Random thoughts on random days

I picked up the current issue of Rollingstone magazine yesterday mainly so my wife and daughter could get their fix of Johnny Depp who graces the cover this week. In the early days of the magazine I would religiously read it cover-to-cover as soon as it arrived in the mail. But as I grew away from my childhood in the 60s and early 70s I lost interest in the music they were covering during the 80s and had little time for much of anything else when I started having children of my own. Bur reading this issue has peaked my interest again as they report on the convergence of the music industry with the digital age which is one of my passions.

However….

I am surprised that Rollingstone’s site has very little of what is actually in the printed rag. I was hoping to blog about an article I read about YouTube and the music biz but I can’t find the information anywhere on their site. I want to give Jann Wenner the benefit of the doubt in that somewhere this content must exist on their site. I thought that maybe they have it locked up as a subscriber only access but I don’t see any login screen.

You would think that a magazine like Rollingstone would be leading the way in the didgital world with enhanced versions of their articles on the web along with allowing comments from their readers. And podcasts. And vidcasts. They do have a Rock & Roll Daily weblog but nothing from the current issue. I know that advertising is a big reason for the magazine to continue to thrive but come on!

Now maybe I’m just blind and the information is indeed up there. If that is the case then they have a very bad user experience going on.

Geez.

UPDATE: I was blind. There is a login but in somewhat small type under the Welcome banner. And they do have an RS Updates section that includes newsletters, podcasts, RSS feeds, and Desktop Alerts but it was way at the bottom of the Home page which I never scrolled down to see. I still don’t know how to search for current articles or if they are even available let alone finding old articles. The search field that is most obvious only seems to search music by artist, album, or song. How do you search the other content?

I purchased two books yesterday in anticipation of my annual summer trek to the beach. I came across Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel at Half-Price books which surprised me since it was only released in January. My good fortune! I have been reading Scoble since his days with Userland. The book is about how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers (re: the cover jacket). This subject expands on what the Cluetrain Manifesto first broached: markets are conversations with blogs becoming an important way to encourage them.

The other book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is an expansion on an essay he wrote in Wired magazine in October 2004. It’s a very interesting and much debated topic that is basically: what happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? It certainly changes the playing field.

Now the tough part: which do I read first?