The Obama presidential campaign will be remembered for its many first. The first bi-racial presidential candidate, the first presidential candidate to acknowledge his black children, the first presidential candidate with an African first name and the first presidential candidate to release a digital CD.

The compilation was put together by the good folks at Hidden Beach Recordings, best known for removing the arsine ramblings of ignorant buffoons from popular rap songs and making them palatable to anyone with a 5th grade education, in the UnRapped Jazz series. The CD is only available from the Obama campaign store, and will set you back $25 bucks for the digital download or $30 bucks for the physical CD. All proceeds from the the CD will go to the Obama/Biden ticket. After the election the CD will be released to retail stores around the country.

Bristol Palin’s African-american baby daddy speaks out (and promotes his music). This has been making the rounds for a couple of weeks and I’m surprised it hasnt died yet but people are still forwarding it around.

If you need evidence of the death of “Hip-hop” I offer the following two videos. First up is MC Frontalot with a video called “It is pitch dark”. MC Frontalot combines the lyrical skills of a Lupe Fiasco with the social inclinations of Maurice Moss . This is geek rap at its musical best.

On the other side is “Its cold in the D” a scary but heartfelt ode to urban and musical blight.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with another geek friend about the merits of buying the full-version of Spore rather then downloading it via BitTorrent. I was so excited about the games release that not only was I willing to buck the P2P trend and purchase the full $79 version but I was insisting that my friends do it to. Sure you could get it for free, I’d argue, but then you would have to get a crack for it and hope the crack still worked in a week or two mode. When Spore hit stores I was ready to buy into the shrink-wrapped goodness of the retail version, alas that was not to be.

“Dumbed down experience and draconian DRM”

That was the title of the very first review posted on Amazon for the full retail version of Spore by a poster going by the name of Erich Maria Remarque. The review goes on to outline a complaint that will be echoed in over 2,000 other reviewers, namely that the Sony/BMG styled DRM, effectively punishes the purchaser of legitimate versions of Spore. After 2,595 reviews fewer than 200 rated the game 4 or more stars (one can imagine that most of these reviews are from EA staffers).

A quick look on MiniNova shows 10 well seeded Spore torrents (>50 seeds + >100 leeches) of 76 available. Another 86 torrents where listed of various cracks and patches to the game to ensure gameplay. Clearly EA’s DRM efforts have had little impact on the ability of people to get the game without paying, nor has it limited the playability of the game, as several posters on the Mininova boards have pointed out. Everyone seems to be asking is asking is; Is this of the of

When you treat paying customers like thieves and make the purchased product less functional and more cumbersome the the free alternatives you will lose your customers. The US traditional music industry has be a shining example of this process and should function as an object lesson to other industries. Alas, EA seems not to have gotten the message and has managed to convert Spore from the most anticipated game of 208 to the most derided. So rather then a post about how awesome Spore is and how elated I am to finally have played the game, I am instead posting a missive on how I went from Promoter to detractor.

Use the Conversation Prism to help discover new services and sites, where conversations about your client’s brands are happening. Begin by observing the conversations you find and as you discover ways to add value and truly contribute to the conversation, jump-in participate in them. Identifying and understanding these services, how to leverage them and build strategies around them is the real challenge facing communications companies

A few months ago top BitTorrent meta-tracker and SuprNova successor, Mininova started distributing content for anyone that wanted to put media in-front of their millions of users. This weekend the good folks at Mininova upgraded their Content Distribution service to include stats generated though Google Charts API. The stats themselves are an interesting window into the pull of specific types of content in different areas of the world. More fodder for algorithmic marketing efforts that can process the data and pull out usable insights into what people want and how they want to get it.

This is part of the presentation I gave in Chicago, it started off the sessions and was intended to give people an understanding of the terms, phrases and language of Web 2.0 pundits and users. In a strange twist, all the audio from this session was lost and so the presentation is sans audio.

The story on the first two slides is that those words were literally something I heard during the Start-up Riot here in atlanta. I use that as an example of both the extreme nerdiness of which I am sometimes a part as well as how every much the language of Web 2.0 has moved beyond MBA speak. The point I try and drive home with these slides is that you need to know the lingo to be a part of the game and you need to understand the lingo to play it. I no longer include The Long Tail in presentations because it is so hard to convey the idea, the controversies and rebuttals without either spending 10 minutes on it or getting uber geeky and referring to power laws.

I’ve never been a fan of the Zune, back in November of ’06 I laid out 10 reasons the Zune would fail and was surprised by the number of Zune fans that told me I was dead wrong. Of course the ultimate expression of Zune fandom was when Steve Smith’s got himself tattooed with the ZUNE logo.

This was social media at its best. A fan interested in a product takes up the mantel of that product on behalf of the brand and evangelizes for it in their own communities. Even I had to second guess my Zune bashing, if a seemingly sane man was willing to permanently brand himself with its logo for no money or other consideration.

Fast forward two years and the flip side of social media shows how quickly a brand can be torn down. The Zune tattoo guy is back and he is not happy. In a video posted to YouTube mszunefan (aka Zune Tattoo guy) outlines why he is unhappy with Microsoft. In a fairly damning and somewhat compelling video he highlights why he thinks the product has failed and its lack of future prospects. Clearly indicating the the 50 thousand people who have watchde it so far that they should avoid the Zune.

