And now for this week’s installment…

Anyone who has had the misfortune of talking to me about either innovation or fitness recently knows I’m obsessed with how technology can help us move from reactive care to wellness care through feedback and incentives. For example, I use a few devices and Web sites to track my workout, what I’m eating, weight and heart rate. Through these I get a complete feedback loop: What I Ate + What I Did = Result. The Result might be weight fluctuations but it might be faster loops around the track or a long run without that hit-by-a-truck feeling. Also, since my friends and family can track my progress via both public and private Web pages I have a little built-in peer pressure to keep me honest. This feedback loop is inspiring and motivating for me and I thought I’d share my setup here in case it’s useful for anyone else who is looking for a little inspirado.

What I’m using:

1. Fitbit – Fitbit is a fancy pedometer attached to Fitbit.com. I keep it in my pocket all day, clipped to my shorts when I run, and clipped to a (Fitbit-provided) wrist band while I sleep. It tells me how many steps I’ve taken, calories burned, and quality of sleep. I doubt any of the three are 100% accurate but that’s not important in practice, what I find it most useful for is getting a sense of your relative activity.

   It’s eye-opening and inspiring to see that on a day I simply go to the office and home again I take around 4,000 steps whereas a Sunday like today where I run ~10 miles I’ll clock in more than 20,000 steps. Fitbit recommends we all have a daily goal of 10,000 steps and that’s pretty hard to hit without trying if you drive to work — you have to take a walk at least to get there, but a short walk will put you over 10K easy. In other words, it’s a do-able goal but unless you walk to work/class you’ve probably got to make a little time for exercise to get there.

   There’s much more to Fitbit.com than just the pedometer, though. You can input virtually any activity (I track my weight training as “active” time) as well as track what you eat. I don’t track the intake very often, but I try to track it now and again just to get a sense for how many calories I’m eating vs. burning on a typical day (it doesn’t take too many days to get a feel for how you’re doing, generally speaking). The sleep tracking is more interesting than I thought it would be. It doesn’t give you much data depth (for that you’d need something like the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach) but it is definitely interesting to look at the history and see how much sleep you’re getting on average. Looking at these trends can point to some patterns and habits that could use adjusting (such as staying up at night blogging and listening to music instead of going to bed and reading — whoops).

   At $99 the Fitbit is a no-brainer purchase relative to the data and motivation you can get from it (just don’t run it through your washing machine). Jawbone has a new entry in the space called “UP” but I haven’t tried it yet — if you have any thoughts on it please leave a comment.

2. Withings Wifi Scale – This is just a weight scale you stand on, it measures your weight and takes a guess at body fat and uploads the results to the Web. The scale seems to be a little light in a flattering sort of way (it thinks I’m ~150, I’m really more around ~155) and who knows how accurate the body fat guess is but like the Fitbit the real value here is in the relative more than the absolute. I’m not trying to lose weight but taking weight measurements a couple times a week along with everything else is a great reality check. Stepping on the scale is the equals sign — I did this, I ate that, so then what? Oh, it equals this. You start to see the impact of little changes and fluctuations. Every lab needs a way to measure results. $150 on Amazon.
3. A GPS-enabled Watch w/Heart Rate Monitor – I use a Garmin Forerunner 305 I picked up for less than $100 at my daughter’s preschool auction a couple years back. It’s not the state of the art but it’s a great watch: long battery life for long runs and an excellent interface interval training. Sure, it’s bulky, but you get used to that really quickly (I don’t even think about it anymore). There’s a fancier Garmin watch with the same features now but I can’t vouch for it personally, let me know if you have experience with any of the newer models.



