Living in Michigan, with the highest unemployment rate in the country, we’re definitely experiencing some dark days. Every day, I’m grateful to have a job and skills to maintain employment especially as 1 in 4 of the people you meet don’t have a job, and haven’t had one for six months or more. Surely, this is as close to experiencing the Great Depression, that my grand parents told me about as a child, that I hope to come. However, amidst the despair there are signs of hope, and a lot of that hope resides with small business owners. Small businesses drive the economy, and it’s with that in mind that I wanted to share this interesting article on the small business equivalent of “open” business with this interesting CNN Money article called, Love a Local Business, Buy a Share…

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Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre… that’s a phrase that’s been echoing through my mind today. Why? Because it’s hard to put value on something until

a.) It’s gone

or

b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

It’s part of the human condition, I’d say, we take stuff for granted when it’s abundant and freely-available and then when it’s gone and is no longer free we start to miss it, it becomes an issue of scarcity. Two situations that ride this median between scarcity and abundance come to mind, both of which are music listening-oriented.

The first is a story of my local public radio station in East Lansing, WKAR, licensed through Michigan State University ran Music from the Hearts of Space for years. I donated regularly because I wanted to support the programming, specifically HOS, as it’s referred to by fans such as myself, but then one day it happened, and HOS was pulled. What could I have done? I don’t know. I did contact station management, and received the standard “budget cuts” reply, fact-based, to be sure, but not very helpful. Bummer.

The second story has to do with Pandora, the excellent music player that came out of the Music Genome Project. I’ve cultivated an excellent playlist on Pandora over the last couple years, and it’s a music outlet I hope not to lose. However, recently they started advertising and introduced a premium service. I’m going to sign up for the premium service, almost certainly, but it got me thinking about what’s lost when you don’t lend your support, and sometimes even when you do. This takes me back to my opening points, I talked about the bummer of losing HOS, which was free, abundant and easily taken for granted. However, it’s the second point that I think of when Pandora comes to mind – b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

When something goes from being free to costing money, no matter how good it was for free, it was just free so how you could make demandments, and have expectations, but when you’re a paying customer you expect a say, you expect a great product, a product worth paying for; the algorithms that brought you Yanni when you were trying to enhance your Harold Budd playlist just aren’t as acceptable when you’re paying. The whole mindset changes.

This is one of the things I love about Google. No matter how much free stuff they give out (of course it’s not just out of the goodness their corporate heart), they don’t slouch on their offerings because they’re free. They beat expectations, they give you stuff you want before you even know you want it. Thankfully, they’ve found revenue streams outside of their software, unlike Pandora, which is the revenue stream like many other software as service Web sites.

Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre, as I’m thinking about it now, means that something is free of a price, monetary or otherwise, but with regard to libre, it’s totally free and price can’t be attached to it. That was the experience of HOS on the radio, and Pandora when it was ad-free — Libre… However, for a time, it was gratis, too… More thoughts on difference, here.

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This post was one that was originally posted here, but kind of got lost in the mix, and I wanted to repost it for two reasons. First, this is a great example of using the Web to create and be creative. I was surfing Flickr, a free picture sharing site, and I found this great series by Indy Kethdy, he had them marked with a Creative Commons license, so I downloaded them, created a video, and then composed a soundtrack to the photostream. Then I posted the video on YouTube to share. This sort of the full-circle of open sharing, social media and creativity on the Web. My second reason is less profound, I know the site has some new readers, and I thought that they might enjoy checking out this video montage. Enjoy.

