I was reading a post on Binary Moon today and felt compelled to leave a comment.  While doing so, I noticed something that said “dofollow” and clicked the link.  It seems there is a plugin I had not heard of called “dofollow”.

Written in the base code of WordPress is a “nofollow” command.  This means that when a search engine crawls your site it does not count the web pages entered by your commenters.   This has been in there for a while, and was done to combat the number of comment spammers who were over running the web.  However, with the addition of so many spam killers, I can’t tell you the last time a spam comment made it to the site.  And even if one does, I delete it within an hour or two.

Well, it seems the “nofollow” no longer makes sense, and someone wrote a plugin to turn it off.   It’s a nice way of thanking your commenters, and giving them a little link love for commenting on what you wrote.  Once installed, you can select the option for it to wait for a comment to turn X number of days old before it will remove the command, giving you time to delete any potential spam comments.

I have now installed it, and barring any hiccups, I will be leaving it there as a “thank you” to everyone who leaves a comment.  I highly recommend everyone with a WordPress blog do the same.

*sigh*

Okay folks, enough with The Last Supper already.

Someone has taken a 16 gigapixel picture of the painting so you can study every detail.  And, I admit, it’s fun to look at as you can see every crack in the wall it’s painted on to, but, really, is this necessary?

Can we just get past the whole The Da Vinci Code obsession and get on with our lives?  Yes, it was a “fun” book.  Not really a “good” book, or even a “great” book, it was fun fluff.  Nothing more.  Yes, the person to the right of Jesus has a bit of a feminine look to them, but this still doesn’t point to some great mystery.

The “floating knife” is clearly in Peter’s hand, and, yes, it is held at an odd angle, but it still doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

This is like the guy who reversed the image and “discovered” all sorts of “secrets”.   It’s a painting!  Yes, it is famous.  Yes, it is gorgeous to look at.  Does it mean it holds some amazing secrets about the life of Jesus?  No.  Does it mean Dan Brown’s book was true?  No.

I just can’t believe the amount of energy and technology that gets wasted on this non-story.

I got a chance to take a quick look around NBC’s new “private beta” site today, Hulu.com. This site has been causing quite the stir as it seems this is why NBC pulled their shows from iTunes, and if the current content is any indication, Fox won’t be far behind.

There are two types of videos on the site: Full length TV shows & movies and highlight clips.

I’m not sure what the strategy is here. There is an enormous amount of older shows on the site, most with thriving DVD sales, so you have to wonder why NBC would want to undercut their own sales. I can either buy season 1 of Arrested Development, or I can just go on Hulu and watch it.

Huh?

That’s not to mention there are some full length movies on there as well. Not that I really want to sit in front of my computer for two hours just to watch a movie, but the option is there.

I’m sure NBC has something up there sleeve with this, but what it is, I’m not quite sure yet. It’ll be great if you miss a recent episode though, or your DVR gets too full (as mine tends to do).

You know what I love about the Internet? Randomness.

The other day I’m doing my normal Gmail run when I get a note from someone named Dave talking about how he agrees with me about the wonders of compact fluorescent bulbs and he mentions I should check out his blog sometime when I have a moment. Well, as I visit, on average, 600+ websites in a week between my various jobs, what’s one more?

So I jet on by DavesDetours.com and somehow this guy has hooked up with Hanes to go around the country talking to people about how the stay comfortable.  However, I noticed as I watched the videos, very rarely does he ever get around to that question.  Instead he ends up doing things like arm wresting 50 Cent (and loses his watch to the rapper) or dancing with the FSU all-girls dance team.

In short… if there are any companies looking to sponsor a grumpy, middle-aged, over weight guy to travel around the country to promote your product… I’m available.

Seriously, how do you land a gig like this?!?  It reminds me a bit of when Jeff Probst was considering leaving the hosting gig on Survivor.   He said in several interviews that he wanted to leave, travel the world, see some sights, experience other cultures… it then dawned on him that he was being PAID to do this.  I want a job where I get paid to just travel around and do things.  Sure, it is work, but what a way to earn your living.