4. RunKeeper.com – RunKeeper.com rules. You might know it as the running app for iPhone but it’s so much more than that, it’s awesome even if you don’t run or run with a watch like mine instead of an iPhone. All of the things I mention above, the Garmin watch, Withings Scale, and Fitbit all feed into RunKeeper.com and give me a place to collect all my workouts and data. They support apps and I use a RunKeeper app called Stronger to track my strength-training and stretching, too. I can easily look at trends in weekly mileage, see that I tend to be most active at 6am (yikes!), or a bunch of other stats. Plus I can see what my friends are up to — Facebook for fitness nerds of all levels.
5. TrainingPeaks.com – I thought the old Nike+ Flash site was the worst site ever made but TrainingPeaks.com gives it a serious run for its money. The site is basically unusable but has one saving grace: it will send you a nightly email with your training prescription for the next two days from some of the top coaches in the world. I’m using it now for one of (fellow Hoosier) Hal Higdon’s programs. The emails are great but I’m not getting any value from the site. I can’t figure out why I would pay $20/month for TrainingPeaks.com when RunKeeper.com gives me so much more and more easily, too. But I’m thankful for the Higdon training program.

Yes, I’ve transferred my nerd-ness to personal telemetry. I suppose there are worse things to do with it. But I really do find each of these things valuable. Recommended. I hope that’s helpful.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where the technology + health space goes from here. Check out Daniel Kraft’s incredible TED talk below for a peek at the future of medicine, personal telemetry, and stage-zero care and prevention. It’s incredibly inspiring.

Must sleep, get up early, strap on, and hit the road…

ian

ps – this past weekend my five year-old ran her first race, the kids half-mile at the Long Beach Turkey Trot. After I attempted pushing her in the stroller for the 5K. Crowded field on a boardwalk pushing a stroller — it was frustrating going trying to weave through the crowd and run a reasonable pace. After my daughter said, “You hit everybody.” I pleaded innocence, saying, “Not everybody!” She responded, “Well, most people.” So, apologies to anyone (everyone?) I ran into during that 5K. On Saturday Nicole, Miranda, and I ran the Santa Monica version of the Thanksgiving weekend run, The Gobble Wobble. I broke 20 minutes in the 5K but was 30 seconds slower than I’d hoped. It was a fun race, though, Nic and Miranda killed it!

My friend David Pakman wrote a great piece on “unbundling” last week, describing how music was unbundled and what that means for media in general. It was timely for me, I’d just included a slide in Wednesday night’s class at UCLA entitled “The Great Unbundling”. I wrote a brief response including that slide plus a couple more (and some stats you might find interesting) over on Topspin’s blog. Check it out, leave a comment, and share it with a friend if it moves ya.

ian

My first tech conference was working Comdex for IBM in 1993. My job was to show the research I was doing for the Indiana University Music Library which involved streaming Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra” or Miles’ “Freddie Freeloader” (literally the only two tracks we had encoded for the demo) from an RS-6000 equipped with a “Shark Multimedia File System” to a PS/2 runing OS/2 across TCP/IP after doing a fake search in a primitive Web browser. It was one of the first “streaming media” demos, certainly the first one I’d ever seen. My job also involved me wearing an IBM polo shirt and a pair of khaki pants I bought at the Las Vegas GAP (I didn’t own any nice pants). My booth was right next to a booth where every hour Gallagher would run through a schtick which involved putting a typewriter, a TV, a Nintendo, etc into a box and pulling out a ThinkPad (oh and of course smash watermelons). I caught and joined him in the parking lot getting weeded. It was pretty damn exciting for a kid from Indiana.

But I spent the rest of the 90s not being invited to conferences and not seeking them out. I’d get asked occasionally to this or that and oblige when possible, but believe it or not I’ve never really considered myself a conference-goer. Once I was at Yahoo! Music doing the conference circuit became part of my job and I did my best. Still, I didn’t go to things I wasn’t invited to and generally tried to spend more time in the office and less time out on the road. The same has been true at Topspin. I know people think I’m some sort of conference whore but the truth is I say no way more than I say yes and only participate when I think it’s good for Topspin. My favorite part of my job is working with our team to grow the business; I fight hard to keep my calendar faced in toward the company as much as possible and not out glad-handing.

