Over the last weekend I blogged about the problems I had with Telstra and harassment by their sales staff.

This evening I had a call from someone in Telstra who asked me if he could discuss the Perceptric blog with him. I asked him if he had come across it as a result of the complaint phone call that I had made last week, or as a result of a key word trawl to pick up negative comments about Telstra. He told me that his job was to monitor social networks in Australia, particularly Second Life, Twitter and blogs.

Very quickly he cut to the chase. He told me that he would be happy to arrange to have my phone number deleted from the call out database and would be happy to pass on upstairs any complaint letter that I would like to forward through him.

How amazing is this...?

You can telephone a Telco and get nowhere. And you can blog your problem and get reaction on the first work day after the weekend that the blog was posted.

A big thumbs up for one part of Telstra, anyway. Customer service is alive and well.

But only if you are online and actively blogging, day after day, putting memes into the marketplace.

Telstra - I applaud you for paying attention. Is this the lead that other companies are going to have to follow in order to survive the slings and arrows of the horde, the one that reads blogs and virally transmits the memes that it finds?

By the way, my deduction is that there are rogue elements within Telstra that are the problem. They want to get Telstra fined for calling out to blacklisted numbers. Lets see if I get any more sales calls....

There is an neat app on Facebook that enables you to send video mail to other people. Very simple to use.

I would love to see this kind of an app for a regular blog.

Ideally something that enables me with no more than a couple of clicks, to be able to initiate recording a video on my laptop, have it upload to YouTube (or someother hosting site). Then I could immediately take the embed code from YT and insert the vlog here.

And ideally, a simple one frame branding ad at the end of the video - "brought to you by Toyota Prius" so that the advertising is actually telling you more about the person and therefore is accretive to the whole communication that takes place....

I am totally into Facebook.

I think that it has the potential to change things as much as Google has done. And after all, we are now really the Google generation, aren't we? A generation that is outside of age based demography and is more about memetics. A group of people who are always on....

But Facebook is beyond this again. And if you haven't tried it, you really should. There are definitely some annoying features - like the constant barrage of new apps. And that wears thin very fast.

But some of the applications are super cool. And really add value. One of them is the Facebook bookmarklet which you can add to your Firefox browser and kind of makes blogging redundant in some respects. It enables you with one click to add a reference to a web page/story to your facebook profile, which in turn means that all your friends get to see it, and that leads them to comment.... Much more viral than a blog which requires someone to actually come and visit you and your writing.

Then there is the Blog Friends application, and the more I see of it in action, the more I like it. I think it is still relatively small in terms of its distribution across the Face at present, but this application really has some serious potential. It presents a really fast access to your friends' blogs and their friends' blogs and means that you get a kind of randomized RSS feed of content, opinion and information that is really valuable...

I have been in touch with the CEO of Brain Bakery, the UK company that developed Blog Friends, and he seems like a really smart and visionary guy. I hope he and the company do well from Blog Friends. This sort of application, if applied to conventional news feeds, could be totally awesome.

Worth joining Facebook just to experience this stuff. Facebook and applications like the ones I have mentioned are going to absolutely change the face of media over the next few years.

We are at the beginning of the golden age of accelerated meme transfer.

I am at the Future Exploration Network conference today, which is taking place in Sydney and San Francisco simultaneously.

Check out the blog here. Some very interesting discussion about social media and business models during the morning session.

If the Australian election were to be decided on how many friends you have on MySpace, here is how the results would be…..

(This is based on statistics taken from the politicians listed on a site inside MySpace called Impact and then linking to the respective MySpace page and checking the number of friends)

So big drum roll please… and the votes are as follows:

Howard Government – 8 Friends
Kevin Rudd – 4131 Friends
Bob Brown – 181 Friends
Andrew Bartlett – 261 Friends
Steve Fielding – 5 Friends
Peter Garrett – 933 Friends  
Joe Hockey – 275 Friends
Kerry Nettle – 83 Friends
Tanya Plibersek – 101 Friends
Malcolm Turnbull – 123 Friends
Warren Snowdon – 26 Friends
Dennis Jensen – 6 Friends
Julia Gillard – 778 Friends
Wayne Swan – 180 Friends
Stephen Conroy – 112 Friends
Maxine McKew – 133 Friends
Nicola Roxon – 66 Friends
Greg Combet – 342 Friends
Steve Ciobo – 71 Friends
Sam Crosby – 10 Friends

Very trivial perhaps in the great shape of things. But its clear that in terms of MySpace friendship it is a landslide in favour of Labour!