Anyway, if you get a moment, swing by Dave’s, it’s amusing.

So with two full days of playing with the BlackBerry 8830, what do I think?

I love it!

The battery life seems to drain a bit fast, but otherwise the phone is a dream to use.  And best of all, with my 7290, I was lucky if I got 1 bar of signal when standing next to the door of the warehouse, which was no where near my desk.  With the 8830, I’m getting 2 to 3 bars at my desk.  How, I have no idea, but I’m cetainly not going to argue with it.  No more going outside twice a day to check for texts!

The trackball is so much nicer to use than the  old trackwheel that used to be the standard on BlackBerry’s.  It makes navigation a breeze.

The full-color screen, use of ringtones, while old-hat to most, too bad, it’s new to me and I’m loving it.  Number 1 though has to be using it at my desk.  A dream come true for me.  I’ve been waiting years for a phone I could use all day.

Overall, a great little device, and I’m loving it.

I was cleaning my desk during this whole computer saga (the tower is back… it was wiped and is working fine), and I noticed something: Why do I still have a huge pile of blank 3.5″ floppy disks?

I haven’t had a computer with a 3.5″ drive in years, yet I have a stack of approximately 30 blanks that I’ve been moving around from office-to-office with me.

It just made me think about how important this format used to be to the computing world.  Everyone would have spares of these laying around, cataloged full ones, and so on.  And when you think about it, they only stored 1.44mb each, not even enough for one MP3 file.  Now I carry around SD cards that can store 2GB, and if I dropped them, I could lose them forever for not being able to find them for being so small.

Just makes me ponder where we will be a few years from now.  Will I look at my 2GB thumb drive and snicker?

Well, through no choice of my own, I’ve switched my BlackBerry and my carrier.

My contract with T-Mobile didn’t expire until April 2nd of next year, but since my BlackBerry 7290 stopped charging for some odd reason… I was kinda stuck.

Well, my parents had a spare line on their Sprint family plan, and I could upgrade to a BlackBerry fairly cheaply over there, so I went for it.  Now I’ll be using an 8830 which has more features and is, in general, is just prettier.

I should get the phone either tomorrow or Monday, so expect a full review at some point, but I have a feeling I’m going to like it more.

I swear I’ve gotten to the point I just despise computers.

This is exactly what my Dimension 5150 looks like, even down to the card reader.  Now, as far as I can tell, what’s going on is NOT Dell’s fault, but… Windows XP is just totally screwed up.  And I mean BADLY screwed up.  To the point the computer is going in to the shop and being wiped clean and everything reinstalled.

Now, yes, I thought about saying “Screw it, let’s go Mac”, but, this computer is only a little over a year old, and the XP install has always been a tiny bit funky.  So, I figure it’s worth the $90 I’m paying some techs to do all this (they’re also going to use an air compressor on it, and run some hard disk checks), and see if this one can be salvaged.

But I am just so darn fed up with computer problems.  They seem never-ending.  I will, however, say this has probably been the least stressed I have ever been over a computer crash due to my automated back-up, Carbonite.  I’ve talked about it before, so I won’t bore you, but what a peace of mind knowing my most important files are already backed up and just waiting to be put back in their proper homes as soon as I’m ready.

Never the less, it’s going to be a fun couple of days reinstalling everything.  The joys of technology.

Well, this is an odd feeling.   It seems I work for the #1 blog in the UK (the link keeps going up and down) and I didn’t even know it.  True, it was only announced today, but still, kinda cool.

When I joined Mashable, we were 12th on the Technorati world list, and since then I’ve seen us go to #9, and our current position at #8.  We have quite a way to go to become #7, and I fear we may get caught by those damned LOL cats at some point.

And I have to say it felt a bit odd being pointed out by name in Pete’s (the owner) post as I don’t feel I’ve contributed that much, but it was nice to be acknowledged all the same.  (for those who would like to take a gander, you can find a full archive of my posts here)

And the first cancellation of the season goes to… Viva Laughlin.

