In the UK, a certain Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution said recently that she found it strange we are “enthusiastically embracing” the possible erosion of our identity through social networking sites, since those that use such sites can lose a sense of where they themselves “finish and the outside world begins”.

From my perspective this is a very odd point of view. My online identity and my offline identity are the same. And it didn’t happen gradually. My online identity didn’t mysteriously eat, digest and transform my offline identity. I enthusiastically took my offline identity online, to meet new people and to be more readily available for my existing friends. My conversations on the web are as real as the ones I am having taking a walk with my best friend, or talking with my wife and kids over dinner. Furthermore, if anything I’d like to think of my online life as an identity preserver rather than an identity eraser.

This is my great-grandfather. I have a few pictures of him, but I hardly know anything about him. He was born in 1910 and he died in 1971. I was born in 1971 and I never got a chance to meet him.

He worked as a bicycle repairman. When he was young he was a pretty good boxer and everyone says he was a very decent guy. My great-grandmother died when I was 25, but we never really spoke about him, and whenever I discussed my great-grandfather with my late grandmother, she always basically repeated the same three things: “He worked as a bicycle repairman, when he was young he was a pretty good boxer and everybody thought he was a decent guy.”

My family were never big on words. My grandparents are simple people, very kind, warm and loving, but they didn’t tell stories and they were always a bit uncomfortable when I wanted to know what life was like “in the old days.”

It’s a pity my great-grandfather wasn’t on Twitter. I would have loved to know some of the everyday things about him that are so prevalent on Twitter. I would have loved to know his immediate thoughts when German forces entered Norway in 1940, what kind of music he enjoyed in 1955 or if he enjoyed his work at all.

For me, Twitter is a diary on steroids. Well, sort of. It’s not a very powerful tool to analyze anything in itself and I certainly want to keep some of my thoughts to myself. But over time all these small messages will give people a pretty good impression of who I am — they will reflect my interests, my routines, my dreams and my fears in life.

The steroid part of it is the fact that my thoughts and actions may instantly spark an interesting conversation with another person on the other side of the globe. Is Twitter, as some cantankerous critics say, a tool to remind members of an insecure generation that they exist? Of course it isn’t. For some people it is. For other people it is something else entirely.

For me, Twitter and social media isn’t about self-promotion or exhibitionism at all. Quite to the contrary, I’m a private person who loathes when I’m in the spotlight. I don’t like to talk about myself with other people.

I do, however, like to talk about my ideas with other people. I like to share my thoughts and my interests, and I like to engage in conversations about them. I do it in real life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues, and now I can do it online with people I don’t even know, and I think that my life is all the richer for it.

And I really enjoy the prospect of my blog and my 75-year-old Twitter-stream being available for my great-grandchildren to read in 2082. Really, Twitter should offer an export button. Maybe there’s a certain amount of self-preservational vanity in that notion, but there is also the longing I have always felt to know more about my ancestors. It’s only been a couple of generations, and apart from the pictures, my great-grandfather’s life has been reduced to three things: Bicycle repairman, boxer, decent. Obviously, this is but a fraction of what my great-grandfather was about.

Regardless of the future of Twitter, Robert Scoble claiming it’s broken and all, I love the fact that people, regular people with ordinary lives, have started documenting themselves and their lives for anyone to see — on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, on blogs and on any other social media platform that exist.

I know more about Stephen Fry than I know about my great-grandfather. Hopefully my great-grandchildren will know more about me than they will know about Britney Spears’ granddaughter.

Yes, yes, I know. Fat chance.

Anyway, if you want to, you can help me lose sense of myself, prove Lady Greenfield right or convince my great-grandchildren I was incredibly popular in 2009 by following me on Twitter. See you around.

Ooh, I’m slightly annoyed after submitting a few questions for a Q&A session (in Norwegian, if you’re so inclined) on a local site today with Ragnar Bjerkreim, a board member of TONO, the Norwegian Performing Right Society, and leader of NOPA, the Norwegian Society of Composers and Lyricists. Today’s session was about the record industry and file-sharing.

Admittedly, no matter how much you try to avoid it, you look somewhat like a member of the Green Ink Brigade posting questions for these Q&A sessions, forced into asking multiple questions in a slew, unable to format them in a sensible manner on a lousy submit form. Nevertheless, I think his answers were foggy and evasive to the point that I suspect he didn’t even understand my questions. Or maybe he just didn’t have any real answers. I sure don’t — that’s why I asked him.

My questions:

• What do you think the future will look like? Do you think it is possible to agree on international technology laws to effectively put a stop to illegal file-sharing?
• If so, how are we going to avoid affecting the democratic and legal exchange of information […] on the web in a negative way with this kind of legislation?
• Is it alright to sacrifice parts of this democratic and legal exchange of information in order to protect commercial interests, or do you rather consider these aspects to be unrelated? If so, why aren’t they related?
• And finally: Do you think recorded music is permanently devalued, or is it possible to regain the commercial value of recorded music in a reality where — if technology continues to evolve at the pace we’ve seen so far — we will be able to get all music that has ever been recorded onto our iPods in 20 years’ time?