What is also interesting is that some of the Liberals in the list don’t even say what their party is – like Steve Ciobo. You have to figure he must be Lib because his #1 friend is Joe Hockey.

A little dated but still worth knowing, I found this article about a chap - "Matt Cutts works for Google and has a blog about how to court their search engine; so, when Matt flaps his blog wings in America there is a tsunami on the far side of the Internet."

Which alleges that - According to China Internet Network Information Center, CNNIC, Google is losing market share from 33% last year to current 25.3%.

It goes on to support this at the following link @ Linux World .

Last year, on FirstMonday, I wrote:

"Many bands and artists take advantage of the net by using it to advertise their performances, at which they sell their CDs. This can be very effective and the major record companies are becoming less relevant to artists. However, despite the apparent success of aggregators like iTunes, few independent artists appear to be profiting from commercial downloads and a business model based solely on pay-for-downloads is very difficult to implement successfully."

Lately, similar notions have been been discussed by bloggers, including Chris Anderson of the Long Tail, in his Give away the music and sell the show post. There is also recognition of the need for sustainable business models for online music in the blogsphere. Much of this discussion is focused on economic matters and from the perspective of the music consumer. This is, of course, legitimate, but implications for musicians and music producers and aesthetic considerations are rarely discussed. This is a significant omission. Music is an art form.

The notion that the best way for musicians to use the net is to use their online presence to promote their performances is at odds with the general trend towards digitisation and virtualisation. It is also not good for many musicians and music producers. While some musicians are great performers and while acknowledging the powerful impact of well executed theatrical and improvisational performances, it should also be understood that the excessive dependence on performance and its analogues represents a failure of the online music market and the aesthetic impoverishment of music generally.

Let me illustrate this with some personal history. In 1980, when my New Wave band Smig Zee broke up, I purchased a TASCAM Portastudio, a Korg MS 20 Synthesiser and embarked on an amateur career as a home recording artist. I was not a natural performer and was glad to be able to simultaneously produce music and and pursue a career in the Public Service, as well as an interest in writing. I haven't performed since 1980 and if I had continued performing and pursued a professional career in music I would probably be as deaf as Pete Townsend and would certainly not have accumulated a nice superannuation fund. I deliberately mention superannuation to prick the romantic bubble that surrounds the meme of rock and roll performance and to note that few professional musicians, even successful ones, are adequately provisioned for old age and retirement.

Gigging can be very hard on musicians, even those that who are good at it and enjoy it. To musicians like myself, who are primarily interested in composition and production, there is nothing more boring and aesthetically arid that having to play the same songs over and over again. There are also opportunity costs, time spent performing reduces time spent composing and producing music.

As a home recording artist I was fortunate enough to participate in the electronic music boom of the 1990s and had techno music released by Volition Records and other labels as Alien Headspace and ambient music released by Silent Recordings as the Trancendental Anarchists. I am still producing music under these names and also electro-pop, by FutureRetro and publishing this on the net via Qualia Recordings, a virtual record company formed with my musical collaborators, Ross Goddard and Mark Van Veen. To end this excursion into personal history, I note that this approach is not at all unusual. There are millions of amateur musicians who are producing music in home recording studios and releasing it on the net and who do not perform.

Another salient point is that there are genres of music that are entirely unsuitable for performance. If you've ever seen a techno band attempt to simulate performance of their programmed productions, you know what I mean. DJs largely replaced performers of techno and dance music at dance parties and raves. Ambient music is so internal and anti-dramatic, that ambient music producers hardly ever attempt to perform it.

Despite the magnitude and significance of these trends towards the democratisation and virtualisation of music production, the music performance meme persists. Perhaps the most absurd recent manifestation of this is the simulated performance of a number of bands in Second Life. A more common manifestation is the simulation of performance in music videos. This is often extremely ritualised. Singers lip-sync in front of guitarists playing unplugged instruments, while the drummer hits a lone snare drum. This represents a singular lack of imagination and a depressing aesthetic failure. Music videos which attempt to augment the music with narrative or abstract visuals, do exist, but are vastly outnumbered by those that pay obeisance to the empty ritual of simulated performance. A brilliant example of a lateral music video which abandons the ritual of simulated performance is the Free Hugs video by the Sick Puppies. This was wildly successful and won a YouTube award.

There are also multitudes of bands and musicians who, while composing and producing their music in studios, feel they have to perform to promote it and produce income. In many cases, this is essentially the live simulation of performance, where the musicians attempt to replicate the studio production and arrangement of their music in a live performance. They give themselves little or no latitude to depart from the recorded version in the performance which is consequently devoid of the immediacy and improvisation which characterises real performance.