But there are a few great conferences in our industry, ones where I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get real work done every year. MIDEM is at the top of the stack, I get more business done there every year than any other conference. It’s been a real pleasure to work closely with MIDEM the last couple years as they broaden their outreach to entrepreneurs. I’ve made great friends and together we’ve done some real business (look for another big announcement built at MIDEM last year in January of this one). SXSW is probably second on that list given Topspin’s business. Unfortunately I’ve barely seen any music the last two years there but that’s because SXSW is non-stop grind for me each year. The last two years I’ve actually gone out of my way to *stay sober* the entire week just so I could make it through. It’s like running an ultra-marathon. I’m really looking forward to helping with the SXSW Accelerator program this year.

One event which has truly turned out to be excellent and I will go to each year invited or not is SF MusicTech. Brian Zisk and his team have grown SF Music Tech over the last few years into something which really embraces the spirit of where the industry needs to go, people who love music and people with talent in technology coming together, celebrating innovation, dealing with issues of copyright head-on, being honest about how we are and in many cases are not making money. They’ve done an incredible job pulling interesting and different people for the panels, not the same talking heads you see at most of the others (which is why they almost never invite me, I’m sure! I don’t blame them!). In the early days the gathering happened too frequently but they’ve slowed it down and made each event more valuable the last couple of years. It’s a simple, one-day event with two big social evenings. I’ve had incredible conversations with people way way smarter than me each and every time I’ve attended.

Brian reached out to me last week and asked if I’d help moderate a panel which was coming together unusually close to the start of the event. It was a panel suggested by WMG’s Ethan Kaplan and a good idea. It’s not a panel about Topspin’s direct-to-fan marketing approach, which hopefully is a good thing as my participation won’t be self-serving. Hopefully I can draw on my experience working with labels as they try to relate to the Internet starting in 1994 to pull some advice from the panel which will help others considering their approach to existing music companies. My notes preparing for the panel are below. Please come if answers to the below questions look interesting to you. Leave additional questions you may have in the comments and I’ll try to get them answered.

See you there,
ian

What Music Companies Need From Startups

Startups often want to work with labels, managers, and other big companies in the music space. While the intent is almost always good, starting from a love of both music and technology, the approach often lacks enough insight into what these companies need to gain any traction. On today’s panel we’re going to discuss what these big companies actually *want* from startups and how various approaches might be received.

Our panelists are:

Ethan Kaplan – Warner Music Group
Ian Hogarth – Songkick
Rachel Masters – Red Magnet Media
Aaron Foreman – Universal Music Group
Moderator: Ian Rogers – Topspin

First of all, let’s learn a little about each of our panelists. Ethan and Aaron, can you tell us about your jobs at two of the majors and what sort of startups you generally come into contact with?

Rachel, tell us about your current company but also about the kind of folks you worked with when you were at Ning.

Ian, you work not only with labels but as you’re in the live space you work in the space of the 800 lb gorilla, Live Nation. What kind of large music companies do you find yourself dealing with at Songkick?

Ethan, what are some of the common mistakes you see entrepreneurs make when they’re approaching WMG? Aaron?

Rachel, how do you help broker and navigate these waters?

Ian, do you think entrepreneurs *should* try to work with these companies or should they build their technology so they don’t have to?

Aaron, can you give us a little detail on what your department does and what sort of technology would help improve your daily life?

What are some of the technologies used today by the music companies: labels, live, publishing, merchandise, etc?

How much development is happening in-house at music companies? Who is doing what?

Entire panel, is there a killer app no one is creating? Do you see a hole in the “big music companies need this” market no one is filling?

…

Billboard and Hypebot both had articles this week speculating who Google may be calling to lead their music initiative. Surprisingly, my name was on the lists and I had more than a few inquiries hit my mailbox asking how I felt about it.

