I’ve spent this weekend (so far) working on the audiobook version of Music in the Digital Age, and you can get it at Bandcamp. Each section of the book has been released as an album.

Part 1 is the overview, which I call ‘Understanding Music in the Digital Age’. It features the chapters about the way in which I think about music, and ways in which to understand the online environment as a conversational space.

Part 2 is The 20 Things Revisited – which goes back to my original ebook from 5 years ago, ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online’, and addresses and updates each point along the way.

The website of the book
I’ve also been developing the website for Music in the Digital Age. It’s taken me the past week to get it the way I want it, and it pretty much just looks exactly like this one.

But there’s some cleverness lurking in there too. Have a look at the Contribute page. That took me a long time, and with the help of my friend Ben, I finally got the slidey thing at the bottom working. Quite pleased with that.

But ultimately, even though these are still works in progress, it’s good to have the e-book available, the audiobook published, the website online and half a dozen translations underway.

Feels like I’m getting somewhere with it.

My topic was ‘Musicians are Media Producers’ and I spoke for about half an hour with about 15 minutes of questions afterwards.

A couple of people asked if my slides would be available, so here they are.

It doesn’t help that they don’t make sense without the speaking that I did (or if you can’t read my handwriting) but the session was recorded, so once that’s available I’ll link to the talk that I did. Hopefully that will help unravel the point of the slides.

For iPad users – yes, I used the Paper app to draw the slides, exported each image to the Photo Library and then imported into the Keynote app. I did the presentation straight off the iPad, which works well for me. Not sure I’ll do the “handwritten” keynote presentation thing again – but I might. Makes a change…

Photo by ĐāżŦ {mostly absent}

I started asking people for their ideas about stuff on this blog this time last week. I thought it might be an interesting follow-on from the project where I came up with an idea each day for thirty days.

It was inspired by the guys from Ideas Improv who stopped people in the street to ask for their ideas for a documentary project. Really interesting stuff.

I chose a range of topics and just threw the gates open. “Tell me your ideas”, I said. And some people did.

But I don’t think I thought this through well enough – and so now I’m going to stop. I feel as though rather than contribute to the value of this blog, just throwing out a topic and asking for your suggestions is getting in the way a bit.

So this is one 30-day project I’m happy to abandon.

The 30 days in one afternoon

I had thirty ideas for topics (more, actually) – but since I’m not going to continue this as a 30-day project, I thought I’d stop this game here in its tracks.

I’m interested in hearing your ideas, of course – so if you’re curious, the full list of topics on which I was going to solicit ideas were as follows:

01. Rain
02. Education
03. Housework
04. Time
05. Collecting
06. Food
07. Art
08. Relaxation
09. Parenting
10. Travel
11. Politics
12. Cities
13. Games
14. Animals
15. Speech
16. Flight
17. Power
18. Gifts
19. Broadcasting
20. Tradition
21. Outdoors
22. Design
23. Stories
24. Sex
25. Weapons
26. Truth
27. Altitude
28. History
29. Superpowers
30. Heat

A bunch of the conversation starters all at once, rather than a theme per day. I’m still curious about what ideas you might have come up with – but not thirty blog posts curious. So let’s just leave it at this one. Given the topics above, what have you got on your mind?

We now return you to your regular programming. Besides… I have a much better 30-day project up my sleeve. About which, more soon.

Plus, people sent us whisky to try. Bonus.

This year, we’ve kind of let it slide. Clutch has moved up to Aberdeenshire and no longer lives just around the corner, he’s focusing on his expanding family (child number 2 due any moment now) – and I’ve been concentrating on other stuff. Writing books mostly.

In fact, I think I may have only had whisky about three times so far this year – and then only when we’ve had visitors over. It just hasn’t been something I’ve focused on or paid much attention to in 2012. Maybe we’ll get back into the swing of it next year.