From fan to foe in a Web 2.0 minute. Social media giveth and social media taketh away.

With gas prices through the roof and sales of gas guzzlers in free fall it really shouldnt come as a surprise that the big auto makers are readjusting plans and making changes. Besides blue-collar layoffs and office cut-backs, it seems that even the folks on Madison avenue may also have to worry a bit as auto-makers shift their spending to Digital or reduce spending altogether.

A couple of days ago Ad Age ran a story about Ford taking $20 million off the table as it reduced it’s ad spending from $300 million to only $100 million due to the free fall in truck sales. Another article that caught my eye, also on Ad Age, highlighted that GM has shifted close to 25% of its advertising from traditional platforms to digital media venues. Thats everything from SEO strategies to CRM implementations slated to get a 25% chunk of GM’s multi-billion dollar ad largess.

If you’re a traditional advertising agency this is the point where you get to quaking in your boots and if you’re a digital shop, my resume is up-to-date and ready to send.

At least the academics have really begun to build the tools that will make the celestial jukebox and unlimited music locker a commercially viable and practical product. Which is kinda funny when you think about it because thats actually the job of the Harvard MBA’s in the executives suites collecting big checks. If you work in or around media, these are the papers you should probably read and use to guide your thinking about the industry. Marketing, especially for media, will be largely algorithmic and these are some of the early experiments in creating the algorithms that will result in discovery and hopefully sales.

The papers that look the most promising:
– A Comparison Of Signal-Based Music Recognitionmmendation to Genre Labels, Collaborative Filtering, Musicological Analysis, Human Recommendation, and Random Baseline Terence Magno and Carl Sable

– Armonique: Experiments In Content-Based Similarity Retrieval Using Power-Law Melodic and Timbre Metrics Bill Manaris, Dwight Krehbiel, Patrick Roos and Thomas Zalonis

– Moodswings: A Collaborative Game For Music Mood Label Collection Youngmoo Kim, Erik Schmidt and Lloyd Emelle

– Oh Oh Oh Whoah! Towards Automatic Topic Detection In Song Lyrics Florian Kleedorfer, Peter Knees and Tim Pohle

-Social Playlists and Bottleneck Measurements : Exploiting Musician Social Graphs Using Content-Based Dissimilarity and Pairwise Maximum

I wasnt able to find a couple of them but if f anyone has any of these papers I would love to see them or if your blogging from the conference could you please post or email me a link.

This is a SlideCast presentation of online content offerings beyond BET.com. The discussion was lead by m friend Guy Primus VP of Interactive Media for Overbrook Entertainment. Edited out much of the Q&A and some of the incredibly fun banter we had during the session to save on time.

An interesting article from the good folks at TorrentFreak. While it wont have any of the humor and fireworks ThePirateBay brings to the party, I still think this will be an interesting battle. Mininova doesnt run a tracker or host files it is truly only pointing in the general direction of both legal and questionable torrent files. However the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BRIEN disagrees.
<Insert trite music industry is doomed comment here> blah </insert>

I noticed that the article keeps referencing the DMCA, which as a US law and as such probably has little applicability as a defense in a Dutch courtroom. Hope the folks at MiniNova have a better battle plan up their sleeve then “we kinda follow a fuzzy US law”. The Dutch agency persuing the case counts among is success forcing Demonoid offline for a couple of months and getting them to move their popular bitTorrent tracker to a different ISP.
<Insert music industry loves whack-a-mole comment here> blah </insert>

I thought this was a joke at first but apparently its real. Google is now officially in the health market. Read the full release after the jump but the following line baffled me.

“Partnership Allows Patients the Ability to Share their Prescription History”

Why exactly would I want to share my Valtrex, Vicodin and Viagra prescriptions with everyone in the pharmacy back office?

WALNUT CREEK, Calif., May 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Longs Drug Stores Corporation (NYSE:LDG) announced today a new collaboration with Google Health to provide a platform for sharing of information between patients and providers. Working with Google, Longs will be one of the first pharmacies to provide their customers with the ability to import their prescription information into Google Health allowing the consumer to share that information with providers and doctors of their choosing to better coordinate their care.

“Working with Google Health is a natural extension of the services we already offer as part of our commitment to our customers to ensure patient safety and healthcare quality. Longs patients will have complete control of medical record transmission to their Google Health accounts and can turn the transmissions on and off at their discretion. With patients having more options and better access to their medical records and medication history, they can better coordinate their care with their doctors and healthcare providers,” said Mike Laddon, Longs Drugs SVP, CIO.

Google Health launched to the public today at an event at Google. A new product, it allows users to store, organize and manage their medical records and personal health information online. Longs was included at the event as a “first mover” integration partner that Google is working with to demonstrate the value of sharing data between patients and providers.

In addition to Longs 514 retail pharmacies, it’s wholly owned subsidiary RxAmerica, which provides pharmacy benefits management services and Medicare beneficiary prescription drug plans, will also be able to offer clinical guidance and cost savings to its 8.7 million members.

“Participation in this program truly supports the emerging trend of consumer directed healthcare. RxAmerica will be able to use this partnership to position ourselves as a client and member-centric company — one that cares about maintaining the well-being of its members and controlling costs,” said John Gardnyk, President of RxAmerica.

Google Health is available on the web at https://www.google.com/health. A link to Longs is included in the partner directory.