Rest assured, I can happily report I’m not leaving Topspin for Google or any place else (and hopefully the Topspin board feels the same!). Google is certainly an interesting company and I’d love to see how they compare to my AOL and Yahoo! experience — I actually get a kick out of seeing how these big companies run (or don’t, as the case may be), but there is nothing on my mind at the moment aside from working with the killer Topspin team to build the marketing and retail platform used by every professional in the music business. While I know many entrepreneurs who have vowed to never pour their energy into the unforgiving abyss of digital music again (y’all know who you are!), this business is my passion and I plan on being a part of it one way or another for the rest of my life. As such it’s a huge honor to see my name on a list of “top anything” in the world of nerds and music. Thanks again Antony and Bruce for the kind words, I’ll try my hardest to live up to them.

I don’t like underestimating Google, but in this case I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything particularly interesting about their music initiative. I’d love to be wrong and find out they’re going a different route but from the news reports it sounds like they’re just going knocking on doors looking to license content for streaming and download. Yawn. Maybe they’ll finally integrate Simplify and free your personal collection into the cloud. Anyone remember Muse.Net circa 2003? Yeah, that. Couple that with the fact the Android team is driving this initiative and it sounds like you have a check-box marketing feature for Android (you can’t compete with Apple without a killer music experience) and not a “Google is going to change the music industry they way they are changing the book industry” scenario. I’m not saying it won’t be big and important, Android is quickly becoming a killer platform, I’m just saying it’s not progressive enough to be interesting to me personally, and I’d expect more from a company as known for changing industries as Google is. There’s a big difference between *really* picking a fight in an industry that needs it as much if not more than any other, one that would be a precursor to the future of movies and other content, and just pulling together a me-too service to bring their mobile platform to feature parity.

Instead of contacting an increasingly fragmented population of rights owners and asking for permission to access their content with a cumbersome set of attached strings I wish Google would build a valuable ecosystem content owners *want* to include their content in — they are a company who could start with the demand, not the supply. Build the inputs and outputs into the marketplace: rights owners upload and manage their own content, set the rules, give access to content to any app (including the Android app) willing to play by the rules. Take what MusicNet and 7digital have done with their APIs a step further, let the market determine what it’s willing to spend to utilize the content in their apps, give value in the ecosystem to cheap/free content and let rights owners charge as much as they think their content is worth (the ecosystem will determine if that content is the price is appropriate by whether or not it gets utilized). Topspin would *love* to participate in a marketplace like this and we could even add some interesting product bundling (merchandise, CDs, vinyl, tickets — all self-serve from the artist perspective) to the mix. THIS would be a very interesting play against Apple in my opinion, a licensed streaming and paid download store, less so. I get why it’s a fine feature for Android, and why Google has avoided music in the past, but I’m still disappointed Google isn’t taking a path which alters the course of digital music more.

Speaking of Google, I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook vs. Google lately. At Topspin we’ve been digging in to what’s possible with the Facebook Like ecosystem and I have to say it’s an absolutely brilliant move. Sinister, in its way, but brilliant. For those who haven’t looked deeply into it, when Facebook changed “Fan” to “Like” across the site they also made it possible to “Like” any page on the Interwebz. So not only are they grabbing knowledge that you “Like” the Bed Intruder (who doesn’t?) but they might know that you “Like” Topspin or even this blog.

So what? Once upon a time Google came out of nowhere with a way better search engine, right? That search engine was better because of PageRank, an algorithm which used publisher intent (via what text linked where) to better rank search results. Now Facebook has their network of 500 million people expressing their like of pages across the Web. Add this data to a search engine and imagine how results might improve or simply get more interesting by showing you results ranked highly by your social group.

But the real fun starts when Facebook takes their ad network off of Facebook. They already have more than $1B (annually) running through their ad network on their pages alone. If they make that network available to publishers I could buy ads targeted at employees of major labels reading “You’re working more albums with less resources — Topspin can help” not only ON Facebook but across the Web. Imagine if you could add “on these sites” to all the other great targeting you can do with Facebook ads (Likes, employment, geo, demo, etc).