Adding ‘whisky author’ to the CV

However, one of the things that Clutch and I did in our role as whisky writers was to contribute to this impressive collection of short whisky reviews. I think we maybe did about 30 of them between us (edit: Clutch assures me the number is closer to 50) – far from the full thousand – but in amongst them, we got to try some really special whiskies.

The book is out next week… and it’s edited by Dominic Roskrow, who some readers may remember as ‘my nemesis‘. You can order it at Amazon UK if you’re interested – and it’s half price at the moment: only £10.

In the USA, it has a different cover and slightly different title. Get it at Amazon US for $24.39.

Oh – and of the ones I tried, the Whyte & Mackay 40 Year-Old was probably the most impressive. And yes, sorry – it’s all gone now. That was lots of fun to share.

As for my favourites – these are my defaults:

My favourite £30 whisky: Laphroaig Quarter Cask
My other favourite £30 whisky: Glenrothes Select Reserve

My favourite £40 whisky: Lagavulin 16
My other favourite £40 whisky: Fettercairn Fior

My favourite £50 whisky: Ardbeg Uigeadail
My other favourite £50 whisky: Jura Prophecy

And of course, there are lots of others I like rather a lot… though some of them have three-figure price tags.

Photo by stevendepolo

06. FOOD

Big topic today with lots of scope for inventiveness.

I want to hear your idea about food. Whether it’s about solving world hunger or preventing food wastage, creating home gardening kits, halting the obesity epidemic or creating ways in which kids can get more nutritious lunches at schools, I want to hear what you’ve come up with.

Maybe you’ve invented a new type of sandwich or designed a machine that poaches the perfect egg. Let’s hear your idea about food in the comments please.

 
We’re using a Creative Commons licence: Attribution, non-commercial, share alike. That is, you can use any of the ideas presented in the comments of this series of blog posts for any non-commercial use, as long as you give credit for whose idea it is, and that the thing you make is also shared in the same way.. 
 
But to make things easier for people who DO want to pick up any of the ideas here and run with them on a commercial basis – you have permission, so long as you ensure that you cut the person whose idea it is in for ONE PERCENT (1%). That’s only fair.  
 
Look forward to seeing your ideas in the comments…  
 

Photo by Rupert Brun

05. COLLECTING

Today’s call for ideas is about accumulating things.

Whether it’s an idea about how to shelve and display a DVD collection, thoughts about archiving or cataloguing, ways to start and keep a collection of interesting things, or perhaps you have new ideas about collectible products that will see you create the next Pokémon or Cabbage Patch doll phenomenon… we want to hear about.

Let’s have your idea related to collecting (or, indeed, ideas about anything that the subject of ‘collecting’ makes you think of) in the comments please.

 
We’re using a Creative Commons licence: Attribution, non-commercial, share alike. That is, you can use any of the ideas presented in the comments of this series of blog posts for any non-commercial use, as long as you give credit for whose idea it is, and that the thing you make is also shared in the same way.. 
 
But to make things easier for people who DO want to pick up any of the ideas here and run with them on a commercial basis – you have permission, so long as you ensure that you cut the person whose idea it is in for ONE PERCENT (1%). That’s only fair.  
 
Look forward to seeing your ideas in the comments…  
 

Photo by Telstar Logistics

04. TIME

Here’s an opportunity to get creative. You might have an idea for saving time, or for a time-management technique. You may want to think about keeping time, or doing something that involves altering the tempo in a piece of music. You might come up with a new type of watch, or some way of making things last much longer. You might have an idea about overcoming the problem of different timezones, or even decide to invent a method of time travel. It’s entirely up to you.

Put your ideas in the comments. Criticisms of the ideas will not be published – just the ideas. So feel free to be as imaginative as you like with it.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with.

 
We’re using a Creative Commons licence: Attribution, non-commercial, share alike. That is, you can use any of the ideas presented in the comments of this series of blog posts for any non-commercial use, as long as you give credit for whose idea it is, and that the thing you make is also shared in the same way.. 
 