I can’t say as I’m surprised. As usual, we try to import a show from England and we totally botch it up. With Hugh Jackman involved I had some hope of it being a worthy copy of Blackpool, which I enjoyed, but, alas, it sucked.

They did so much wrong it’s hard to even begin to figure out where it went wrong.  I think namely the actors sang WITH the original singers was part of the problem.  The writing was flat, most of the acting was over-the-top, and it just didn’t catch the right vibe of the original.

Oh well, I kinda knew this would happen, but I still checked it out, and now I have one less show to worry about.

I’m trying desperately to get ahead on my various blogging projects, and I swear, it never works.

Daily Blog Tips did a great post on this a while back (seriously, every blogger needs to have this in their RSS feed). The post was about six tips for a more stress-free blogging life, and #4 really jumped out at me:

4. Write more than you publish

Like the simple but true ’spend less that you earn’ principle of saving, you can develop a surplus of blog posts by writing more than you publish.

Let’s say you wrote one extra blog post a week for one year. At the end of the year, you’d have 52 surplus posts: enough to put your blog on autopilot for almost two months! You can also dip into these surplus posts when you don’t feel like writing, or experience some other kind of blogging emergency.

I love this idea, and with a possible trip in my future (I’m not jinxing myself this time, and not saying a word until I have a ticket!), I need some surplus posts built up. I would rather not use them, but it would just be nice to know they’re around if I need them.  The problem lies in the fact that I’m trying to do it for more than just this blog.

All told, I have four mandatory posts a day to do, and one big post that I work on at night.  So I am already generating five posts a day, every day.  Two of the four daily ones, I can build up a surplus, the other two are to timely.  And the big night time one, I need to talk to my editor to see how he wants to handle it.

But, with my day job, and already writing so much content each day, I’m just burned out by the time I get to the “extra writing” portion of the day.  That’s part of why I’m doing these real late night posts on this blog so that I can possibly free up some time elsewhere.

No, this post had no real point, but I’m frustrated and I want some surplus posts darn it!

I’m not sure why, but Yahoo! Mail just tends to annoy me more than anything else any more.

Correction: Yahoo! in general annoys me, but I’ll be specific to the mail.

After a post I did in August, where Roy and Luis taught me, via comments, about the aspects of GMail I was missing out on, I have totally fallen in love with GMail.  It really shows the flaws of Yahoo! Mail though.

I had been using Yahoo’s email for awhile for business emails so I could access them from anywhere, especially solicitations from vendors.  What I’m finding now is that older emails tend not to load.  It’ll say they’re loading… and then nothing.  I’ll reload everything, try again, still not loading.  Sometimes it takes 3 - 4 tries to get them to finally work.

A lot of people signal the fact Yahoo! Mail offers you “unlimited” storage, but what good does that do you if you can never read them?  The interface is showing it’s archaic age, as is all of Yahoo!, and you have to wonder what happened to this once king of the Internet?

Google could very easily sit on their laurels at this point, but instead they are constantly innovating.  I do wonder sometimes if they are going to reaching a breaking point by expanding too fast, in too many directions, but for now, they seem to have a handle on things.  In the email department, once I learned how to do labels, I can’t believe how smooth the whole system runs.  I have never been unable to reach a piece of email (*knocks on wood*), and the only flaw I’ve ever run in to is my contacts list sometimes fails to load, but it usually shows up in a minute or two.

So, can Yahoo save itself?  It could, possibly, but every day they let slip by is another nail in their coffin.  GMail is becoming one of the most common used applications on the web , and Yahoo is going to have to copy some aspects of it if they hope to survive.  The first thing they need is a completely new interface, and hopefully one built on AJAX.