Sorry no comment on Ping yet, still haven’t spent any time with it. What do y’all think? Comments on any of the above welcome.

ian

I like Bob Lefsetz and while I don’t always agree with him I think the music industry is lucky to have such a prolific and unfiltered voice of dissent. I originally discovered Bob via the Rhino podcast many years ago. The podcast included “The Lefsetz Letter”, a portion of the show where an animated character (Bob) would tell you a story about some music he loved and how that music impacted him and his life. I remember one story in particular, a story of his driving to the mountains to ski with his dentist and listening closely to the group Yes for the first time. I hadn’t listened to Yes since I was 12, didn’t know this guy or care about his dentist, but because he was clearly a music fan I loved listening to his story. I distinctly remember thinking, “I can’t believe how much I’m enjoying this.” I didn’t care that Bob’s stories seemed to be reviews of things from Rhino’s catalog, I trusted his genuine music fandom enough to find it entertaining and even when he sang the praises of Loggins and Messina I assumed he was selecting the titles from the Rhino catalog he enjoyed enough to share some sincere stories about.

I met Bob many years later (but many years ago) when I worked at Yahoo!. As a result of my being passionate and outspoken about issues in the music business I’ve received praise in Bob’s written “Letter” more than once (for which I’ve received a few offerings of condolences but I’ve always taken pride in nonetheless). The biggest compliment Bob ever tossed my way was (paraphrasing) “Ian is first and foremost a music fan”. My life has been listening to and loving music and this was close to the highest praise I could have been given. As my friends/family will tell you, music is everything to me and has been since I’ve been old enough to have a personality (my mom could share that picture of me in footie pajamas playing the yardstick as a guitar). I don’t watch movies or TV (apart from the occasional music documentary), I just prefer music. Apparently I’ve passed the bug on to my kids, my older daughter (19) is the general manager of MIT’s radio station WMBR and my younger daughter (3) has already lived and loved her first Bonnaroo.

So you can imagine my disappointment when Bob called me out last week, saying I was all hype and insincere when I talk about music, specifically on Twitter. Here’s his original salvo:

…And those who think Twitter is purely for hype. Hell, I’ve now learned that Ian Rogers is not a discerning listener. Makes me wonder about Topspin. He’s constantly tweeting that the music of every act the company works with is good. That’s utter hogwash. Especially when the tunes are outside his normal flavor field.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Bob’s statement wasn’t factual, he was assuming more of what I was tweeting about was Topspin-related than actually was. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but unfortunately we don’t (yet) work with all the artists I love.

I asked Bob which tweets he was referring to and he sent a sampling. Neko Case and David Rawlings showed up as “outside my flavor field”, but not only do they have nothing at all do do with Topspin (I wish they did), I love both those artists and have gone out of my way to see them both live. He seemed surprised I’d want to watch the new Paul McCartney DVD (which was released via Topspin), but watch it I did (both discs), and was surprised myself how much I liked it. He mentioned Sloan which is much closer to the line he was saying I crossed — I probably wouldn’t have known about that release if a manager who is enthusiastic about Topspin hadn’t tweet’d the link to me. I listened to it, liked it, and tweet’d that I was listening to it for free, assuming my followers like free music and might want to check it out, too. Bob mentioned a Harmonia and Eno reissue but (unfortunately) Topspin has nothing to do with that, either. Of course there were two mentions of the band I’m managing, Get Busy Committee, and one which was letting people know there’s a list of Topspin bands people can follow en masse. As I said to Bob and laid out in detail in an earlier post, I started managing Get Busy Committee because I loved the record, and Topspin is more than a job, it’s a company I have most of my personal net worth and time wrapped up in. I love it and am insanely proud of what we’re doing. It’s a lot to ask me not to talk about it. I know not Marx’s alienated labor. I admit the line between personal and professional is very blurry for me, but that’s not a marketing ploy, it’s genuinely blurry in my life at the moment. Not sure a CEO of a startup can/should live any other way.

