Bob, the third guy at EM finally caves and starts a weblog.

I think there must be some sort of inverse correlation between the amount of bloggers a company has and the amount of productive work they get done.

Rumor: Donny is starting a weblog.

Any takers on this bet? John will stop weblogging when he moves back to Waterloo.
2:56:01 PM   []

And it only took 5 minutes to install, we should have done this years ago!
2:10:17 PM   []

Curt: 'Maybe I'm dense and maybe this was your point, but didn't you end up agreeing with a lot of slashdot's critique of fairtunes?'

I've ignored Curt's email for a week now. It's probably time for a response. So here goes. What follows are 5 critiques of Fairtunes and my response:

• We'd never actually send the money to the artists: Disagree
  We sent money to artists so I obviously disagree with this assertion. Though that said there is still a lot of money that hasn't been sent because it's not cost effective to do so (it'd cost more to send then the amount we're sending)
• How would *we* find the artists: Agree
  We did a pretty good job of tracking down artists but it was a very time consuming job often involving expensive long distance phone calls and dealing with arrogant management companies
• Tipping will never work: Undecided
  The jury is out on this one though I must say that Amazon is doing a pretty good job at it.
• Our business model wasn't viable: Agree
  You have to bring in a lot of money to make the business work. When I say a lot I mean 10's of millions of dollars.
• Our costs were too high: Agree
  Even in the 21st century it costs a fortune to write and process a payment to an artist (~$2.50 an artist in disbursements PLUS labor).

But why Fairtunes did not succeed was because there was never enough buy in from either the fans or artists. Yes we had fans who sought out Fairtunes to send money to their favorite bands, and yes there were bands who stuck a Fairtunes button on their page but we never succeeded in showing that tipping could be wildy successfully for a band.

Something that I never thought of but what Gary pointed out to me was that Fairtunes was not setup to benefit from Metcalfe's law that states the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. While users who sent money made our totals go up it didn't result in any sort of snowball effect of more money coming in. To bring about some sort of network effect we would have had to have created some sort of tie between fans and artists that superseded that of simply a financial transaction so that there would be that feedback loop which would cause the network to grow.

And of course at the end of the day it's fairly simple to disintermediate Fairtunes who was trying to disintermediate the record companies. We recognized this problem and had several ideas of how we could add value to the chain so that artists and fans would be motivated to use Fairtunes as a solution but we were unable to implement them before we ran out of steam and unfortunately it seems that the 'new Fairtunes' is going off in a direction that allows again for themselves to be easily disintermediated.
11:29:02 AM   []

• Kids' TV bulging with fast food
• McVeggie Burgera passing the test

I don't often make recommendations here so pay attention. YOU MUST READ Fast Food Nation.

I recently finished reading it and once I'm done mentally digesting it I'll post a rant or two. I'll also note that I haven't eaten at McDonald's since reading it.
9:11:20 AM   []