New Media: No more CDs! No more DVDs!

I suspect reading about what the media landscape is going to look like over the next five to ten years has made me decide I'm not going to buy CDs or DVDs ever again.

First off, EVERYTHING is going to be available for us to download. This BBC article about spotify.com has convinced me that having access to everything and not needing to own it is the way forward.

I'm looking forward to owning less stuff. As I see it, there are three tiers of media: stuff I'll watch once, stuff I'll watch more than once, and stuff I develop an emotional attachment to. It's only stuff in that third category I really need to own. The other stuff I'm happy to download as bandwidth becomes cheaper. (In fact, I watched the first episode of The Cult on TVNZ on Demand and thought the experience was fine.)

But, obviously, this raise concerns about the companies providing these downloads censoring material or restricting access to them (through price, digital rights management [DRM], or whatever. But the counter to that is torrenting.

I also think that JP's concerns about not being able to own the physical artifact are going to be addressed through:

i) treating the physical items as rarities
ii) being able to manufacture any item you want in-store (burn a CD, if that's what you want, or print any book you have the files for).

I also recommend checking out Amanda Palmer's post, 'why i am not afraid to take your money':

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.

please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.

dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

And a bit of an RPG geek-out: The Future of Tabletop Gaming. If that post was too long, and you didn't read it, then here's the summary: Technology is going to change gaming. That's inevitable. So figure out what tech-assisted games are going to look like, and go out and make them.

Tabletop gaming favours young people.(*) Pretty soon, we're all going to be carrying around extremely powerful computers (iPhones, smart phones, PDAs). The costs for developing programmes for these ubiquitous technologies is getting cheaper.

(*) As you get older, it's tough to get people together for a game once you factor in family commitments, transport, and work.

Therefore, we'll move away from books, and into creating technology assisted imaginary spaces. And the business model will change:

... [Do] whatever it takes to get people playing your game. The old model was Selling More Books = Making More Money. That’s gone. Already gone. The future is more people playing = making more money.

... Sell your content. No, I don’t mean your fifty pages of history for your setting. I mean new classes, new skills, powers, gear. Stuff your players can use. Stuff they can play with.

... The lesson here is not “Augmented Reality is going to change tabletop gaming.” AR is just one component of it. The fact that all the players in the target demo will live with and on their personal mobile web devices complete with cameras and social networking is the lesson. The fact that they’ll pay you $5 for a new class or race is the lesson.

I think I disagree with one minor thing in the article: I can see how tech like virtual tabletops and Skype can get older people together, while still balancing families and work. But the rest of the article seems pretty damn sound to me.

Why I'm Not Writing today - Portable Edition

I'm jazzed by my new cheap cellphone - I can shoot two hours of footage on it, store the names of all the books I want to read from the library, record voice messages to myself, listen to mp3s and play games.

Currently, I'm getting the hang of Texas Hold 'em Poker. (Di: if you're reading this, I'm gunning for you now.)

Links - Future of TV

OK, something a little new here. I'll post a whole bunch of related links, and then analyse them in the comments as I get time. Join in the conversation there, and if anything insightful pops up, that'll get a post of its own.

First up, the future of television / 4th generation media (4GM) ...

NBC fails (spectacularly) to bully Apple into raising its download prices.

Theatrical release isn't where studios make their money from movies.

Didn't I predict the death of the mainstream in one of my first posts? Well, it's happening. And, by the way, how many people do you know who regularly watch television anymore?

Guerilla drive-ins - organising movie screenings in unused public spaces, via flash-mobs.

What the hell. Boogie Nights / Star Wars (link to YouTube).

A TV professional speculates about future trends.

A link to a link about making internet content watchable - and move the audience from TV to the net.

And another link-link to a business model for internet content.

Enough for now.

Links - the future of media

Advertising

Pop-ups in TV shows are being considered as a possible near-future form of advertising. For instance, viewers might see a commercial playing in a TV in the living room of the set. Then the commercial would pop full-screen.

Netvibes is a stie that gives its users to build a web page that gathers their favorite sites, blogs, etc, together. It does not accept paid advertisements. Instead, it makes advertisers create a Netvibes that provides a useful service to its community.


Online businesses

Over at GigaOm, there's an article about how the toughest part of a new venture is to get your users to pay you anything at all.

"The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny."

As Anne Zelenka says,

"the reason there’s a huge gap between people paying you nothing and people paying you something is because that’s where you go from hobby to business. Between zero revenue and positive revenue lies your business model. Going from zero pay to a penny is where you’ve discovered how to make money–and that’s what businesses are about. The penny gap separates the winners from the losers, economically speaking.

Downloads, Music, & DRM

If every music listener in the world paid $50, they could have access to every song ever recorded while maintaining or increasing music sales. That's according to Cambridge-educated economist turned music-manager (Pink Floyd, The Clash, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Billy Bragg) Peter Jenner.

Here's the story of how one man's terrible DRM experience trying to legally download a single piece of music has led to him giving up on online music altogether. Over-reaction or flawed business model? You can decide.