But thankfully I don’t actually talk about every Topspin artist and my tweets aren’t all hype. I took a look through my tweets for the week previous to Bob’s comment and did a little tally. I counted a total of 63 tweets from the previous Friday to that Thursday. In those tweets only 18 were Topspin-related (including the 5 Get Busy Committee ones). I covered 37 distinct topics and only 9 were of those referenced Topspin or artists we work with. Most importantly, the number of tweets which were about something I didn’t personally like, care about and think someone else might be interested in was equal to ZERO. So yeah, I like music and talk about our artists, but I don’t *only* talk about our artists, I certainly don’t promote all our artists regardless of my opinion and I don’t talk about things that are “outside of my normal flavor field” just because they’re on Topspin. If you’re curious, the tally is here, check it out for yourself and please let me know if/where you find something off-base with my personal tastes.

But as Bob said (in an email to my wife, one of Bob’s readers who came to my defense without my asking her to), “Perception is everything in this business. Truth is two steps behind.” Just because Bob’s statement isn’t factual doesn’t mean that isn’t the way my activities are perceived. I really don’t think he was calling me a hypester to be mean, this was truly how he perceived my relentless enthusiasm — he assumed most of the bands I was excited about were somehow Topspin-related even though this wasn’t the case — and he wasn’t alone. Bob forwarded me a note from another reader who feels the same way and someone else on my Twitter feed @replied and said they often feel marketed to by my tweets. As someone who is genuinely passionate about what I do the last thing I want to be perceived as is a phony; I started thinking about the issue here and how to improve it.

So, starting now if I’m tweeting about something related to my company, Topspin, it will be clearly marked with the hash tag #topspin. Bob’s point was a good one, I wasn’t delineating when my tweets were or were not related to my company. I naively thought it was fairly obvious, if I was linking to Amazon, iTunes, Lala, Rhapsody, or some other non-Topspin experience then it was unaffiliated, but obviously that’s not very well thought through — most people don’t click nor do they have the same ability to immediately ascertain if something is or isn’t Topspin-related. Very poor assumption on my part. So from now on I’m going to make it clear: if my tweets don’t contain the hash tag #topspin you can rest assured I don’t have a personal interest in what I’m tweeting.

Additionally, I’ll tell you right now I won’t tweet about something I don’t care about or think you’d be interested in even if it does have to do with Topspin, but I appreciate that’s difficult to believe and it seems it’s just good practice to disclose things which could be construed as pure hype or promotional in nature.

There’s a semantic web-esque side effect of creating a stream of easily segmented #topspin tweets, too, and while that’s fun that’s definitely not my motivation here.

You might think this is a bit pointless and/or pedantic but I actually think it merits at least a little thought and discussion. For whatever reason more than five thousand people follow me on Twitter, vaguely caring what I have to say. I appreciate their sharing a bit of their scarce attention with me and want to respect that connection. If this simple step makes my voice more legitimate I’m all for it, and I thank Bob for the nudge.
 I’m sure many will think I’m overreacting to Bob’s criticism but I’m not one to take my credibility lightly, sorry.

I’m not sure I can solve what seemed to be Bob’s biggest complaint in the end, though: I’m too positive. Bob told me the fact I don’t say enough critical things makes my positive comments lack context and also hurts my credibility. He’s not wrong that I avoid the negative. I stop myself from critical comments from time to time. The example I shared with Bob was this aborted tweet: “RT @nprmusic The Decade’s 50 Most Overrated Recordings http://su.pr/1sCMZD”. I held back because I knew what was meant as humor and sarcasm with a bit of criticism would have been taken as mean-spirited, which I am not. Don’t get me wrong, I am a music snob and an equal opportunity hater and the likelihood I like your favorite band is small. But I also understand the doom metal supergroup I’m listening to in headphones while I type this is not likely up your alley, either. More than ten years ago Phil Wilhelm taught me the important lesson of the concept known as “for others”, and I instantly became less of a dick. Lots of music, art, food, styles of life, belief systems, and entire forms of entertainment are “for others”. Not for me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their place. I’m not writing endless holier-than-thou diatribes about the evils of TV just because I hate it. Do your thing. As Jenny Aurthur famously (in our house) once said, “Don’t yuck yuck my yum yum,” or my favorite Ricky Powell quote, “Why dis when you can be nice?” Sometimes I can’t resist a critical statement, I’m not saying I never dis, but it’s true I don’t make a habit of it.

