Considering I was originally blog-tagged four days ago by Bill Deys (and then two days ago by Charles Cadenhead), I would say that I’m decidedly late getting this post out.  I will spare you the excuses.  However, since I’m so late on the game for this one, I’m reluctant to tag anyone else since I’m probably the last one on the Internet to respond to this.

So, without further delay and in no particular order, here are my seven favourite songs based on current listening habits:

Sting - Fortress Around Your Heart
Xavier Rudd - Messages
The Police - Hole In My Life
Barenaked Ladies - Vanishing
Jack Johnson - Upside Down
Genesis - Trick of the Tail
Colin Hay - Waiting for My Real Life to Begin
Masters of Reality - She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On)

Bob and I have both lamented about the ever growing spread of social media tools geared towards expanding and engaging one’s community. I’ve dabbled in some of them, each of which addresses a specific need for community building. Today, Carter Harkins introduced us to a tool that I think I will be spending a lot of time getting to know. It’s called Crowd About and it fills a need, specific to Podcasters, that no other service does: contextual commenting. Carter is one of its creators.

Crowd About offers a simple way for your community to be more actively engaged by allowing it to create text or multimedia comment to any media file in your Podcast feed, and then apply the comment to a specific location of that file. Imagine having your content indexed by comment threads and being able to consume comments by clicking a specific location of your media file, and then participating in the discussion yourself. In fact, you can even index your own content and then let the conversations begin. That’s the core of this tool.

It doesn’t stop there. Crowd About can be integrated into your own Podcast site (WordPress and others) so that the “playground” (my term, not theirs) comes to you and your community - instead of you and your community having to go to the playground. About the only drawback of that integration is that participants are required to be logged into a Crowd About account.

Of course, requisite profile and friends technology is part of the tool. Has anyone figured out how to create a single friends repository in WordPress that can be referenced by every other technology, yet?

This evening — before settling in to conduct two interviews –  I broke a rule known well to singers, public speakers and on-air personalities: don’t have dairy before your performance.

Daryl Cognito has coined a new, industry term: sloppy mouth. It’s a highly technical term that Daryl explains as the host sounding drunk. For me, the term describes a radio host here in Ottawa that I can’t listen to because I can clearly hear tongue, cheek and lip movements — not the kind of thing you want to hear through earbuds in your ear canal.

Daryl asked if I had any thoughts on how to avoid sloppy mouth. I rushed together some initial thoughts:

• Mic position - don’t have the diaphram of the mic aimed directly inside the centre of your mouth.

• Voice - don’t speak so softly and carefully “inside” the mic so that the volume of your voice and mouth come through at the same ratio. Position your mouth several inches from the mic.

• Inflection - if your voice is rich with dynamics and passion, it will be distracting enough for the listener to not notice the slop (that even sounds gross).

• Equipment - use a microphone that is suited to your voice and style. While many singers use elaborate and expensive mics for their vocals, Phil Collins typically uses a low-end dynamic mic because that’s what works for his voice.

• Processing - if you apply compression to a recording that already has sloppy mouth, you will boost the presence of the sloppy mouth and it will be impossible for your listener to ignore it.

It probably helps to not have dairy products before you record.

For three days now (Saturday March 17 through Monday March 19), I have been trying to get through to Rogers Wireless technical support. For each of the six times I have called, I have navigated their voice automated phone system and consistently end up at a message that they are “currently experiencing higher than normal call volumes” and that “wait times will be in excess of fifteen minutes”.

Is three consecutive days of this really higher than normal call volumes? Or are we witnessing the tell-tale signs of an inattentive and unresponsive call centre?

Andrea and I were just interviewed by Jennifer of Microsoft Home Magazine. We’ll post details when the article is published.

When Bob Goyetche and I first started working on Podcasters Across Borders 2006, there were a lot of reasons to be concerned — mostly relating to financial commitments and community interest. Okay, concerns may not be the right word. Let’s say Stress, with a capital ‘S’.

We took a big gamble, committing personal funds to secure conference facilities and invested a lot of time to plan and promote the event, and process registrations. It was a great learning experience. In fact, maybe I should blog some of my lessons-learned about that process sometime.

A turning point in the process, for me, was the day we received our very first paid registrations. I knew that no matter what happened, PAB2006 was going to be great. In my view, it was already a success because others believed in the event and its organizers enough to commit their own funds and holiday time to participate. Karen and Ross made my day and became silent motivators when things seemed rough. They will always be the first ever paid registrants for PAB.

Things are a bit different this year. PAB is an established event with a large following. A lot of people have been emailing Bob and me for months asking for registration information — many have also offered help. That doesn’t change the fact that there were concerns going in to the big registration announcement. It’s amazing how that first paid registration can evaporate all of those concerns. We have Bill Deys to thank for kicking off the demonstration of trust in us this year.

Registrations are coming in faster than we expected. This is real!

See you in June.

Registration for the 2007 edition of Podcasters Across Borders is officially live. If you want to attend, act quicky. There are only 160 seats available!!!

Be sure to use the tag PAB2007 on all posts, photos, videos, etc… relating to the event.

