Jane Siberry profits by making paying for her music optional.(0)
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
Page 2 of 2
Appearing in Monday’s National Post, A Barenaked guide to music copyright reform is a statement by Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page on behalf of the the newly-formed Canadian Music Creators Coalition.
Including Canadian artists such as Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace, Dave Bidini of Rheostatics, Billy Talent, John K. Sampson of Weakerthans, Sloan, Andrew Cash, Bob Wiseman, a co-founder of Blue Rodeo, and of course the Barenaked Ladies, the CMCC aims to promote changes to music copyright law that will “protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies.”
I’m actually surprised this didn’t happen sooner. It’s great to finally see some artists from major labels speaking out against prosecution of MP3 file sharers and the tightening of controls over media that threatens to drive away paying fans.
As a great fan of the Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Our Lady Peace and Blue Rodeo, it’s especially heartening to see so many of my favourite artists working to free their music so that I can continue to support them and enjoy their work a paying fan for years to come.
Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog is always great reading, particularly if you’re interested in how people take in information. Though it has a definite tilt towards the world of Java development, most of the articles speak in general terms about learning and design — you won’t see any code here.
Kathy’s recent article The myth of “keeping up” really hit home with me. Loosely speaking, my day job is to monitor the entire realm of web technology. Realistically, this is one of those areas that is bigger than one person’s brain. Even if I spent 24 hours a day reading about the latest web technology (let alone reporting on it), I wouldn’t be able to keep up.
So… it’s time to let that go. You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you’ll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, “Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band…”
I never liked Weezer anyway.
Kathy offers plenty of good advice for being selective and efficient about what you choose to stay on top of. She mentions jumping on aggregators, tools that collect information from many sources and distill it down into an efficient view.
My aggregator of choice is BlogBridge (I even contribute code to the project, which is open source and cross platform), which has a whole range of subtle but indispensable tools that allow me to filter my information intake according to the amount of time I have available on any given day.
Another item of advice that Kathy offers is to track down an expert in any field you want to learn and get a breakdown what things you absolutely must learn, what things you probably should learn, what things would be nice to learn, and what things you can ignore.
Kathy goes on to suggest that technical publishers like SitePoint (where I work) should be thinking about these issues too, rather than just pumping out bricks of undigestable knowledge.
There’s an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).
I personally think SitePoint is doing a pretty decent job of this already, but there is always room for improvement.