CD sales keep declining. The artificial demand for replacing all your old music with CDs has been over for a while. Now, sales in the first quarter of 2007 a 20% lower than the same quarter last year.

More linkage

In lieu of original content, I give you:

A pretty cool SF story about a wiki-driven democracy.

20 tips for achieving goals. One that I particularly like is, "Make it a rule to never skip 2 days in a row." And in related news, Lifehacker presents the idea of beta-testing your goals.

Got questions about biology? Ask a biologist.

Holy crap! 5 steps to building your own backyard hydrogen-fuel cell generator. You'll need solar panels, electrolyzers, steel piping, a gas tank, an inverter, and a few other cool bits and bobs, including a hydrogen sniffer. Which makes sense.

I'm off to play my first game of poker in 15 years tonight. The useful soyouwanna.com has a nice rundown on the rules of poker (warning: contains a lame and outdated Ross Perot joke).

This weekend, The Limit. I'm 28 pages from the end of my rewrite. Then the typing in and proofing commences. Hopefully it'll all be done by 17 March, when this year's Iron Game Chef competition begins.

Linkage

Stephen King talks about the possibility of rewriting the Dark Tower series, and how JJ Abrams optioned the movie rights (for $19!).

A rundown of some very cool-sounding indie video games. I love the idea of a martial arts game that plays like chess (about 4 down).

Jeremy blogs on diet. And again.

And after the last post, I resolve to not be so lazy. That paragraph was a quote. I shall link to my sources in future.

Tech - Google Reader, 1 problem sorted

Marking all posts as read (see yesterday) is extremely easy, it turns out. Simply press Shift-a.

Make sure you're in Only List Updated view.
Press g + a. That gets you to view all the new stuff in a list.

I view everything in List view.

Navigate your way round the list using the n and p keys. Use o to open up the full item, and press o again to close the item back down (and keep your place in the list view).

Finally, to mark everything as read, press Shift-a.

From what I can tell, navigating this way means that when I look at Google Trends (which tells me what I'm reading and what percentage of it I'm paying attention to), I'll get some meaningful information.

Script - Useful gadgets for writers

Wired posted a list of their Top Gadgets for writers. Here are the ones relevant to me:

Digital Recorder

Don't waste time fiddling with your music player or laptop: the specialized controls and user interface of a good digital recorder are indispensable, and much better than those on devices whose focus lies elsewhere. Some DAPs are better than others—the iPod is capable enough—but you'll miss the simple, one-click operation of a smaller device with an integrated mic.

Any of the name brands will do, but make sure it offers a USB port, plug 'n' play hookup to your computer (It should appear as a portable drive when plugged in) and that the recordings are saved in a sensible format (such as WAV, WMA or MP3).

Great for capturing brainstorming sessions, Actual Plays, and those moments when the perfect lines for the scene leap out at me. I'm investigating this.

A decent pen

It's not just those of us less enamored of technology who need a decent scribbler: we all write the old-fashioned way, all the time, regardless of our affinity for the latest half-cooked tech toys. The constant scribe might want to try the ergonomic Yoropen, especially if cramp and repetitive strain are issues. And there's always the Fisher Space Pen for writers who write upside-down.

The rest of us have the Parker Jotter, which, when used with a gel-ink refill, is unbeatable. As much as I love classic fountains like my Parker 51, for everyday use, the workaday jotter topples any legend.

Okay, have to admit I haven't explored the world of pen-geekdom, but the Yoropen and the Parker Jotter sound cool.

Better writing software

The twin gorillas of word processing, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer, impose a writing experience often counter to the needs of people who actually write, as opposed to people who generate business correspondence. There are many alternatives targeted at prose-crafters, most of them dreadful (more on those in a moment) but the two standouts are Scrivener for Mac OS X and RoughDraft for Windows, simple, straightforward, laser-guided writing software.

Scrivener has more features and eye candy, and carries a $35 price tag. RoughDraft is simpler and free of charge.

I shall check out RoughDraft immediately.

Unlimited public transport access

Exploration is about the most useful activity a writer can indulge in.

Didn't I already post about this? Public transport rocks for getting the writing down on paper, but this article also points out that a trip can also provide you with new sights and new material.

Google - not just a verb, it's a monolith

Have I saved myself from wasting an hour a day online?

In the last 24 hours, I've created a gmail account, set up a Google Reader page, and swapped the blog over to the new googlised version.

I'm fairly happy with Reader. I've tried rss aggregators before, but the fact I'm on dial-up has meant they haven't been worth the time (I follow a lot of blogs, and that makes the search time very slow). Reader seems to have a few issues with creating folders (it's not intuitive or all that easy) and with marking everything as read (as far as I can tell, you can't do it). However, I'll keep exploring it.

[Edit: Ah-hah! Marking something as read is as easy as pressing the spacebar a couple of times.]

Also, thanks to Lee for fixing my PC. I'm now using the internet at normal speed again.