Jamie Beckland

Many hands have been wrung about the future of music. The music industry has seen year over year of increasingly steep declines for a decade. Think about that for a minute: in 2001, the business fell by 3%. In 2002, it fell another 11%. In 2003, it recovered slightly. But the dead cat bounce was confirmed in the subsequent years. The industry has posted double digit declines in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. In 1999, the industry was $14.3 billion. In 2009, it was less than half – $6.3 billion.

Can you hear the clanging death bells? Music will surely die! This fate has been proclaimed everywhere, but, of course, misses the point completely. If we learned nothing else from the housing bust, let us at least remember that more isn’t always better – sometimes it’s just more. Continue Reading »

Tags: Backstreet Boys, Dave Carroll, Megan McArdle, music industry, MySpace, Shania Twain, The Atlantic, United Breaks Guitars, YouTube

In The Great Reset, Richard Florida asks the question that all policy makers should be asking: what happens after a Depression?

This shockingly simple question opens the door to look at history as a guide for what is to come for the U.S. economy. Florida reviews two different  economic slowdowns in American history, the Long Recession of the 1870s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, and compares those to our most recent financial meltdown of 2007-present.

While there are a number of accounts of what went wrong, and whose fault it was that the economy tanked (Big greedy banks! The dollar-hungry, exchange-rate fixing Chinese! Government’s insatiable quest for higher levels of home ownership! Homeowners’ binge-spending, house-as-ATM profligacy!), Florida largely leaves the causes of the crisis aside. This is really for the better. Florida is a metropolitan sociologist – primarily concerned with what makes cities, and what makes them better.

But, Florida hits on a larger theme that has so far been ignored by most Great Recession books: what now? Continue Reading »

Tags: Arlington Virginia, Depression, Dupont Circle, high speed rail, Long Recession, Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, transportation

Sorry for the delay in updates. I have been in the process of moving, which has taken me away from blogging.

Now, everything is in the new house, and many things even have a place to live!

Continue Reading »

Tags: externalities, houseboat, moving

With recent developer conferences from Facebook and Twitter, and the forthcoming Google I/O conference, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the breathless excitement of possibility. It gives tech blogs many millions of pageviews to chronicle each minor announcement as if it were a game-changer.

But, in the weeks and months that follow, the sheen inevitably wears off, and developers start determining which innovations are truly exciting, and which are just so much hype.

It’s the community that makes are breaks these companies – a point that is very apparent when we look back just two short years, at the hottest technology of 2008: Web3D.

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Tags: DimDim, Elf Yourself, Erica Driver, Forrester, Gizmoz, GoToMeeting, Linden Labs, online identity, Second Life, Skype, Transmutable, Virtual Heroes, Web3D

Amongst those that talk social media, the most popular conversation is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is the prom king, and the entire high school commons of the blogosphere knows what’s going on with him at all times. That’s part of the reason why WebMediaBrands acquired Social Times, publisher of allfacebook.com. Check out these uniques for All Facebook – growth has tripled in Q1 in part because of increased interest in the platform:

But, there is a much more important conversation that deserves more attention: how collaboration tools are changing internal operations within organizations. These cultural changes have little to do with Facebook, but the impact will be much greater than Facebook’s impact by itself.

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Tags: AllFacebook.com, economic growth, Elon Musk, Enterprise 2.0, facebook, GDP, journalism, productivity, Social Times, SpaceX, WebMediaBrands

Facebook recently announced that they will give up personally identifiable information to certain “approved” sites that use Facebook Connect. Within the tech industry, this is seen as a scary invasion of privacy, but I am not sure if it is really a very big deal. This isn’t a very big step forward from a marketing perspective, and in the end, most users will be better off.

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Tags: danah boyd, digital marketing, facebook, Facebook Connect, Huffington Post, Jason Kincaid, marketing, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Mediaplex, PEI, PII, privacy, Quantcast, ReadWriteWeb, SXSW, TechCrunch, tradeoffs, Traffic MarketPlace

Confession time: I have been looking at houses online. I salivate over the new listings every day.

We are settled into Portland enough that buying a house seemed like a reasonable option.

But, this topsy turvy market really means that the best bet is to stay on the sidelines. I won’t be buying a house any time soon. And you shouldn’t either.

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Tags: Alice in Wonderland, Alt-A mortgages, buyers market, crazy people, economics, GM, househunting, housing, interest rates, Option ARM mortgages, Portland, real estate, supply and demand, Suze Orman, The Fed, unemployment

Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price, will scare you. And it should. If you’re in the business of selling anything, you need to think about how you might be able to give it away. Because if you don’t, someone else will. Continue Reading »

Tags: Chris Anderson, free