For those who don’t know what AJAX is, it’s a web language that allows a portion of a page to refresh without the whole page having to do it.  Take for instance when you archive something from your inbox in GMail, you notice it disappears, the inbox shifts, but the whole page doesn’t disappear to accomplish that, that’s AJAX at work.  It’s faster, less annoying to the user, and much faster since only a portion of the page reloads.

It probably comes down to a design aesthetic,  but Yahoo needs to get their head out of their behinds and get cracking.  I for one have left, and and don’t see myself going back unless there are major changes.

This is an odd topic for discussion, but this just never ceases to amaze me.

What’s so fascinating you ask?  Why the temperature of my office of course!

As you can see from the lousy pictures I shot, when I got to work at 10:00 AM, the office was at 71F.  (and it actually changed from 70 to 71 as I was about to shoot the picture)  Then at 1:15 PM it hit 86F, turning on the AC.

Okay, this may not seem all that odd, but… it’s only 61F today outside with a lot of wind blowing.  It’s actually fairly brisk if you go outside.  Not in the office though, oh no, it’s shorts weather in here!

Our heating is run on natural gas, a 500 gallon tank powers it, and all winter last year we didn’t even have to refill it we use so little.  I’m not sure what we did when built this building (a 3,000 square foot metal pull building), but this office is sealed up like a submarine it would appear.

The office isn’t huge, but it’s not exactly tiny either.  I’m the only one in the office today, so it’s not excessive body heat… maybe… unless three sleeping cocker spaniels generate a ton of heat, but it was like this before they came to work with me everday.

Either way, it’s October 19th, 86F in my office, and the AC is on… that’s just messed up.

Yesterday, at approximately 5:45 PM, I lost my Internet connection… for 15 hours.  It was due to a horrendous thunderstorm we were having, and everyone in my area went out.  It did teach me some interesting things though.

1. Cable One does a lousy job of updating their national call center on what the heck is going on.  “Well… I think they’re working on the problem.”  Really? It’s seven-hours in to this and you “think”?
2. I am in desperate need of a dial-up ISP as a back-up for Internet access.  As much as it would pain me to be at dial-up speeds, at least I would be able to send out some emails to let people know I’m down instead of calling a friend in Boston to dictate emails to her.
3. If one makes their living on the Internet (blogging and online ecomm stores), being without the Internet is like having both arms and legs tied behind your back… and not in the “fun” way.
4. 15 hours of not checking my RSS reader leads to an annoyingly full reader.
5. I had the most visitors ever to my blog yesterday, and I have no clue why.  Apparently I should disappear more.
6. As I was writing this, my blog went down…

Yes, I am currently in possession of an iPod Touch, but no one freak, it’s not mine, it’s my mom’s. I did not buy a Classic and then turn around and buy yet another iPod… I swear.

All that being said, my mother is currently out of town, so I’m playing with it so I can teach her how to use it when she gets back. So… easy blog entry as I give some thoughts.

I don’t get who this is for.

Seriously, it is absolutely perfect for her needs as she is out on the road 26 weeks a year, and it’s a pain in the ass to haul out her laptop to check for hotel rooms. With this, she just needs a Wi-Fi connection and she’s set. So, perfect for her.

For the general populace… it’s an over-priced toy. Yes, you could say that about any iPod, but this one in particular seems extreme. The biggest selling point, to me at least, is the Internet capabilities, but who’s going to sit around doing serious surfing on a screen this size? And blogging? Forget it, you’d go insane. So when you strip away the Internet portion you’re left with… a really expensive iPod.

You can’t even classify it as a PDA (at least not yet) since you can’t enter new calendar entries from it. You can add new contacts, but not update your calendar? What the heck?!? I will say the keyboard works far better than I expected, but I still don’t see adding too many contacts that way.

Yes, it plays videos too, but the idea of watching a whole movie this way, except for maybe an overseas flight, just doesn’t appeal to me.

