know | Future

In an effort to drive consumers to their pay subscription service as well as opening up an additional stream of advertising revenue, Napster announced yesterday that it is opening up free streaming of its entire 2 million song strong library.  The catch? You can only listen to a track five times before it is locked out.

They also announced Napsterlinks a music linking service so you can send a link to that deep track you found down at the thin end of the tail to a friend  as well as Narchive a social network set up around the Napster library.
I imagine it is only a matter of time before somebody rips the entire Napster library by capturing the audio in real-time and hand cataloging the content.  Though my calculations put the time it would take to play 2,000,000 five minute songs around twenty years…

In the April issue of the Digital Journalist, there is a column by Terry Heaton that proposes an interesting concept for the future of advertising in a consumer centric pull environment. Terry posits that advertisers should be moving away from the traditional role of attracting attention from consumers that are tuning out traditional big splash advertising and instead producing small bits of advertising content to be set free on the Internet to find their way to self-targeted consumers.

Though not revolutionary by any means, Terry’s model with advertisers producing discrete encapsulated content: bits of video, images, specifications, product information, xml data dropped in an rss feed and passed through a three stage sieve of search engines, dumb aggregators (automated blogs) and editorial aggregators (blogs and social networks) on their way to consumers is simple and elegant.

The problem as always, is tracking success so that clients will pay you fairly for the production of that advertising stream.

via the MIT Advertising Lab blog

Two developments late last week have pushed e-readers to the fore:

• The Belgian publisher De Tidj, which is running a test of an electronic handheld newspaper reader device from Phillips, has run the first ad in the e-reader edition for Rabobank. (If you follow cycling Rabobank sponsors an elite pro team)
• Microsoft and the New York Times have announced a new software set to debut with the notorious next gen MS operating system, Vista that promises to provide a natural interface to an online version of the newspaper.

During the presentation at the American Society of Newspaper Editors 2006 Convention in Seattle, Washington. (full transcript available here) one of the tidbits that came up was that advertising size and shape will be automatically reformatted to fit the device which is being used, a radical departure from current web practice. Sadly. no mention was made of any low powered devices such as those using e-ink technology from Phillips or Sony’s Librie. Until MS supports a low power reference platform like that, I am afraid this will be just an evolutionary step, tablet pc’s or even the new handheld UMPC platform just consume too much power with their active screens.