet.

I don’t know that FB ads will ever be useful, but I do expect their targeting to continue to get more precise. Google’s inferential targeting methods are comparatively blunt; they don’t even get your gender right a quarter of the time. FB knows your gender, age, relationship status, profession and more, and they know all that information about your friends too. This enables the kind of laserbeam demographic specificity that marketers have long yearned for.

What is Mark Zuckerburg trying to accomplish?

Kirkpatrick understandably wasn’t too impressed with The Social Network. He thought the “Mark Zuckerburg” character in the movie was a more accurate portrayal of Bill Gates. If anything, Kirkpatrick thinks Zuck is even more focused and ambitious than Gates, and while Zuck isn’t as profound a technical thinker, he does understand psychology a lot better. (I was unsurprised to learn that Zuck’s mom is a shrink.)

Zuck wanted to change the lives of college students, and there’s no doubt he’s accomplished that. Zuck now wants to change everyone’s life. Kirkpatrick doesn’t say why, or to what end. He means to be admiring, but he ends up making Zuck sound like a Bond villain. I think Zuck has done a great job making it easier to keep touch with your acquaintances and other weak ties. But FB isn’t the medium I’d use for any serious connection with people close to me. Pushing FB’s users to make their posts more public and more accessible to advertisers doesn’t exactly foster genuine emotional expression. FB is a staggeringly effective way for me to share witty banter and mass announcements, but I wouldn’t want to carry on any serious intimacy there.

I have no doubt that Zuck will get his wish to see FB become ubiquitous. The US has the most FB users because it has the most internet users overall. But there are other countries where FB users represent a much higher percentage of internet users. These are the countries where the internet is first and foremost a cell phone experience rather than a computer experience, and FB is one of the big drivers of smartphone sales. In Asia, you can get an FB-branded phone, and there’s been discussion of introducing something similar in the US.

Whatever is motivating Zuck, it isn’t (primarily) money. He’s certainly had ample opportunity to cash out. Three years ago Microsoft offered Zuck fifteen billion dollars for FB. Now, of course, Zuck will end up being worth a lot more than that, so maybe he is motivated by money after all, but still, imagine turning down that kind of cash before you’re twenty-five.

In the village, there is no privacy

Kirkpatrick cites the startling fact that as of a year or two ago, a majority of humans are living in cities for the first time in history. He sees FB as a way to return to village life. My early months with FB were a surreal and thrilling reunion with people I knew from every age and stage of my life, many of whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. It’s nice to have mobility and freedom to come and go, but it means that my friends and family are scattered around the world irretrievably, and that can be hard on the emotions. FB brings us back together like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

So that’s the good. The not-so-good is Zuck’s outspoken commitment to forcing transparency on our internet interactions. Since secrets are increasingly difficult to keep in the internet age, Zuck no longer sees a point in trying. This is the exact point where I depart from him. Zuck has the chain of causation backwards — FB is one of the major factors making it harder to keep secrets on the web, but I don’t see where that gives Zuck permission to unilaterally change people’s privacy settings to make it harder still.

Of course, no one has to join FB. But surely there must be some happy medium between having everything I type into the internet be public and not typing anything at all. I can reasonably expect my bank account to be private, and my e-mail. Is that naive? Maybe I’d like a forum to be able to talk about what’s going on in my life in a way that people close to me can access easily and that others can’t. I thought FB would be that forum, but I was wrong.

Strategic self-commodification

Jacqueline Maley, writing in The Age, observes:

[N]othing that occurs in people’s lives, as represented in social media, is disappointing or mediocre or even just neutral. Indeed, life, as reported on websites like Facebook and Twitter, is never merely good or mildly pleasing. It’s fabulous. It’s wonderful. It’s amaaaaazing.

The more people I get connected to and the more public my posts are, the less substantive my activity on FB becomes. At this point I mostly only use it for innocuous jokes and trivia. I can’t imagine using FB to write anything vulnerable, or self-doubting, or angry, or really anything too personal. That severely limits the usefulness of the site for me. All my interactions on the site are starting to feel like advertising, of myself, my associations, my ideas. I don’t like that feeling. It’s not that I have any problem at all promoting myself online. I’m perfectly happy to practice strategic self-commodification on LinkedIn and Twitter and even on this blog. But being surrounded by my fellow villagers, slick self-promotion feels weird. It certainly is annoying when my friends use FB to market at me, and I’ve had to unfriend a few of the pushiest ones.