There’s no denying it’s small, and there is an allure to that, but, again, the price pops up. For your common, everyday person, I just don’t know if there is enough value here to warrant the price. If you travel a lot on business, I could see it, but if you’re in an office, near computers all the time, then no, there’s nothing here. If you really only 16GB of music storage, save yourself a couple hundred and get yourself an iPod Nano. I would even give college students, with campus wide Wi-Fi a “maybe”, but if you’re between classes, are you looking at a website, or where you’re walking?

Overall it’s cool, perfect for what my mom needs it to do, but not so great for John Q. Public I feel.

Even in Scotland there are music problems it seems.

The Kwik-Fit chain of car service centers in the UK is being sued… for playing their radios too loud. The Performing Rights Society, a UK based organization charged with watching over musical copyrights, is saying that employees of the chain play their personal radios too loud, and this qualifies as a public performance as customers can hear the copyrighted material. Kwik-Fit maintains that the playing of personal radios is not permitted, but the PRS has documented evidence of more than 250 accounts since 2005 in the service centers. The total bill is £200,000 in damages, just a little over $400,000 USD.

“Damages”? Seriously… “damages”?  I have always felt this was such a load of hooey when it comes to “public” performance.  The United States has similar groups that will go in to businesses and demand licensing fees if they feel your radio is over a certain decibel level to make it for more than “personal enjoyment”.  My feeling is if it is true over the air radio, as in a radio station, shut up, and get out of my face.  You’re getting your cut where you need, and if I want to play the radio at a level that *I* enjoy, then I’m going to listen to said radio at that level.  Who are you to say what my “personal enjoyment” level is?  Perhaps I want my chest to thump when I hear a drum beat, that’s my choice.  If someone else can hear it, too bad.

My disgust with the music industry just keeps growing and growing.  At what point will they finally go “Ya know… I think we’ve come up with enough ways to earn money, we’re good.”?  Instead they just keep grabbing more and more, just making people such as myself think “Ya know… I really don’t ever need any more new music, thanks!”

Blog Action Day is upon us, and as I mentioned before, this year’s subject is the environment.

Since each blog that is participating is supposed to write an entry that relates to your blog’s theme, and how you can give tips on being more green, but since my blog tends to wander, I’m sure this post will also.

While I know not all of my readers agree on global warming, I think we can all agree on there is too much pollution in the world. I think we can also all agree we like to save money. So, I thought I would approach everything from the aspect of how you can live a bit greener, and save yourself money at the same time.

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

My love affair with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) continues, and shows no signs of dying down. The bulbs are becoming easier and easier to find, with Wal-Mart having displays of them all over the store now, and more vendors carrying them. The prices are steadily dropping, and they really do cut your electric bill by using less wattage for the same amount of light.

I did a full post on these back in June, and since then, I finally had a bulb burn out… 2 & 1/2 years after I put it in. So, yes, I pay more for the bulbs to begin with, but tell me last time you had a standard bulb that was on approximately 8 hours a day last for 2 & 1/2 years. I think we all know how that question will turn out.

Soda Cans

Do you live in a state with a deposit on aluminum cans? Do you remember to save them up, or do you just throw them away? Well, if you toss them out, it must be nice to throw money out in the trash. Do what I did, I got a large cardboard box, lined it with a trashbag, and instead of throwing the cans in the garbage, I shake them out in the sink, and then toss them in the box. No more effort than throwing them in the garbage, and when the box is filled, I just pull the bag out and take it in. No muss, no fuss, and the cans get recycled.

Even if you don’t live in a deposit state, at least look in to recycling centers, or see if your trash collection offers recycling options.

Bottled Water

It seems so innocent when you run in to the convenience store on your way to work, grab a bottled water, and go on your way to the office. Multiply that by 250 working days, and you’ve just used 250 water bottles in a year. Even if you send them to recycling, do you consider the environmental impact of producing the bottle? Never mind shipping the bottle to the plant, transporting it to the stores, and the energy involved in the bottling.

