It occurred to me that there were 3 notable launches last week.

On Wednesday, Seth Godin announced the launch of Brands in Public which describes itself as a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite brands. Each dashboard is a Squidoo Lens, aggregating content and opinions from other sites such as Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter and the Blogospere in general. Squidoo doesn’t purport to have created any of the content itself, it’s merely a convenient way of viewing (viz. a lens) this information in one place. All the content would be easily discoverable by going to a few specific websites and spending a bit of time on Google.

The response was largely positive but a certain amount of backlash prompted a follow-up from Seth at the end of the week, the upshot being the some of the Lenses were removed from the site. In Seth’s own words:

“other people didn’t like elements of it. And they were direct in letting me know.”

Meanwhile, I was alerted to the relatively innocuous launch of Google Sidewiki by a twitter post from Jeremiah Owyang.  Having emerged from Google Labs, Sidewiki “allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage” if, that is, you use Firefox or IE with the Google Toolbar installed.

Internet users without the requisite toolbar can still see Sidewiki content as it is simply just HTML content hosted on the Google site. For example, Jeremiah followed up his post by contributing a Sidewiki entry of his own. I think that we can expect to see Sidewiki content appearing in Google search results at some point in the near future.

The most important consequence of this is stated by Jeremiah:

“recognize that you don’t own your corporate website –your customers do”

In essence, Sidewiki allows any other internet user to post content on top of your own website. For everything that you post online, Google has kindly provided a built-in comments facility whether you want it or not.

The cynic in me would argue that this came about in an attempt to usurp Twitter from its current top spot as the commenting (and moaning) medium of choice. Otherwise, why else would Google release an API so that third-party developers can leverage the content posted on Sidewiki? You can tell it’s helped Twitter along by the mryiad applications that connect with their platform.

This leads me on to the third launch of the week. OneForty is “A Better Way to Discover Twitter Apps” although I’m not quite sure why “to” is the only word not to warrant capitalization. What it boils down to is an App Store for Twitter – a place for application developers to promote their apps and for Twitter users to review them.

It’s remarkably easy to use, in part because it uses the OAuth protocol to seamlessly connect you to the Twitterverse, but also due to a very well put together site. I would like someone to explain to me exactly what their favicon is meant to be though.

The response to OneForty has been overwhelmingly positive. With over 1500 apps leveraging the Twitter platform it was both difficult for users to discover ways to get the most out of their Twitter account and even more difficult for app developers to promote their product to the right people.  OneForty allows app developers to say “we have a product” and then people can say “we love it” or “we hate it” or even write a mini essay critiquing its finer points.

You can see it’s not a million miles away from what Sidewiki set out to achieve so one wonders why the latter received so much negative publicity. My guess is that it’s the same reason why the objectors to Brands in Public were quick to have their pages removed:

No one wants to hear bad things said about them.

They don’t want to have a conversation that they can’t control so it leads to a one-sided adoption of social media, but leaving out the social part. A marketer that does this becomes the bore at the party – only talking about themselves. It’s no wonder that there is so little trust for corporate blogs. It’s a shame that they don’t take a leaf out of the other two sites. Seth Godin is an evangelist for permission marketing, and the point of Brands in Public is to provide a vehicle for corporate entities to see what the Internet is saying about them and then respond accordingly. Seth’s response to those that don’t want to be a part of it is understandable – we’ll just shut you down and make room for those that do want to be a part of it. At the other end of the spectrum in OneForty, where the brands themselves are embracing the opportunity to be talked about and to engage their customers in conversations. Hell, OneForty itelft tried to engage its customers by providing its very own Sidewiki in the form of a UserVoice forum, which allows users to directly comment on the site they are using. The best thing about this is that OneForty has and will listen to the feedback that they are given.

I don’t know if Google Sidewiki will be a good or a bad thing for the Internet, but I do know that it will move the goalposts because there isn’t a brand big enough to convince Google to take the facility of their individual website, and as a consequence corporate brands will have to follow Jeremiah’s advice:

“Don’t be reactive to negative content – embrace social content now.”

I hope they do, as all too often the standard corporate response to something that isn’t part of their programme is:

“Shut them down; or shut them up; at least shut the door and hide under the desk.”

and at the end of the day that benefits nobody.

Just round the corner from my flat in Belsize Park is an impressive former church which I occasionally see Japanese tourists taking photos of. I discovered a while ago that it had been the recording studio where Pink Floyd recorded “Dark Side of the Moon”.

This week I found out that it is apparently still in use as a studio, and that is where there was a meeting of such music industry and internet policy luminaries as Lily Allen and that bloke out of Radiohead.

Their conclusions were one step ahead of the government at least, in that they poo-pooed the idea of having the internet accounts of file sharing ‘perpetrators’ blocked, although the idea of ’squeezing’ them is perhaps sillier. However the nature of their and the government’s debate on the subject shows how flawed our approach is to policy and the internet.

The application of these restrictions is impractical and a burden which service providers are hardly keen on. This isn’t the government being supportive of companies which are supposed to provide the critical infrastructure for our new digital economy.

Inevitably any attempt to do this will result in accidentally targeting the wrong people (my brother in law’s work at the Institut d’Astrophysique de PARIS was nearly shut down by a similar scheme which detected his lab was sending large deep space recordings over the internet)

Anyway anyone who is more than a casual computer user and file sharer will find ways around whatever monitoring is put in place.

The more fundamental problem is the focus on attempting to prop up a failed business model and ignore the real challenges ahead. It’s a con that artists are the ones will suffer if we don’t do this, it’s the record company industry which has been ripping off consumers and artists for decades who will suffer, and if they have to cut down on ‘flowers for the model’ it means that money is actually more likely to go to artists or be recycled into other areas of the economy.

Instead we should be giving support to attempts to monetise these inevitable developments. The fact that it is major labels who hold the biggest stakes in Spotify shows that despite their protestations they at least can see which way the wind is blowing.

This hang up on the music industry and it’s prime place in the recent Goverment Digital strategy report also shows completely the wrong approach to supporting the digital industries that might actually get us out of the multi billion £ hole we are in the UK. All it does is introduce extra tax, quangos and legislation of no benefit whatsoever to industry in the broad sense or the individual. Nevermind the worrying continuing encroachment of state sponsored snooping.

There is no focus on doing things that might actually encourage innovative businesses in UK and make the most of the great intellectual capital we have in this country. If these do happen here rather than over the Atlantic then it will be inspite of all the structural barriers that exist here in comparison.