Granted, the general direction of these questions is somewhat colored by my own views. I’m trying to force him into a trap. I’m also taking for granted that introducing new technology legislation implies restricting the use of file-sharing tools, which is totally relevant in regards to the ongoing Pirate Bay trial. But maybe I wasn’t clear enough after all.

Here are Ragnar’s answers that pissed me off a little bit. Not much, but enough to put it on my blog. He probably answered a lot of questions within a limited timeframe, but I say that doesn’t excuse him from actually reading the questions. My comments in parentheses, if you were wondering:

• It’s hard to say what the future will look like (No shit. Stupid me for asking)
• Your questions include several assumptions that I don’t agree with (?)
• It’s allowed to share files that are not copyrighted  (Yes it is, but I didn’t ask)
• It’s not a democratic right to walk into a book store or a music store and take whatever you want and not pay for it (No it isn’t, no one said it was. I asked how we could avoid affecting the democratic and legal exchange of information with new laws)
• As time goes by, I’m sure new and better technical formats will come along, where you can choose whether you want to own or rent your music (?!?)

None the wiser, then. He answered my first question, I’ll give him that.

A little bit about my viewpoint: I’m all for finding viable solutions that will ensure that the artist gets paid for his/her work, but to be honest I’m more worried about the potential implications of new technology laws for me as a regular web user.

I can upload my holiday videos to YouTube. I distribute my music (I’m an amatur musician) to last.fm, iLike or any other service that is willing to host my music. I’m a total publicity whore. I write this blog to express myself, and I upload all of my pictures to Flickr. I don’t use BitTorrent — but I might as well have uploaded my pictures to the web using a BitTorrent-client if that was my preference, it’s still totally legal.

To my knowledge, everything I do on the web is legal. But at the same time I could easily have used either of these services to upload large amounts of illegal content, copyrighted material for which no permission has been obtained. As, indeed, many do.

The way I see it, if you’re ever going to reduce the amount of illegal sharing on the web, you inevitably have to reduce a lot of the perfectly legal sharing that is going on all over the web, because the tools are the same. For every paragraph I publish, for every song I make available to the public, for every video I upload, I could have chosen to do something illegal - I could have copied a large portion of someone else’s book onto my blog, I could have uploaded the latest Britney Spears album to the web using my ftp-software (not really, I don’t have it)… anyway, you get the idea.

It worries me. How are they going to stop all those “pirates” and all those “thieves” without bothering me and my legal web habits? I just don’t think it’s possible, and I don’t think the entertainment industry cares about how their crusade affects me and my internet habits. I am skeptical of the entertainment industry, the right holders and their motives at large. I’m worried about how their endless search for petty cash may ultimately harm the web. Most of all, I’m skeptical because of the way they have treated fans, developers, technological innovation, competition, thieves, bands and musicians in the past.

That being said, I have no sympathy for self-righteous people who assume that it is their God-given right to get things for free either.

Robert Scoble is the kid up the street with all the answers. You know, the kid with ALL the Commodore 64 games, a gigantic Lego model railroad in the basement and whose father apparently owns a flying Citroen CX? I’m pretty sure that’s him.

Well, this kid is all grown-up now, and he’s on the web. And, as in childhood, once you learn to filter the bullshit from the actual content the guy is a real treasure.

He’s a pioneer blogger, a tech guru, a social media evangelist - and quite possibly the #1 human link aggregator on the web. He introduced me to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Friend Feed and probably a dozen other more or less meaningful services on the web at an early stage in their development - heck, I even think it was Scoble who introduced me to the concept of RSS feeds.

I’m not a tech guy, but thanks to Robert Scoble I have practically turned into the prototype early adopter on the web (yeah, right.)

He’s extremely extrovert on the web, he’s opinionated as hell and he shoots from the hip. His writing is temperamental and personal, he’s potentially ill-tempered but usually enthusiastic, even ecstatic over some new development.

It’s easy for a non-tech guy like me to enjoy his rants and share his enthusiasm for what is, let’s face it, some seriously geeky stuff.

He makes friends easily - it’s one of his main concerns regarding Facebook: The 5,000 friend limit, which he exceeded months ago (I hear you! I’m rapidly approaching that limit myself - getting close to 40 now!) He has a huge following, one of the original "A-bloggers" - me plugging him is, like, Caveman Eremite in the Desert plugging the New York Times. It seems as if he’s making enemies just as easily as he’s making friends, though.

But he’s a very entertaining guy, he’s working his ass off bringing us the latest from Silicon Valley or wherever all these tech startups pop up. And nobody hits that j-button more than Scoble. Yeah, I know. You probably don’t have a clue as to what I’m talking about.

Be that as it may, if you want to know when the next Facebook arrives or maybe just add a little tech, controversy and flavor to your rss feed, Scoble’s your guy.

I should write him a song - that would definitely get my stats up.

Create Digital Music pointed me to Alltop, a headline aggregator with a really nice music page.