I love bottled water also, and it’s nice to screw on the cap so you don’t run a risk of spilling it all over your desk, but how about you refill the bottle yourself? Say every Monday you picked up one bottle and reuse it for the entire week? You just cut out 200 bottles from the cycle. You’ve saved yourself money, you’ve removed carbon emissions from the air, and you aren’t polluting as much.

Sure, there are situations where it just isn’t practical to refill all the time, like say a cab driver, but if you work in an office with a water fountain, water cooler, kitchenette, bathroom… any clean water source… just refill your bottle and you’ll be surprised by the impact that will have on the planet, and your wallet.

Carbon Footprints

Pretty much everything we do leaves some form of carbon footprint, the amount of CO₂ something produces, but do you know how to reduce yours? Here is a collection of footprint calculators to help you figure out how you may be able to reduce yours.  And trust me, some of them are so easy, such as properly insulating your house, which will in turn cut your heating bill.

BeGreen - A carbon calculator and offers lots of information on how to be “neutral”.

BP - British Petroleum (or “Best Petroleum” as they go by in the USA), has an animated carbon calculator with little people that asks detailed question about your home.

Carbon Footprint - Since they grabbed the .com address, seems natural to inclue them.

Ecological Footprint Quiz - A very detailed quiz to let you know how much you depend on nature.

NativeEnergy - See your impact, and get carbon offsets.

PaperCalculator - See just how much impact all the paper you use impacts the planet.

TerraPass - Emissions calculator and carbon offset options.

The Carbon Diet - Track your footprint, compete with friends.

The Nature Conservancy Carbon Calculator - Calculate your impact and see what tips they offer.

Yahoo! Green Carbon Footprint Calculator - See your impact, pledge to save.

Zerofootprint - Create a profile, calculate your impact, see how you can cut back.

So, there you go, four easy things that no matter how you feel about global warming, will save you money, or just will help cut pollution however you view it.

Also be sure to see my post on TECH.BLORGE.com about greening up your computing life. 

You know how I always know Ann Coulter has released a new book? She says something insanely stupid.

I’ve talked about her a couple times before, and I honestly don’t view talking about her as violating my self-imposed political neutrality. I view it as “You’re so insanely stupid, you really should just fall off the face of the Earth.”

This time, if you missed the news, she once again said women shouldn’t have the right to vote. She then went on The Big Idea on CNBC and said Jews needed to convert to Christianity to be perfect. I mean, never mind the fact that the host, Donny Deutsch, is a practicing Jew, that was just insanely stupid to say about ANY religion. You can see the Wikipedia entry about it here.

DEUTSCH: You said — your exact words were, “Jews need to be perfected.” Those are the words out of your mouth.
COULTER: No, I’m saying that’s what a Christian is.
DEUTSCH: But that’s what you said — don’t you see how hateful, how anti-Semitic –
COULTER: No!
DEUTSCH: How do you not see? You’re an educated woman. How do you not see that?
COULTER: That isn’t hateful at all.
DEUTSCH: But that’s even a scarier thought.

I say it about here every time she pops out of her cave: She’s an Internet Troll.

She is no better than those people who get their kicks by going on Internet message boards, and say inflammatory things just to get a rise out of people. Is it really surprising to learn she released a new book, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, on October 2nd of this year? No, it’s not. She has discovered the cheapest, and easiest, way to promote her drivel is to go out and say things no sane person would.

And yes, I fully admit I fall in to her little trap, but notice, I don’t Amazon-link her book, and I don’t even link to her site, only Wikipedia. I refuse to be that large a part of her little marketing machine.

Luis asked a good question on Saturday.

Are there any conservatives out there who see Coulter as anything other than a joke? Seriously, I’d like to know.

At what point does this woman finally get written off, not as a conservative, but nothing more than a despicable, self-promotion machine? She adds NOTHING to the political dialog in this country, and even if she does say anything remotely relevant, the signal-to-noise ratio is so low on her, it gets completely lost in her inane ramblings.

