SBS - Social Bookmarking Soulmate

I am a firm believer that every person has not just one "soul mate," but that it is simply about being at the right place at the right time. In perusing del.icio.us, I think I may have already found not one, but three, social bookmarking soulmates. In this blog I will just profile Flaithbhertach, since he [let's just say it's a he] was at the right place at the right time, the first one I stumbled upon.

After going through 13 pages of Flaithbhertach's bookmarks, I felt that we had a pretty strong connection - I had read many of the articles that he bookmarked, was familiar with many of the online music services he bookmarked, and was introduced to many interesting articles, that he bookmarked.

Flaithbhertach's main bookmarking topic is music, "music" being his number one tag with 216 tags. Music is followed by design and history, each with about 100 tags on del.icio.us. I wouldn't necessarily call him a bookmarking fiend, but Flaithbhertach definitely keeps bookmarking in mind when prowling the internet, bookmarking a couple of pages every other day in varying degrees. Even after 13 pages of bookmarks, I was only still in late August - going back to page 169, I see that he started using del.icio.us in September 2005, and since then has accumulated 1684 bookmarked pages. Looking through his bookmarks I see a wide range of pages as far as popularity goes, he's got pages that only a couple of other people have bookmarked, but also pages that thousands have bookmarked.

Beyond Flaithbhertach's top 10 tags, he has 547 other tags, many used only once, but clusters of double-digits sprinkled throughout. Looking through his tagging conventions, I've found that he is fairly diligent with his tagging, usually using at least three tags, and very often many more. This helps create a network within all his bookmarked pages, probably making it easier for him to search both broadly and narrowly with useful results. The number of tags used only once could probably be reduced; he could probably find a way to consolidate "intelmac," "laptop" and "macbook" into one broader tag.

Two interesting pages I found through Flaithbhertach's bookmarks were a youtube video of a speech on Trent Reznor's (of Nine Inch Nails) business model and a blog about the dark side of "web-only networking."

The youtube video is embedded within an article on Business Model Alchemist, and is a recording of Michael Masnick from Techdirt giving a 15 minute presentation on "how an artist, Trent Reznor, is re-inventing business models for the music industry." (sidenote: watch the video. I know 15 minutes seems daunting, but it goes by quickly with 280 slides and is very interesting, I promise.) Masnick explains Reznor's business model as CwF + RtB, aka Connecting with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$$, and goes through Reznor's various experiments with the previous Nine Inch Nail albums.

Another interesting page I found was a blog post on Create Digital Music - a guest blog on "Digital, Artists, Labels and the Crisis of Plumeting Expectations". The blogger, Dave Dri, quickly touches upon the downside of online-only networking. Dri discusses the negative effects of losing IRL (in real life) contact with people, both within the industry as well as fans, and discusses the idea of marketing that "begins and ends with 'thanks for the add!!" While I think his perspective is a little more dire and pessimistic, I do agree with the main message of his post, being that "one might say it just boils down to effort." Making music isn't just about a seamless process of digital connections, but is about the effort put into creating the art as well as investing in it beyond just making a Myspace profile.

I think Flaithbhertach is a great resource for my blog readers - his bookmarks are interesting, relevant and educational.

But I haven't forgotten about the two other SBSs I've found, NiteShok and Nice Fish Film's. Both have music as their number one tag, with 261 and 486 tags, respectively. NiteShok's other top ten tags include "music-industry," "writing," "marketing," and "business." Nice Fish Film's other top ten tags include "socialnet," "science," "twitter," and "web2.0." Just looking through the first few pages of each user, I've already found numerous interesting and helpful pages relating to the music industry.

Having these three bookmark-savvy users on my radar will not only help me but also my readers further expand our inquiry and understanding of where the music industry is headed.