It wasn’t fun. However, my MacBook Pro is networked, again, after all of the WWAN support update 1.0 stability-related issues. My AirPort is rock solid, again. How? These are the steps I followed:

• Backed up my data — by the way, unlike PC, Mac overwrites old backups with new ones, deleting files from the backup destination if they no longer exist on the source. Be sure to do a complete backup to a fresh destination.

• Made sure I have a lot of disk space. I think I needed about 10Gb.

• Booted my computer from the installation CDs and did an Archive install, preserving user preferences. Note, this also saves all of your installed applications except the ones that are dependent on some kernel components (e.g. Parliant’s Phone Valet).

• Rebooted my computer.

• Used a wired connection (because my AirPort was not working), to be able to download and install the first wave of software updates.

• Reset the password of my wireless network.

• Hey! Finally! A wireless connection that restores itself from sleep!

• Used the AirPort connection to install the second wave up software updates — UNCHECKED THE APPLE WWAN SUPPORT UPDATE 1.0 AND AIRPORT EXTREME UPDATES.

• Copied back files I had to delete for space.

• Confirmed everything is working.

• Removed the Archived System folder.

This took me about four hours to figure out and complete - the longest piece being the archive installation from CDs. Thanks a million to Maurizio Ortolani for all of his help and patience.

I have confirmed with Apple that there is no way to permanently ignore any software updates. The tech told me that doing so would require Apple to rewrite the server application that serves the updates. I argue that it can be a software setting on the Mac (e.g. ignore this update) - just don’t mess with my AirPort anymore.

When I first learned of BumRushTheCharts.com (BRtC), I had reservations about the idea. In particular, I wondered if juicing the iTunes charts for an independent artist for one day would actually make any difference - and if it would actually hurt the independent movement.

Perhaps because of the community-centric excitement about the project, I decided to ignore my misgivings and participate. Naturally, I blogged about it. It took a comment from Daryl to make me think carefully about my reasons for paticipating. As a result, I have decided to withdraw my participation in BRtC and take an academic view of the effort, publishing my analysis both before and after March 22nd — zero day.

This is my “pre-analysis”.

The independent community has long complained about the music industry’s approach to signing, developing, and promoting — and its treatment of — bands. Many artists have also cried foul. Some, like the Barenaked Ladies, have done something about it.

Indeed, the music industry is very effective at using its strength to sign bands that will make money for them, and then create buzz and influence the charts to see that the money comes through. They have essentially owned mass distribution channels and apparently enjoy a significant amount of control on how radio stations program their music. To prove their influence, the major labels are managing to stay strong even as the marketplace becomes more agile and adaptive than the industry.

Technology is the differentiator. Besides the hotly debated DRM-related issues, online tools and democratized digital music has made it possible for the grassroots to organize. They have formed communities which have established distribution and promotional channels. Over time, these small communities have connected with other communities to create a strong and far reaching network of like-minded people. It’s the independent and democratized, or open-source, version of the music industry - a welcome change for many who have felt overwhelmed by having their tastes dictated to them.

BRtC is apparently hoping to be the first effort to to leverage the size of this open-source music community and harness its strength to catapult one of its own to the top of one, albeit high-visible, music chart. My sense about this is as follows:

• BRtC is going to be amazingly successful at unifying a community for a common cause. This will be a great moment for the grassroots to demonstrate its passion, connectedness and organization skills. It’s all about people.

• Selecting a single band for a community to prop up is analogous to the industry mass promoting the next big thing and using its influence to drive sales and chart success. This is one of the issues that got us here in the first place. I’d be interested to find out the percentages of those who love, don’t care much for, and outright dislike the song. It’s all about influence.

• The metric that is being used by BRtC is one that the record industry understands well. In this manner, BRtC is playing on the music industry’s turf. This may be because BRtC feels that this is the way to get noticed. It’s all about visibility.

• BRtC risks validating reliance on old-school music industry fundamentals by using the tools of the digital music era. This can be extremely harmful since the industry can then use this as further support in the argument for technology to protect old-school economic models of the industry. And, don’t think that the irony of the new technology won’t be lost on them. It’s all about new thinking and its relationship to old thinking.

I decided to get some industry views on BRtC. The first person I spoke with is Adam Smith of Nettwerk Management - for the Canadian perspective. Their roster includes the Barenaked Ladies and Avril Lavigne. Adam feels that BRtC may garner some short-lived media attention and may inspire some industry types to talk for a few minutes. He claims that the industry is far too fickle to be concerned and there will be no lasting impact.

Miles Copeland, who, among his many accomplishments, founded I.R.S. Records and managed The Police, and susequently Sting, believes that BRtC is sending a mixed message about its views on the majors and it will be of little, if any, consequence.

“The impression given is that the recording industry is the enemy yet you are encouraging them to stay involved in signing more music”, Mr. Copeland offers. “There are many reasons an act gets dropped and just as many of them have to do with the artist as with the label. If the independent music community is so powerful what do they care what the majors think anyway? Just get on with it and sell music and stop complaining about the majors and what they are and are not doing. The initiative you describe sounds just like a promotion for one artist and will be viewed as such, a marketing ploy nothing more. Means nothing to anybody. Getting one act to number one for a day does not mean another will happen the next day or the day after.”

BRtC continues to build strength in preparation for March 22, 2007. Will Black Lab’s “Mine Again” be on the iTunes charts that day? Stay tuned.