Oh, by the way, I neglected to mention this was her second fun comment of the month. Her first was her dusting off one of her “greatest hits” about how women shouldn’t have the right to vote. She first brought that gem up in a 2003 interview, and she went back to the well to drag it out for another interview (also, post-book release). The first time was in a May 2003 magazine interview, just before she released her book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. There’s that ODD timing again… imagine that.

On a parting note, I noted when I talked about the Elizabeth Edwards vs Ann Coulter debacle a few months back, that it seemed Ann didn’t know how to handle someone confronting her over one of her comments. (In this case, calling John Edwards a “faggot”) It seems Donny Deutsch noted the same in an interview that followed Coulter’s anti-Jew comment.

In an interview published in Adweek three days after the interview, Deutsch noted that when he challenged her comments, Coulter appeared “to back off” and “seemed a little upset”, adding, “I think she got frightened that maybe she had crossed a line, that this was maybe a faux pas of great proportions. I mean, did it show ignorance? Anti-Semitism? It wasn’t just one of those silly things.”

I think if anything shows that she says these things just to say them, it’s her inability to defend herself when confronted over them. A trait common amongst Internet trolls.

Let me end this the same way I end all my Ann Coulter rants: please don’t feed the Coulter troll.

Looks like Gmail may be bumping those free accounts to 4GB by the end of the month, and rumors are 6GB in January.

Remember when I talked about a Firefox extension that turns Gmail accounts in to virtual storage drives?  Heh.  It’ll be like having a 4GB hard drive added to all your computers.  (and 6GB later on)

A lot of folks go “But Yahoo has unlimited space already!”  This is true… and they have a lousy interface.  I can hardly ever load my old emails on Yahoo, but with Google they always pop right up.  Gee… what a shock.

This really leads me to something I’ve noticed lately that Yahoo is just sucking for the most part.  None of their technology is updating, it’s beginning to look dated, and if they want any hope of keeping up with Google, they need to invest in some new tech, and they need to do it soon.  I honestly can’t remember the last time I thought to go to Yahoo first, and that used to be a multiple times a day stop for me.

Oh woe must be many a music executive right now as big name acts are jumping in to the fray of leaving the old system behind. Add to the names I mentioned the other day Nine Inch Nails and Madonna.

Yes… that Madonna.

Madonna’s deal is a bit different than the others in that she won’t be self-selling, but instead selling through a concert promoter, Live Nation. The deal is for her next three studio albums, the first one’s ever without Warner Music Group behind her. She will get $120 million in cash and stock options, and retain 90% of gross concert revenues. Considering that her last tour, Confessions, brought in $192 million, she should be quite happy with her pay. The material girl has one more album to deliver for Warner’s, and then it’s on to new grounds for her.

So, what does this say for the music industry as a whole? Talking with my friend, M, today, a rabid follower of music, she fears more “The Donnas’ scenarios.” The Donnas started off as almost a female-version of The Ramones, even following a similar naming system where they were all named “Donna”, and built a small, but extremely loyal, following of fans. They were on Lookout! Records for their first four albums, and then moved up to Atlantic Records… and it all fell apart. The sound of the band changed completely, turning in to a packaged, pop sound. They dropped the “Donna” names, changed their looks… basically they were a shell of their former selves.

And, I have to agree with M, the record labels are going to be desperate for acts. You will start seeing minor bands signed in a hurry to fill holes in release schedules, and the bands, happy to finally be noticed, will do whatever the labels ask of them, including disregarding their true fans. The music landscape will be littered with “Donna-like” instances as the labels try desperately to cling to an out-dated business model.

Instead of trying to change with the times, and realize that the old model, which heavily favored the label over the artists, should go the way of the dinosaur, they will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve it. This will end up disenchanting listeners even further than already have been, bands will get thrown quickly by the wayside when they don’t pan out, and the labels will damage themselves even further.

It’s time for the industry to realize they’ve messed up, and if they stand any chance of surviving, they need to change with the times, and do it now. Otherwise, ten years from now we’ll be saying “Remember when their actually used to be record companies? How quaint!”