Resistance is futile

Whatever my misgivings are about my privacy, I still use FB every day. It’s an effortless way to share links and news, and much as I love Flickr, if I want a photo to get seen by people I know, I’ll put it on FB. (They get fifty million photo uploads a day right now.) I like seeing what my friends are doing and thinking, and I enjoy bantering with them. And for my loose ties and casual acquaintances, it’s easier for me to write FB messages than to try to keep track of email addresses, much less snail mail.

I know several novice internet users for whom FB is their entire online experience. FB likes that idea and they plan to run with it. Right now FB search is pretty lame, but Kirkpatrick expects them to dominate search someday. They’re planning some sort of tremendous e-mail service that would gather every interaction you’ve ever had with someone into one big thread. (Yes, but will it have BCC? That’s all I’d ask.) FB evolves constantly and fast, and so its growth is unpredictable. All I can say with certainty is that the growth isn’t going to slow anytime soon.

Back in the nineties there was a thing called groupware. Kirkpatrick astutely observes that groupware was the business precursor to FB, and that it had tremendous potential to change the nature of business. In studies, Lotus Notes and the like were shown to meaningfully improve productivity. But groupware never really took off on a grand scale. Kirkpatrick thinks it’s because middle management felt threatened by the hierarchy-flattening properties of social tools. Now social media has arrived in the enterprise, whether middle management wants it there or not. Plenty of big companies block FB on their intranets, but that doesn’t keep people from using it on their phones. Smarter organizations are trying to bring an FB-like functionality into their workflow by rolling out tools like Chatter and Yammer.

FB isn’t likely to dominate enterprise settings, but I do expect it to become omnipresent elsewhere on the web. For all my skepticism about FB and privacy, I’m relieved when I arrive at a site and discover I can log in using my FB profile, rather than having to create yet another login/password pair. I’m even happier when I can use my Twitter handle for that purpose.

Kirkpatrick doubts that any company poses much of a threat to FB. Google might dominate search right now, but social search is going to be more important in the coming years than algorithmic search, and Google hasn’t shown much adeptness at getting people to tell them about their social connections. While the Goog might be jealous of FB’s ubiquity and possible future search dominance, the two companies need each other. FB is going to sell a lot of Android phones in the next few years. Kirkpatrick describes a lot of “3D chess” going on between Google and FB, and Microsoft and Apple too. But he doesn’t see anyone seriously rivaling FB in the social world. A bigger challenge will come from governments, who may decide that they want control over their citizens’ online identities, and that it’s time to crack down. Until then, I, for one, welcome our new social network overlords.

The panel:

• Moderator: Jeff Leeds, Editor in Chief, Music, Buzzmedia
• Angel Laws, Founder and Editor in Chief, ConcreteLoop.com
• Jessica Suarez, Writer, Stereogum
• Tamar Anitai, Senior Editor, buzzworthy.mtv.com
• Rob Bonstein, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Epic Records
• Sarah Weiss, Head of Markting, Bowery Presents

The panel is taking place in the Buzz Media office, a grungy downtown space. The walls are hung with art made from stuff found on the ground. Being here makes me feel like an old, old man. It doesn’t help that I have a job interview later today, so I’m wearing my most conservative suit. Meanwhile, Rob Bonstein may be a Senior Director, but he looks like he’s about twelve.

Nevertheless, here I am. The setup in here is distinctly less slick than yesterday’s presentation at JWT, which is a colossal, gleaming midtown ad firm. This is a grungier downtown space with a flaky PA and flakier internet.

As far as this panel is concerned, social media is coextensive with Twitter. The word “Facebook” isn’t uttered once in the first hour. When someone finally does mention it, it’s in the context of driving traffic to Twitter. The panel considers Facebook to be like MySpace for adults, except without the music-playing functionality.

Transparency vs mystique

Should bands have separate personal and professional Twitter presences? The panel can’t agree. On the one hand, transparency is the fundamental social media value. Who doesn’t love behind-the-curtain access to their music heroes? Mystique seems like an outdated concept in the social media age. On the other hand, when rock stars reveal the mundane reality of their lives, they run the risk of puncturing the whole fantasy we’re trying to project onto them. There’s a reason you don’t see Lady Gaga posting Twitpics of her wearing sweatpants.

The panel is unanimous that a musician’s public persona needs to be “on brand.” Otherwise you get too much cognitive dissonance, like M.I.A. and her infamous truffle fries. It makes sense to expect musicians to have a consistent persona, but it asks a lot to ask someone to equate their personhood with their brand. The idea frankly creeps me out. Kanye West succeeds at admirably at inhabiting his persona at all times, but he’s either a hyperdisciplined virtuoso performance artist or a complete lunatic, or both.

