SoundCloud - Samurai.fm

I've noticed SoundCloud being punted around elsewhere and really like the visual interface. For people into breaks, minimal tech, glitch and all that other good stuff it can take a while for a track to warm up, or rather lots of any given track is given over to mix/play space for DJ's to do their thing. SoundCloud helps to fast forward to the next disruption in the track so I can figure out if I'm really into it. Also it's a really good showcase for new DJ's or just to have a dig around in different genre's like the mix below which although  bit on the industrial side for my usual taste is nevertheless the background music while I type this post out.

The thing that makes me take SoundCloud proper serious is that my long standing favourite streaming mixes station Samurai.fm have had a redesign and are using SoundCloud to embed the mixes now. It sort of tells me that they are fast becoming the de facto music platform (within my genre tastes) for me now that I've lost Last.fm to CBS. Though you can always check out my music profile over there as once upon a time it couldn't have pleased me more and I assume it's frozen in time from then.

I used to pay their subscription when it was voluntary but after years of use from when they were audioscrobbler I'd have thought CBS would know how to send an email out to introduce themselves and their business model. Oh well plenty of examples of big companies mismanaging 2.0 platforms. This mix is Dub, Glitch and DnB. 

I hope the embed fits.

Sub-Sonic Symphony - A Journey Through DubStep, Glitch & DnB by Agent.Smith

Tumblr Stats

I may have exaggerated a bit about quantitative data in that post earlier which should be retitled "If it's measurable and you add no meaning to it, you're probably wasting my time". Anyway, my tumblr stats have taken off. They look very different to this blog's stats which I last took a snapshot of over here. Take a look.

Is Social Media About Being Opaque?

Something occurred to me during the Nestle chocolate meltdown in Social Media the other day. I picked up on the story from @jamiec and took a wonder over to the Facebook page seeing straight away that the language used might well be one of the last examples of unvarnished corporate sentiment we'll get to see. It's the language of 'fuck you' isn't it?

"it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus"

So among other digital dropped jaws, I tweeted that part. It was picked up State-side where it started to do the rounds. I can't imagine too many multinationals making that mistake again. It's inconceivable that a Facebook fan page will instruct its fans how to behave and even more damagingly resort to biting sarcasm.

From this it's clear that many are still naive about what makes for participation in social media. Who are still drawing on legacy sentiment from the past. That is the mechanistic and 'professional' corporate bullying tone. Invariably a top-down, hierarchical monologue model (both internally and externally).

But somewhat surprising to me about the whole affair is the sheer hypocrisy of the blogging and digital social media community. The people who jumped on the band wagon who profess to understand social media. These are people who seemingly claim to partake in its values and yet who time and again dodge being transparent, authentic or  in current parlance, human.

Sure it's one thing to gasp in surprise at Nestle's coming out party. But the number of bloggers who are missing a human side to Nestle's use of Palm Oil by Indonesia's deforesting Sinar Mas conglomerate didn't escape me. New meeja's transparent schadenfreude at Nestle was easy to see and yet seemingly opaque when it came to their own positions on the issue. You do have a position right? It's only human after all.

It's one thing for Nestle to parade their sensitivity to local issues by creating say regional flavour variants of Kit Kat in Japan (how Kawaii), but it seems the locals of Indonesia's Riau province on the island of Sumatra are taking a good pasting while trying to protect the land from deforestation by Sinar Mas. All three Youtube clips are still below two thousand hits despite Nestle + Social Media search terms on Google being around half a million.

What does this tell me? It tells me that the sit-on-the-fence, have no controversial opinion, follow-the-dollar attitude that contributed to the decline of advertising's reputation is spilling over into social media. I just don't know how y'all can profess to being authentic, human, transparent and 'keeping it real' if you have no opinion on the issue. Which isn't about Nestle messing up in Social Media. It's about the deforestation for palm oil in Indonesia. Or did we just hijack it so we can wave it in the face of the next corporation to put us on the pitch list and who are stuck in the 20th century so that we incentivise them to work with us? 

Transparent, human and authentic us.