So what is going on here? Is this monumental failure of imagination, simply a cheap and nasty way of using visual media and live performance to a advertise digital music or is something more profound involved? There does appear to be a popular prejudice against programmed and studio production in favour of live performance. This involves the notion that anyone can produce music in a studio, but only "real musicians" can pull off live performance. The illegitimacy of this prejudice is exposed if one attempts to apply it to cinema, the canonical virtual art form. I doubt that anyone would seriously suggest that the best way to promote movies is with theatrical performances. Nor is the notion, that theatrical actors, directors and producers are necessarily superior to their cinematic equivalents, seriously supported. The movie and TV industries eclipsed theatre long ago.

This anomaly has puzzled me for some time. A possible explanation comes from cognitive anthropologist, Steven Mithen, in his recent book, The Singing Neanderthals. This excellent text examines the evolutionary origins of music and posits the theory that one of the major evolutionary functions of music is the promotion of social cohesion in groups of hominids and humans. This makes a great deal of sense when one considers the history of music making. Tribal societies clearly use musical performance, dance and ritual to cement and enhance social cohesion. More recently, before the development of recording technologies, the gathering of family and friends around the piano for singalongs can also be seen as promoting social cohesion. The emergence of concerts represents a move from group music making to the group achieving cohesion, through the passive reception of music performed by professional musicians.  Significantly, the same effect is achieved in raves and dance parties without the live performance of music. It seems that the most important factor is that the group is listening to the same music, preferably at the same time.

If this theory is accepted then the social fragmentation inherent in the virtualisation of music can explain the atavistic yearning for the simulation of performance. It may also explain the apparent success of social networking approaches to online music represented by such sites as MySpace and LastFM.

As the emergent online music industry churns through business models it seems that a number of factors are involved in determining what may be viable and sustainable. I intend to write about other factors such as the adequate compensation of artists and the pernicious and outmoded nature of the Star Syndrome in subsequent parts of this series. Meanwhile I hope I have elevated aesthetic considerations related to the tension between the virtualisation of music and the traditional role of performance, in the minds of those interested in development of a market for audio/visual content of quality. There is the potential for the transcendent combination of music and visuals, which currently appears to be limited by an unthinking and aesthetically arid obeisance to the ritual of performance.

Very interesting thought on Fred Wilson's blog.... about 'networks of networks'. I have thought about this quite a bit recently. But Fred sums it up nicely with an interesting example:

But a funny thing happened. I had about 450 members yesterday morning. I now have 510 members. I haven't added 60 members in a single day since the day I put the reader roll on my blog.

One of two things is happening. My post on MyBlogLog yesterday got more people to sign up (certainly a part of it) or the people joining at Techcrunch and elsewhere in the past day are also joining my community.

If the latter is a significant part of why this happened, then it points to the fact that networks of networks are a powerful community building tool.

This is a significant thought.... perhaps it is a meme in and of itself?

According to a posting on the Alexa home page that tracks back to here, which is the Alexa Blog, Google is losing ground to MSN in page views....


What is more interesting though, is that later in the article the analysis is that ALL major portals are losing out to the little guys. Having come from the Network Insight conference today where someone in the audience for one of the sessions I attended was saying that blogs were irrelevant - this is really interesting news.

Here is what the article says about the little guys:

Over the last year here at Perceptric, we've spent huge amounts of time and energy thinking  about 'what's next?' So many great things to do, so little real time. But the pace of our thinking, planning and development quickened in the last four months. Now, a company that we have been incubating makes its first public appearance this weekend.

Welcome Perceptric Media! And, as even more trumpets sound, and applause, (certainly around our offices) just grows and grows, welcome One Minute World! Yes, not one, but two great new entities and ideas.

Perceptric Media is a group of really, really, talented people that we have assembled who all have great backgrounds, long experience and big futures. What they get is that today's social, business and media environment is more open, more fluid, more interesting, than any ever before.

No one knows what's going to work as we go forward. But the incredible thing is that  everyone  bold enough to have an idea gets a chance to shape the landscape. The key differentiator is execution. Can a company do what it says?  Perceptric Media will. We intend that Perceptric Media be one of the companies that do the shaping. More on the team we have assembled in the next few days.

One Minute World is the first community from Perceptric Media. One Minute World is content for today. Byte size brain food. Everything you need to know, everything you want to have. Any media platform, mobile phone, iPod, laptop, PC, podcast; accessible through the internet, RSS feed, 3G; whatever, whenever.

Startups run fast. Perceptric Media is no exception. As One Minute World emerges be the first to be in touch with our releases, news, development, team by registering or joining our mailing list here.  More on the community and our plans over the next few days.