As CDM says, a great alternative to my already overloaded RSS flow in Google Reader.

Just wanted to put in a good word for Particls, a brilliant free, open standards based app I discovered recently that instantly tracks your favorite sites and topics. It’s kind of like a filtered feed reader.

It’s very easy to set up. Install it, enter a few keywords to indicate your fields of interest and you’re ready to start.

I fed it with some music related words - favorite artists, music industry references such as ASCAP, BMI, DRM, record companies etc., eMusic, iTunes and so on - and I’ve been spending the entire evening reading interesting, highly relevant articles from a seemingly endless array of sources.

In addition you can add your regular rss feeds, and perform a number of tweaks to improve your news stream. But I’m thoroughly impressed with its performance even though I haven’t tweaked it at all.

You can sort your news stream by date or by relevancy. I immediately fell in love with the relevancy sorting option. In the future, I’ll probably use Particls for keyword searches, sorted by relevancy - and continue using Google Reader for my regular feeds, sorted by date.

Highly recommended!

I discovered this graph over at swivel.com the other day. I figure it reveals exactly where the music industry went wrong between 1999 and the present.

It displays a perfectly logical chronological evolution of technology, where new formats gradually replace the old ones. If we went further back in time, we’d probably see similar results for the shift from 78 records to the 45 single, and then from the 45 to the LP.

The curves are pretty close to an ideal product life cycle (PLC) curve in economic theory:

As you can see, there are four stages in the life cycle of a product. Take a look at the graph for cd sales around 1999-2000. It marks the introduction of the decline stage for cds. But there’s no graph to mark the rise - the introduction and growth stage - of its successor, digital music files. That’s because the music industry didn’t start reporting digital sales until 2004. iTunes was introduced in 2003.

That’s close to five years without a legal alternative for the technology that people really wanted - and which they found elsewhere - for free. No wonder then that the music industry is having a hard time trying to change people’s bad habits and turning the negative trend of unauthorized downloading today. They brought it on themselves.

In a Rolling Stone article Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm, claims that the labels killed themselves in 2001 when they decided to sue Napster for “billions and billions of dollars” instead of embracing a golden opportunity. Says Kwatinetz: “The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services].”

After the music industry shut down Napster, they waited almost two years before offering a “user-friendly” alternative to unauthorized downloading - iTunes.

I mean, what did they think would happen? Did they really expect people to sit quietly and wait for two years, as the major label executives sat down in their exclusive leather arm chairs to develop a strategy that may or may not have included digital downloads?

Napster offered a taste of the future back then, and to me it’s absolutely incomprehensible that the music industry didn’t get it at that point (it’s even more incomprehensible to me that they still don’t get a lot of things about digital downloads, but that’s for another entry.)

System update: My RSS feed has been a little unpredictable since I redirected my blog - some of my old posts suddenly pop up in front of the more recent ones. And I’m hardly getting any hits on the site today, so I’m still experimenting with the settings here to get it right.

It’s not like I had a million readers before, but I do hope to keep the ones I had - so I’ll probably stay up half the night and try to solve these problems.

It’s always like that, isn’t it? Whenever something’s bugging you about your computer? It’s impossible to let it go. Like when you’re fiddling with the system settings and the screen goes all black at 11 p.m. You don’t just turn in for the night, do you? You just have to try this one last thing before you give it up and go to bed? Didn’t work? How about this, then?  Or this….? … 1 a.m. . . 3 a.m. . . .5 a.m.

Suddenly you look at your watch and realize that you’re supposed to be at work…

That’s what happens to me, anyway. It’s always the same - and I’m getting older, so whenever I do something like this these days, I’ll need a week to recover.

Oh my, the trouble I go through for you, my dear five readers…

No, really - I do love solving computer problems - my wife won’t be too happy when I come to bed in the morning, though…

Nothing much to say really, I was fiddling with some clips on my audio editor, and I just wanted to show you these three images that reflect perfectly how I feel about the music industry these days. It’s the visual representation of three short rock songs (the last one manipulated to illustrate my point, in case you were wondering.)

It depicts the past, the present, and the future of the music industry - and you can decide for yourselves whether these “charts” reflect the industry’s vision, their products or their consumers. Personally, I think it’s a blend…

Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend - 2007

? - 2017

Get it? Ooh, I’m just so clever, aren’t I? For reference on the subject I’m actually addressing here - a subject it pains me just to think about - check out this article on Wikipedia.

It’s technical, but it’s quite interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

Hooray! I no longer need the Internet Explorer to watch WMV (Windows Media Video)-files!

As my three regular readers will know, I’m a passionate Firefox user. But I’ve never been able to locate a plug-in to play Microsoft’s WMV-files in Firefox.

Now the solution is finally here, and it’s provided by Microsoft itself. So hurry, go to Port 25 and install the plug-in before they change their mind.

“I reduced the functionality [on Yahoo Messenger for Mac] by 30 per cent and increased usage by 35 per cent. As we take out features, it tends to do better with the mainstream users”