Recently, beleaguered music companies discovered that what Steve Jobs has been doing to them for the last few years is what they’d been doing to consumers for many years previous to that and guess what? It hurts!

Then over the weekend at Midem, Qtrax boldly ventured forth with its ad-supported free download business model- ‘From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally’

Sadly no deals had been finalised. As Bart the Amnaoiseach would say, it was all ’smokes and daggers’. You couldn’t make up such ineptness - according to themselves, Qtrax have been working on this for 4 years.

Kudos to the Qtrax PR people for getting the (wrong) word out there, but surely they realised who they were trying to play hardball with? When I initially scanned the Times article I was surprised that the big four music companies were actually doing something to try and loosen Apple’s firm grasp on their online revenues.

However it seems that isn’t the case. We can look forward to more attempted litigation aimed at filesharers in jurisdictions outside the US. We can also look forward to a continued stream of focus-group identified pre-chewed ‘music’ which we didn’t ask for. I’m looking at you, Louis Walsh,

a man who still equates artistic worth with financial success as that allows him to cast himself as a sort of modern-day Phil Spector, instead of someone who makes his living selling children’s music to slow adults.

Thank you Graham Linehan

The £500K (Sterling) launch party, the hype, the advertising-supported business model, it’s all sounding awfully familiar. I’m also taken with the eagerness of understaffed weekend newsrooms to reprint press releases. Some things never change.

Of course, it could be a fiendishly clever reverse-hype anti-marketing campaign. Mention of Qtrax will waft around the web for a while, then just when the buzz is dying down the CEOs of Warners, Sony, EMI and BMG will appear on the (obviously inferior) screens of non-Apple MP3 players. Dressed as the Fab Four, they’ll tell us that it was all just a clever jape, and if you point your browser to Ptrax.com you can download up to at least 300 free songs. Yay!

If you’re still interested, have a look at Qtrax. Will they still be around at the end of the year?

Edit: Excellent piece in the Guardian.

Seth Godin does have a knack for stating the obvious / rephrasing what is already well known. The fact that he makes a very good living out of it shows that a lot of people have a habit of unnecessarily complicating things. Like those incurious bankers in CitiBank and Merril Lynch. Now that people outside the rarefied circles of financial engineering are becoming belatedly curious about CDOs and other esoteric beasts, it seems the bankers don’t actually know where they’ve squirelled away their imaginary money.

Not to worry, interest rate cuts will sort out anything.

Two Tits And A Vote officially launched today. Its an advocacy group for improved women’s health services, and the initial campaign is for better access to breast care facilities for women. Since the strength of any advocacy group is in it’s numbers, this campaign needs you, but with a twist. You don’t have to spend time holding placards, chanting slogans or doing any marching. Well, you may have to march to a post-box, but that’s about it.

Since we’re all cash-rich and time-poor, the site lets you

1. Sign a petition online. Doesn’t take long at all, you don’t even have to locate a working pen. Since this is a serious issue, no Mickey Mouse / Wolfe Tones signatures please.

2. Write a letter to the Minister for Health and Children highlighting this issue. This doesn’t take long either, since you can grab a ready-made letter that you just have to print out, sign and post. You will need to locate a functioning pen, envelope and stamp for this. If you’re feeling especially ranty you can download a Word version to ‘customise’ yourself. Then, if you’re particularly proud of some of your invective and would like to share it with more people than just Mary Harney and you ask nicely, I’m sure Sabrina will be happy to oblige you with your own little corner of the Internet. It mightn’t quite have the prestige of the Irish Times letters page, but it’s better than nothing.

3. Send a postcard to Mary Harney. You don’t need a pen or a stamp for this either, and it costs much less than an orange-mocha-frappucino. The postcard looks so good you’ll want to get one for yourself as well.

4. Sign up for the newsletter. You’ll only receive mail when there is a new campaign that needs your help.

5. Help promote the site. Sabrina has chicklets, sidebar images and the one above to be used on your site. (Pro tip - 1. Use these images on your website and cram the alt tags with the word ‘tits’. 2. ? 3. Profit. )

If you’ve done all of this and still have time on your hands, go and digg the story.

If you don’t know what those last few lines mean, it’s ok. You obviously just haven’t spent enough time on the mostly-satano-porn Internets. Sixty to seventy per-cent of the Internet may be pornography, but an undertaking like this will hopefully illustrate that successful grassroots campaigns can be organised and conducted online.

More: Avoiding Life :

I really enjoyed listening to Bart opining on the absolute turmoil on world stock exchanges earlier.

Speaking to reporters in Dublin, Mr Ahern admitted he was “concerned” about the current volatility. He said he and the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Brian Cowen had spoken “a number of times” in recent days.

I wish I was reassured, but unfortunately circumstances have intervened, and we the plain people of Ireland may suffer. Bart would surely have had a lot of sage advice to offer Cowen if only he hadn’t suffered the tragic bout of amnesia which has erased all his memories of the period when he was Minister for Finance. If this hadn’t happened, the country would surely be safe and impervious to any external economic upheavals.

“Our economic policies are well thought out and are very sound, our budgetary policies are very sound.”

The Irish Times fails to point out that Bart is obviously referring to the European Central Bank when he says ‘our’. After all, it is the ECB which dictates our economic policies.

“But from our point of view, it’s important that we realise that economic developments in both the European Union and the rest of the world aren’t as open to America.”

…

“We have flexible markets which allow us to respond flexibly to adverse developments when they happen.”

Anyone any idea what this means? I don’t. I do know that Bart’s definition of flexible seems to be as flexible as a flexy thing though. In 2006

“Being a small, open economy gives us an inherent flexibility”

Seems that flexibility is the thing to aspire to, whether your economy is open, closed or grapefruit.