When my daughter Zoe was in second grade she loved Spice Girls and even had a “Spice Girls Club” at her school. Spice Girls was terrible drivel, non-music, to me and you. To her it was inspiring, (literally) moving and when she and her friends performed dance routines on the playground at recess it had nothing to do with the way you and I heard Spice Girls, it was kids having fun and a-ok by me. It might sound silly but that Spice Girls experience buried the music snob in me at least a few levels deeper. It taught me that taste is not absolute, and there’s little to be gained from me telling you your favorite band sucks. I just don’t have it in me. [As an aside, Kathleen Hanna took something similar from Zoe’s Spice Girls experience, sang “Wannabe” karaoke with Zoe at a wedding, and mentioned it in a Punk Planet interview which you can read as part of the collection, "We Owe You Nothing".]

I’m sorry, while you will occasionally read critical tweets from me you’re not going to hear me say I don’t get the Kid Cudi record and want to fall asleep every time I listen to Fleet Foxes (both of which are true), I’m not going to waste a lot of energy yuck yucking your yum yum. It’s just not my style. If that makes me less credible I guess I’ll have to live with it. Personally I don’t buy the theory, I am much more interested in what my friends Isac Walter, Sam Velde, and Jay Babcock are listening to than what they are not. They have turned me on to tons of great music to *like* over the years, not music to hate.

If you follow me on Twitter, here’s what you’re going to get: lots of tweets about stuff I like, including:

• Music
• Music industry and technology news and commentary
• Poor, pathetic attempts at humor
• Proud papa bullshit you probably don’t care about but I don’t care — hopefully you will give me a pass on loving my kids

Here’s what you’re not going to get:

• Hate
• Talk about TV shows, sports, or movies (all of which I dislike but I really, truly don’t care if you dig ‘em)

If you’re interested, cool. Follow me, subscribe to my blog via RSS or email. If none of that sounds interesting to you or my lack of negativity somehow makes the things I *am* sincerely excited by less interesting, don’t. That’s the best part about the future of media. No one has a megaphone. Consumers of information have infinite choice and power.

Bob, I am truly honored to be one of the 40 people you follow. I hope I stay there. And I hope clearly delineating Topspin-related tweets helps. Maybe TweetDeck can filter those out for you?

While I don’t actually spend time or energy asking people to find/follow me on Twitter, I do appreciate that anyone would care what I have to say. I can’t make people care, but I care enough to not want to be misunderstood. I hope clearly delineating when something has to do with Topspin will help. If not, I’ll try to define my field of flavor here for further clarity: my top three favorite albums are Sly and The Family Stone’s Fresh, The Stooges Fun House, and Willie’s Spirit. Also in the field: Neko Case, The Beatles, Brendan Benson, Robert Wyatt, and Morrissey as well as EYEHATEGOD, Genghis Tron, Slayer, Burzum, and Iron Maiden plus NWA, Lord Finesse, and Jay-Z not to mention Joe Higgs, Bunny Wailer, and Burning Spear not to forget Lefty Frizell, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Townes Van Zandt and Funkadelic, The Dirtbombs, Jamie Lidell and Arts Blakey and Pepper, Chris Potter, Horaces Silver and Andy… can I stop now?

Thanks for following,
ian

ps – Interestingly, these barbs from Bob sandwiched an unrelated post referencing Seth Godin and permission marketing. But the post didn’t mention that Twitter is as much a form of permission marketing as opting in to an email list is. The 2.7M people who subscribe to Oprah and the 18K people who subscribe to Pepsi on Twitter are committing an act of permission marketing, giving Oprah and Pepsi permission to market to them amongst the tweets from their friends. And trust needs to be similarly respected, or subsequently lost. That, I suppose, is really what this post is about, why I care, why it’s worth talking about, and why the delineation is a good idea.