Indy Kethdy Video Montage with Matt Borghi Soundtrack

Surfing Flickr, as I so often do, I find images that inspire me. Last Friday night, though, I found the fantastic work of Indy Kethdy. I spent hours, and hours pouring over his pictures of Lake Michigan from around Wisconsin. I started to hear music in my ears, and imagined putting these images to sound. I was in luck, because Indy had set his pictures with a Creative Commons license that allowed me to make a video of his photos, put them to music, and then post it here for you to view. I highly recommend visiting Indy’s Flickr page – http://www.flickr.com/people/indykethdy/ and getting a taste of his excellent artistry first-hand. First, though, check out the video homage and the music that I created from the inspiration of his gorgeous still images:

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Came across an interesting article here about a local Michigan company, Oneupweb from Traverse City, traveling around the state in a motor home offering up free advice on digital strategy, SEO and online marketing in general.

My initial reaction to this article was two-fold: First, what a great idea and second, this such an excellent example of a socially responsible Michigan firm doing their part to try and help those struggling in the Michigan economy.

However, what Oneupweb teaches here isn’t just about helping Michigan, but really it’s about outreach and social responsibility. As I said in my post here, the Web has always been social and it’s always been about sharing with others. It’s one thing to to do this only in the digital domain of the Web, from the comfort of one’s office or living room, such as I’m doing now, but it’s something else entirely to take this sharing and exchange on the road to meet the man on the street where he lives. Very inspiring.

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A lot is being said about “free” these days, especially with the release of Chris Anderson’s book on the subject, but ever since I came online I’ve been interested in the economics of free, whether it was freeware, free music, or free information.

Story: I ran a series of free Mp3 downloads back in 2003 at mattborghi.com, and those downloads brought in more hits to my Web site than being featured on the nationally-syndicated space music program, Hearts of Space. To be fair, the program didn’t feature my music, exclusively, and no link was included to my site, but I thought that it would at least have generated some inquiries, and it did. However, I didn’t see nearly the response that I thought I would from that exposure compared to the interest generated by the free monthly download series.

It’s with that experience in mind that I released a variety of my long-form ambient music tracks to be freely available (some of which are from that monthly download series). Here’s the official announcement from my homepage at mattborghi.com:

Freely available Mp3s of long-form ambient works

I have freely released several hours worth of my long form works in mp3 form here, approximately a dozen tracks. Most of these tracks haven’t been available in quite a long time. Some go back as far as ten years and my early Mp3.com page, some were out-takes from records, and the 2003 series was a monthly download series that I did throughout 2003 during a particularly prolific period. I hope to add other long form works over started adding these tracks.

My reasons for doing this are two-fold. First, these tracks haven’t been available in a long time, and to me it makes more sense to put them out into the universe, where people can enjoy them, than let them take up space on my hard drive .

The second reason has to do with my how I measure the success of social media. Social media metrics and measurements are something that many folks talk about, and ponder but I think that good social media metrics aren’t in hit rankings or page views, but rather in how many people you are getting your ideas out to. The more people that download you free ambient music tracks, watch your videos, read your blog, etc… and comment on, think about, bring up in discussion, include in status updates or generally take an interest in your ideas is the best way to measure the success of social media.

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There’s a lot of talk about social media and the role that companies can and/or should play in social media; but the one thing that I’ve learned is that there’s almost no place for social media in the closed organization. Companies that aren’t transparent and are secretive don’t have much of a chance with social media because social media really requires you to put it all out there, and open yourself to public scrutiny. With that said, it’s important to note that if you’re a closed company then your employees and customers are probably already out there in the social media sphere talking about you.

This is where I qualify the first sentence where I talk about there being “almost no place for social media in the closed organization”‘; there’s always plenty of room for “reputation management” or as it was called in the bygone days of yesteryear damage control. However, this part is also likely lost on the closed organization, because they believe that keeping their head down and going with the flow is the best approach, and sometimes it is, a little passive for my taste, but I could see how some might view it as effective, at least from the perspective of ‘if you ignore something it will go away’.

However, I would submit that in the age of social media, or the Web, in general, an organization that tries to live under those old rules is really just signing their own death certificate. It may not happen right away, but like so many great companies that have crumbled, it will happen slowly, until all falls apart, and everyone stands around in the aftermath scratching their heads and asking how this could happen. Yes, it’s a leap from not using social media to an organization’s foundation crumbling, but it becomes less of a leap when the organization has closed up so tightly that they’ve turned their back on their customers.