But to make things easier for people who DO want to pick up any of the ideas here and run with them on a commercial basis – you have permission, so long as you ensure that you cut the person whose idea it is in for ONE PERCENT (1%). That’s only fair.  
 
Look forward to seeing your ideas in the comments…  
 

Photo by bies

03. HOUSEWORK

This time, let’s think about something completely mundane. Everyone has to do it, and I think there’s room for it to be a lot less onerous, more environmentally friendly, more fun and more fairly distributed.

Whether you have an idea for a service that takes care of chores, delivers household goods or performs certain tasks; whether you have a clever way of doing the dishes that takes less time or a special system for getting the housework done; whether you’ve got a way to divide up or incentivise tasks so that the kids practically beg to get involved… or whether it’s an idea for grass-stain resistant kids clothes or compostable underwear that saves you laundry time – let’s hear it.

What are your ideas for housework-type chores?

 
We’re using a Creative Commons licence: Attribution, non-commercial, share alike. That is, you can use any of the ideas presented in the comments of this series of blog posts for any non-commercial use, as long as you give credit for whose idea it is, and that the thing you make is also shared in the same way.. 
 
But to make things easier for people who DO want to pick up any of the ideas here and run with them on a commercial basis – you have permission, so long as you ensure that you cut the person whose idea it is in for ONE PERCENT (1%). That’s only fair.  
 
Look forward to seeing your ideas in the comments…  
 

Photo by Trondheim Byarkiv

02. EDUCATION

Today’s challenge is to come up with ideas about the learning process. It might be something to do with how to learn things, ways in which testing could be improved, innovations in the classroom, ideas for topics that should be introduced, ways of getting smarter or tools for managing lesson plans. Completely over to you.

Having been involved in lots of conversations about pedagogy and curriculum recently, I get the sense that this is an area ripe for fresh ideas and new ways of thinking. So let’s hear what you’ve got!

 
We’re using a Creative Commons licence: Attribution, non-commercial, share alike. That is, you can use any of the ideas presented in the comments of this series of blog posts for any non-commercial use, as long as you give credit for whose idea it is, and that the thing you make is also shared in the same way.. 
 
But to make things easier for people who DO want to pick up any of the ideas here and run with them on a commercial basis – you have permission, so long as you ensure that you cut the person whose idea it is in for ONE PERCENT (1%). That’s only fair.  
 
Look forward to seeing your ideas in the comments…  
 

Photo by eirikso

After this morning’s conversation about sharing ideas, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do a series of blog posts asking for ideas on a theme.

The purpose of the theme is to either remind you of a particular idea you might have already had, or to get you thinking about something you might not yet have had an idea about.

So here’s the first of them:

01. RAIN

This has been a big topic of conversation around here recently, and there’s been an awful lot of it, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about.

What ideas do you have related to rain? It could be a new type of umbrella, something about rain collection, flood prevention, rain-powered cars, new things that we could do with rain — anything at all related to the concept of rain.

You may have a fun idea, a serious idea, a business idea, a simple idea, a complicated idea or perhaps an idea that you’d like to start a conversation about. Over to you.

Simply post a comment under this blog post about your idea, and let’s give the matter some thought. Who knows what we might come up with?

You should feel free to brainstorm, to take the theme in any direction you like, or to use it as a springboard into other things. There are essentially no rules – except the fact that any ideas that you come up with here are SHARED.

 
We’re using a Creative Commons licence: Attribution, non-commercial, share alike. That is, you can use any of the ideas presented in the comments of this series of blog posts for any non-commercial use, as long as you give credit for whose idea it is, and that the thing you make is also shared in the same way.. 
 
But to make things easier for people who DO want to pick up any of the ideas here and run with them on a commercial basis – you have permission, so long as you ensure that you cut the person whose idea it is in for ONE PERCENT (1%). That’s only fair.  
 
Look forward to seeing your ideas in the comments…