In Rockista Craze, Janette Toral wrote a piece about the impact of piracy on our local music industry. It’s well-researched, as usual, and has some nice factoids previously unbeknowst to me. Check it out then come back here for my unscientific response:

This debate is nearly as old and tired as the one about abortion, so i’ll just add a couple of thoughts from the opposing camp to round out the discussion.

1) there’s a logical leap in the observation that piracy is at fault when it comes to the poor success of the record industry. nobody has data that proves this, and the statistics listed above are beside the point. why? because in order to say that piracy is hurting the music industry, you have to first assume that all of the people who pirated music would have otherwise _bought_ those CDs had piracy not been any option. that’s a huge assumption, and it’s the cornerstone of all anti-piracy arguments. the truth of the matter is, people who pirate consume more music because it’s free. if they had to pay for everything they listened to, they would consume less, or not at all.

2) CD sales are going down worldwide, so this is not a phenomenon that is local to us. there are many reasons for this, and piracy is simply the most convenient scapegoat. the biggest reason in my mind is that the CD is an obsolete technology, and it is going the way of vinyl and VHS. (I’m sure the 100m+ iPods out there have something to do with this.)

3) there’s a sea change going on in the music industry right now, and piracy is a syndrome, not a cause. the real cause is that digitization has reduced the cost of production to near-nothing, and consumers know it. they understand that the true cost of a CD is tiny, and that the Internet makes major record labels irrelevant. let’s not kid ourselves about how piracy is stealing money from the artists. _labels_ are stealing money from the artist; they take over 80% of the cost of each record sold. if you removed (or reduced) the role of labels in the distribution process, artists would be more appropriately rewarded for their work, and the price of music would still go down.

4) which brings me to another reason for weakening music sales: the Internet, in general. music delivery over the net is near-instantaneous depending on your connection, and the variety is truly overwhelming. people are awakening to the fact that there is more music out there than their local industry or record store can provide, and they are finding new alternative venues that cater to their maturing tastes.

I spent some time over the weekend polishing up ol’ Moomai and have finally gotten around to writing some proper Help pages. Still far from complete, but at least the ratings system is finally explained a little. The important snippet:

In their most simple form, moomai ratings are simply a compilation of all the ratings you’ve received from other members. The moomai grammar engine looks at your numbers, and generates a sentence describing you by combining words from our phrase library. As you can imagine, the sentence generated depends greatly on what kind of numbers you receive; if your wealth rating is below 5, you won’t ever see words like "billionaire" or "oil tycoon." The rating system is friendly enough that, without knowing anything more about how moomai ratings work, you could simply sign in, have your friends rate you, and end up with a reasonably accurate sentence describing yourself.

Of course, because the hamsters at syndeo::media never stop working, there’s a bit more to the rating system than just that. In real life, after all, not all opinions are created equal; you’d care a lot more about your best friend’s opinion of you than the opinion of some random guy you just met the other day. And since moomai tries to simulate real life, it should work that way here as well, right? As it turns out, it does, and we call that concept "Intimacy."

On your friends page, there’s a scale beside each friend that defines how close (or more specifically, how "intimate") you are with that particular person. The scale ranges from 1 (Introduced) to 10 (True Love), and the way you set this value will define how significantly that person’s rating of you will impact your overall rating.

The Intimacy concept is something I’m really interested in, as I think it has the potential to solve a lot of the signal-vs-noise issues that more established social networks tend to have. I’m one of those people who blindly accept any friend invites I receive, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that respect. So because I’m "overly-friendly" online, the value of being called my "friend" has diminished to almost nothing, simply because I’m friends with practically anyone. The Intimacy idea allows you to define the degrees by which all of these random friends can actually involve themselves in your online life, so you could continue friending everyone you like, but they’d all still just be acquaintances.

In real life, the average person will probably only have a handful of close friends, and potentially hundreds of acquaintances and associates and the like. The Intimacy concept actually allows him to represent his online friends in that same manner. Practically every module in moomai is built around this notion. For example, you can restrict contributrions made to your photo gallery to just "buddies" (intimacy level 5), but accept stories from "acquaintances" (intimacy level 2). Essentially, if we do our job right, Intimacy can become both a solution for profile-privacy and a means by which to better manage our online relationships.

The big question right now is whether people will use it, and if they’ll use it in the manner that we’re hoping they will. If it takes off, there are a dozen other related areas to apply the idea; consumer product recommendations would be enriched significantly if you could combine the ratings of the reviewers you trusted, with each rating properly weighted based on how much you trusted each reviewer. And try to imagine how that would work when applied to a social-news site like digg, or a massive content site like YouTube. Something to think about, definitely.

Moomai’s almost-beta testing phase is moving along at a friendly pace, and I thought I’d share this really great bit of community-powered pixel art that our tiny population of about 5 dozen testers have put together over the past month or so.

The pixel-quilt concept was something I came up with years ago back when I was spending every waking moment coming up with weird crap to throw on highfiber. Originally, it was supposed to be a huge shared image that everybody could work on, an idea which was quaint and just barely feasible back in 2002. In this AJAX-powered day and age though, it’s hard not to run into major concurrency issues when you’ve got multiple users trying to push the same pixels at the same time. In the current incarnation, everybody gets to manage their own quilt by drawing individual patches and laying them out any way they want. Yes, believe it or not, all this artwork was created by hand by some fairly dedicated members, using moomai’s in-browser pixel-art editor. (As you can probably guess, I’m pretty proud of this bit of javascript; even got to learn a little bit of ImageMagick while I was at it.)

We aggregate everybody’s patches on the fly into a single massive community quilt, which is what you’re looking at here. (You can also grab and remix patches created by other users, just to add to the creative chaos.)

Moomai is still invitation-only, but I’m trying to build up the testing population quickly so we can start really stressing the server and see where the (inevitable) holes are. If you want to help out, invitations can be requested here.

My "In Rainbows" boxed set arrived at my doorstep today, after waiting nearly a full month. I took half-a-dozen images of the packaging and various inserts here, for anyone who wants to see how much music-geek-ware 40GBP can buy you these days. (Answer: apparently, quite a lot if you don’t have a record label to split profits with.)

*iPod Touch not included, of course. Just wanted to show how huge this thing was.

**Oh yeah, and the second disc has about 150 photos and artwork by the band and some guest artists. Jesus, it’s a fanboy’s dream!

Ridiculously busy again the past two weeks, so just a quick post to point out a (lengthy, and altogether rather self-indulgent, I’m afraid) email interview I did with PinoyWebStartup.com, a TechCrunch-esque blog about the local tech entrepreneurship landscape by pigmata media. People who read gv regularly will probably not see anything new, but otherwise, check it out and send the pigmata guys some love.

A few dozen photos here. Some commentary and mildly racist observations from a third-world gaijin to follow over the weekend.