Meanwhile, sometimes artists do their most meaningful work when they go “off-brand.” Miles Davis was way outside the bebop identity he helped invent when he put on his sequined lace-up bellbottoms and made Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way, but that was the peak of his commercial (and arguably cultural) impact.

Regardless of whether musicians are supposed to be playing characters or just being themselves, social media best practices are the same as they are for any person or band. Self-promotion is follower repellent. Show the fans love! When they write to you, write them back. Wish them good luck on their math test or whatever. The panel cites Ciara as a good example of the personal and interactive approach. More surprisingly, the panel also mentions Ice-T, who loves to publicly argue with his critics. Just retweeting praise is as boring as any other kind of promotion; Ice-T’s stream is interesting because he’s real and unpredictable.

Planet Kanye

Angel Laws says that when she met Kanye, he told her, “I don’t need Twitter, I’m Kanye West!” That was then.

Kanye’s Twitter is a must-follow. One look at the grammar and spelling and you know that his feed isn’t written by a publicist. It’s constantly “on-brand,” but that brand is so eccentric and self-mocking and over the top that it couldn’t possibly be calculated. Maybe the specifics of Kanye’s life aren’t very relatable to the average hip-hop fan, like his difficulty in selecting the right marble table for his conference room. But Kanye’s Twitter voice is so idiosyncratic and heartfelt that I find it totally endearing.

The bottom line

Twitter is very amusing, but does it actually drive album and ticket sales? It certainly helps get you press attention, and attention generally. The journalists on the panel say if you want to get on their radar, at-replies work better than press releases. As for sales? No one really knows why people buy one album and not another, much less this panel. No one knows specifically whether a given social media effort will make anyone do anything. But attention can’t hurt, and a close connection to the fans can only help.

Guilty pleasures

This doesn’t have anything to do with social media per se, but it’s worth mentioning. Tamar Anitai from MTV kept invoking the concept of the “guilty pleasure.” This is funny to me. America is so puritan, even the hipsters of the pop music world. I love the idea that if I enjoy Justin Bieber, I’m being immoral, like I’m harming someone. Tamar Anitai breaks up the band gossip on her Twitter by talking about TV shows, and she “confesses” to “hating herself” for watching Dancing With The Stars and such. So I’m supposed to believe that that MTV’s marketing team and their Twitter followers are so highbrow and cultured normally, and that they’re being deliciously transgressive when they reveal the dirty secret that they watch crappy reality TV? Didn’t MTV give us Jersey Shore? So many contradictions.

Odds and ends

Facebook isn’t the only big social platform to be conspicuously absent from the presentation YouTube also doesn’t get mentioned until near the very end. It seems surprising, since YouTube is by far the biggest music search engine and discovery tool on the web. I guess no one’s talking about it because it isn’t much of a revenue stream for the music industry. Though how could the labels and music press not be capitalizing on it somehow? I don’t understand the music business. But apparently, neither does the music business.

Erykah Badu live-tweeted giving birth! No real comment there, just, wow.

At this point, artist web sites only exist to direct Google searchers to the appropriate social media profile or item for sale.

The panel doesn’t see much value in requiring people to enter email addresses to hear tracks or do other kinds of interaction. All kids have multiple email addresses now, one that they actually use and the rest to put into web sites to collect marketing messages and spam. Organic social media interactions, word of mouth and TV are the only way to actually get a kid’s attention.

The panel sees a bright future in the use of Foursquare check-ins as a celebrity marketing tool. Ugh.

Social media is all well and good, but no one is buying albums. If you want to make money from recordings, your best hope is to get something placed in a TV ad.

On a brighter note, the panel loves Soundcloud. So do I. No better music-sharing service exists on the web. The panel especially loves the within-song commenting. Show Soundcloud lots of love, internet, we want them to succeed.

After Techcrunch published the slide, the web lit up with the rumor that Delicious would be shut down. It took Yahoo a full twenty-four hours to respond, an eternity in internet time, and when their official statement did finally come, it didn’t exactly put anyone’s mind at ease. They’re keeping Delicious live for the time being, but they plan to… do what? Sell it? The language is vague.

I’ve loved Delicious since I started using it — here’s my full-length rhapsody on why it’s so valuable to me. Watching Yahoo neglect it has been painful, since there’s a lot of untapped potential. For example, two months before Twitter launched, Delicious rolled its Network feature, which lets you subscribe to other users’ bookmarks. It’s basically a more tightly curated and better annotated version of Twitter. I started going back through my bookmarks to see who else was saving them and following everyone who was coming up with interesting tags and notes. The result is my list of a hundred or so Delicious users who consistently post interesting, useful and entertaining links. I look at my Delicious network feed first thing in the morning, before any news site, or Twitter or anything, because its signal to noise ratio is superb. Yahoo had an opportunity to create a robust social network around the Network feature, and they blew it.