The Irish Auctioneers and Valuers’ Institute (IAVI) released a lil’ report today. The report states that there are 40,000* (count the zeros) empty apartment units in Dublin. IAVI president Robert Ganly interprets for us mere mortals - “Overall, I would say to people that the market is beginning to stabilise. The worst is over.”

Now, here’s what these same boyos said a year ago about the property market - “Property prices in the State should grow by around 4 to 5 per cent this year, according to the body representing estate agents.”

Here’s another ‘estate agent’ from across the pond (I use quotes because Mr. Adkins seemed to experience, em, favourable treatment and exposure on certain media outlets). Marvel at the similarity of the style.

Now, a concise explanation of exactly what is going on on the financial markets.

Edit: Sadly, Newstalk don’t seem to be podcasting Kiberd’s comments.

Still waiting for the piece de resistance, an audio clip of an angry Damien Kiberd having a go at all the doom-mongers on the breakfast show this morning. He must have felt truly vindicated by the close of trading on the European stock exchanges. It all seemed very rosy by 5pm, didn’t it Damo? Biggest one day losses since 9/11, and it was a public holiday in the US.

But back to the Irish property market. There’s one developer trying to turn his apartment complex into a hotel. A few hundred yards away, another developer has reopened the hotel he recently bought, hoping to convert it into a super-swanky apartment complex that reached almost all the way to the sky. These are the signs of a market that is functioning correctly, right? The fun-da-mentals are sound?

If the above gives you pause for thought, don’t worry too much about it. Tom ‘I’ll say anything on behalf of anyone’ Parlon is on hand to reassure you.

Question 4: will the doomsayers be proved right (needs RealPlayer)

Note how upset Tom gets when Matt Cooper mentions the elephant in the room, sorry, the empty houses all over the country.

Interest rates? Tom knows - “they’re always going to be about 4 per cent”

Even the FT have rumbled us for being a shower of chancers.

Edit, 10:15pm. The chancers are starting to fight amongst themselves. Geoff Tucker, Hooke & MacDonald’s chief ‘economist’ is on Newstalk claiming that the number of vacancies is closer to ‘a few thousand’.

Should I be worried that I know 90% of what Loren Feldman is talking about here?

Speaking of Facebook, via BrightSpark, Jim Meskauskas on Facebook in 2008

Toilet paper, after all, is also rather popular. Certainly everyone I know uses it. But I have yet to see ads on it.

He’s right, y’know. There’s a whole new rash of irrational exuberance about the revolutionary advertising prospects for Facebook and friends. It all sounds similar to the initial buzz around online advertising (long before AdWords) and the silly money charged for CPM banners. Prices justified because of the millions of eyeballs a big site could deliver. Then it became apparent that direct mail response rates were superb compared to the majority of banner click-through rates.

Valuations of social networking sites are based on subscriber numbers and the potential to generate revenue per subscriber. Highly-targetted advertising and affiliate sales seem to be the only plausible means to this end. Subscription numbers are this year’s eyeballs.

There are differences of course, such as the attempt to badge Facebook and others as platforms, rather than mere websites. That argument only goes so far, since Facebook’s current perceived advantage rests on the fact that it is a walled garden for user data (as evidenced by the Scoble debacle, which had nothing to do with privacy laws). The Beacon mis-step was anything but. If your competitive advantage vanishes when the walls come down, you’d better cash in whilst the walls are still up.

Ask mobile operators about that (see Vodafone Live!, Orange and how difficult operators and handset manufacturers made it for the average user to find their way out onto the wilds of the mobile Internet). The mobile operators still have control of the pipes, or enough of the pipes to charge for access. Facebook doesn’t have that luxury.

There seems to be a tendency to forget that, whether one approves or not, what media does is deliver audiences to advertisers. This is why Google creates lots of applications. It builds an audience. If the application can also gather consumer information all the better. A premium price can be charged to the advertiser based on the probability that the user may be somewhat disposed to view the ad. Simple as that.

I’ll be moving these ’serious’ posts to their own location soon

Eurovision entry taken care of. I am proud to present

John Waters featuring Al Gore, ‘They Can’t Stop The Satanism’

Some context might be necessary here …

Fanny Waters is at it again, Mulley

No child of John Waters will ever marry … a blogger, Daragh O’Brien

John Waters on blogs, Twenty Major

More on John Waters and blogs, Twenty Major again

Fanny Waters’ blog

I happened upon these gems whilst having a quick whizz around a few Irish blogs. Everyone’s all a-flutter about the Irish Blog Awards, ya see. For next year, I’d like to propose a few more categories.

Best link-baiting? But now that I’ve linked to the post, what does that make me? A post-modern SEO expert? Very meta, anyway.

Best troll (it kicks off with comment #18 from ‘Anonymous’)?

Best ‘old media’ commentary on new media? Couple of candidates here - Morning Ireland gets to grips with social networking. Starring the one and only John Waters, who has access to much classified information about the Internet that the rest of us mortals aren’t privy to. I’m crying as I write this, etc.

Best description of Brendan O’Connor? Fat Mammycat, Twenty Major.

NB: reposted under different title due to Wordpress and Opera having a little tiff. Sorry.

What are the chances?

I’m flattered …

It’s been years since I first stumbled across this, but it did bring back some fond memories. Worryingly, it’s still terrifyingly accurate. How many of these are real, and how many are generated?

mesh next-generation channels
productize magnetic portals
recontextualize cross-platform communities
productize cutting-edge synergies
deliver granular platforms
aggregate bleeding-edge metrics
incentivize dynamic ROI
redefine viral mindshare

By the way, I am not an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan. The damn song just happened to snag in my head as I was writing this.