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Reading this Businessweek article makes me think that I am quite sad to see that Yahoo is giving away their search business to Microsoft in the deal announced this week. To be sure, Yahoo has struggled for years as Google has claimed market share, but going over to the dark side and selling out to Microsoft seems sad and unfortunate to me. On the one hand, Yahoo has had a lot of problems, and has lost a lot of money over the years, on the other hand, Microsoft has had a lot of problems with their products over the years, and they’ve made a lot of money. Perhaps it’s a marriage made in heaven, where the bottom line trumps value, but it’s still sad. Yahoo was a Web pioneer, trying new things and attempting to define what the Web could be. However, with this deal, it seems they have thrown in the towel.

It will remain to be seen how things will go for YaBing, or BingHoo, or whatever the combination that adds Yahoo’s search assets to Bing will be called. A lot of folks like to hang their hat on the idea that Bing, somehow, with it’s new interface, and marketing push, is different than Live Search, but really, that’s just advertising dollars at work, because the Microsoft flavor of search is as crummy as it’s always been, and maybe that will change for them with the Yahoo deal. However, I doubt it somehow, because they’ve just never gotten what the Web is about, and I’d submit that Web’s openness is fundamentally incongruent with Microsoft’s culture, and philosophy, thus making it impossible for them ever to get more market share than they can buy… RIP Yahoo – “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

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Innovation can’t happen in the closed organization. Innovation, by its very nature, requires openness and transparency. This is true, because innovation, generally, like great inventions, comes from necessity, and if an organization or a group is trying to innovate under false pretenses, or a feigned necessity, then whatever is created on is built on a cracked foundation, and surely won’t last or at least last very long.

Merriam-Webster defines innovation as 1.) The introduction of something new 2.) A new idea, method or device… In either of the instances above, an organization or group needs to start the discussion not with regard to what it takes to be innovative, but rather by looking at what is broken, then reviewing organizational structure, past fixes/workarounds, and best practices if they apply. If none of these pieces fit the problem, then, and only then, it’s time to innovate.

Sadly, a lot of organizations don’t get this and throw this corporatism around lightly.

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Social media is a new term for a concept as old as the Web itself. As long as the Web, as a network of connected users has existed, it’s been a social medium. So when you have folks sharing things in a variety of formats (i.e. still images, audio, video, etc.) somehow it becomes social media. That’s it. It’s really that simple. There’s no mystery or secret to what marketers and communicators are calling social media; it’s what the Web has always been from YouTube and Facebook, today, to pimply-faced teens swigging soda on Dungeons and Dragons BBS’ (Bulletin Board Systems) all through the late 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s.

Social media has evolved, the technologies have changed, and the user-interfaces have gotten better, but the core of what the Web is, has changed very little. In recent years, particularly since the Web 2.0 hype began, marketers have tried to frame social media as something else, some kind of communications or awareness panacea whereby you herd your fans/customers into some kind of digital stable, and get a direct, captive audience. This has worked to a very limited extent because as soon as there’s somebody building a fence or stable, there are ten other people building wide open pastures where users can roam free. I’m not sure a model that promotes captivity over freedom will ever exist, online or elsewhere.

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Doing the right thing isn’t easy; it takes courage, follow-through and a near-constant defense of what’s right. It’s not that people don’t want to do what’s right, but it’s not the path of least resistance. Sometimes, though, you can’t fight all the good fights, but rather you have to pick your battles strategically.. What will have the best outcome? What are the pros and cons? How would this  benefit the team, the organization, the world, etc… Sometimes this makes it easier to choose, sometimes not. Doing the right thing, often, is tough, but there’s personal solace in knowing you did the right thing. Somehow, this is what matters more than anything.

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