If you’ve invested a lot of effort in curating your Delicious bookmarks, at least you don’t have to worry about losing them. It’s easy to download a backup of them and there are plenty of other services you can upload them to. But having Delicious shut down or just atrophy would be a huge loss because of the accumulated mass of everyone else’s curated bookmarks. Yahoo lets you grab your own data but not everyone else’s, and everyone else’s data is what gives Delicious its value. ReadWriteWeb compares Yahoo’s data policy to “setting a museum on fire.”

Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there’s a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users – I haven’t been able to find it yet.Yahoo blocks all automated extraction of data from Delicious. The company apparently is going to let this unique cross between a museum, a library and a crazy old collector’s attic burn to the ground. I’d like to take a few things with me before that happens, please. One community of non-profit technologists has been bookmarking links with the tag “NPTech” for years – they have 24,028 links categorized as relevant for organizations seeking to change the world and peoples’ lives using technology. Wouldn’t it be good to have that body of data, metadata and curated resources available elsewhere once Delicious is gone?

What someone probably ought to do, as Karl Long said to me on Twitter today, is scrape all the public bookmarks and data and put it on Bittorrent. That would be against the rules, though.

Please, please Yahoo! let us save some of what you’ve got, before it goes to waste.

I’ve heard the argument that we’ve been using Delicious for free all these years, so why should we feel entitled to anything? I for one would have appreciated the opportunity to pay for it. I quite happily pay for Flickr, I pay for web hosting, I’d pay for Twitter too. Yahoo never even attempted to monetize Delicious, aside from a little advertising on the popular bookmarks page, which I don’t think I’ve ever used. Yahoo’s focus on the popular bookmarks page misses the point. I don’t care what everyone has been bookmarking. I care what specific smart people who I trust are bookmarking. Mass trends are occasionally interesting, but only occasionally.

With the future of Delicious still in doubt, I followed the example of a bunch of geeks I trust and joined Pinboard. I’m using it to mirror my Delicious bookmarks, and if worse comes to worse, I’ll just move over there completely. There’s much to like about Pinboard. It’s not free, which inspires confidence in me that it won’t just vanish. I like its zany pricing scheme, where they charge a tenth of a cent times the current number of users. (I paid $7.65.) I can also set Pinboard to archive all my tweets if I want, though I haven’t taken them up on this because my tweets aren’t that interesting to me. If I have a profound thought I’ll put it on this blog.

So far, Pinboard seems fine and dandy for my own bookmarks, but it’s missing the social component. Delicious has over five million users, Pinboard (as of this writing) has nine thousand. Those nine thousand are mostly power users, but even so, that’s not the glorious emergent hive-mind that Delicious offers. If my entire network were to migrate over en masse, I guess it wouldn’t be such a big loss, but so far I don’t see that happening.

So what’s to become of my favorite thing on the social web? Former Delicious engineer Stephen Hood runs through the most plausible options on his blog:

Selling Delicious to a third-party

is not a straightforward proposition. As mentioned above, most of the team is now gone. Last week’s leak (and the subsequent fallout) also did unfortunate damage to the Delicious brand, sending panicked users to competing products.

But ultimately the real challenge here will be the technology. During my time at Delicious we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace.  Yahoo may have to license some of this technology to the buyer. I’m not sure they’ve done that before.

Open sourcing Delicious

This is a seductive concept but doesn’t make much sense.  As in the case of a sale, they would need to unwind a bunch of proprietary technologies before this could happen.  And open sourcing a complex product isn’t as simple as switching your GitHub repository from private to public.  It involves a lot of work to clean up and document the source.  For Delicious this would add up to a huge effort that would be hard to justify purely on a financial basis. Even then, it’s not clear how an open source social bookmarking system would work, given that much of its value comes from being centralized.

Donating Delicious to the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian

Now we’re getting closer.  While it is folly to assume either of these institutions could take over Delicious and keep it running as a viable service, it does seem like they would be interested in preserving the Delicious corpus and making it available for research.

I love Delicious for many reasons, but chief among them is that it is the Internet’s memory storage device.  In the 7+ years of its existence it has recorded the collective online journeys of millions of users during a time when the Web was evolving dramatically.  Those memories are irreplaceable and have enormous value both to their owners (the users) and to society.

For now, I continue to post to Delicious, mirror in Pinboard, watch and wait. Whoever winds up owning Delicious, I hope they value it properly and show it some love.