Another interesting tool to track social/digital media impact

http://tiny.cc/eTIJo

Technology and the ways in which we gather and share information have and still are rapidly converging. There are many well-established online platforms. Search engines, social networks, file-sharing, blogging. Being a part of these is essential, but where the real opportunities lie are in the techno-informational convergences yet to come.

Many of the platforms/formats I mentioned before have struggled to monetize, but their balance sheets are not proportionate to the effects they have had on not only the way we communicate and search for information on a personal level, but also on a commercial level as well.

Corey’s point about the relentless stream of content that one accesses and contributes today is spot on. It takes a lot of work–more work than I’ve been willing to do, personally–to make it intelligible and manageable for yourself…and for your fans.

Every day, I speak with independent artists who are attempting to find a way to rise above the noise, grab a foothold and actually reach the people who don’t know they want to hear them yet. In music, in particular, this may be one of the greatest challenges that artists face now and in the near future. If some of the digital strategists’ predictions are correct, we may see a strong uptick in extremely specialized niche media and social networks along with powerful Pandora-like services that, in some sense, read your mind for you.

On the flip side, digital and social media aren’t the panaceas at the final stages of some great cosmic information revolution. Digital media, as a format, and social media, as a technology, serve us in substantially different ways than their predecessors. We may use them as our primary outlets for communication and entertainment but they surely aren’t _replacements_. They’re additions to the wealth of options at our disposal and we use each for different reasons. As someone who spends every day working with digital media, I can’t help but laugh when someone suggests to me that we’re going to watch the whole world move online and never look back, burning our books and smashing our inkwells along the way. We haven’t yet and I hope we never do. From where I sit, it’s not necessarily true that this is the future and you should stop pressing records. However, what is true is that putting physical product into the world and not tying it back online can be a tremendous mistake. Lucky for you, it’s a pretty easy one to rectify. If you try to balance the two worlds, you’ll be constantly expanding your reach–or the intensity of your impact–instead of committing yourself exclusively to one or the other.