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I've been on the road almost constantly lately, and still trying to wrap this cover story on embedded Linux and XBIM (XML-Based Instant Messaging, exemplified by Jabber), now way over a week past deadline. Joyce and Jeffrey left for Santa Barbara yesterday without me. I'll try to finish this thing tonight, then drive down in the morning. On Wednesday I go to Linux Journal in Seattle. Then Saturday to the Borcon conference in San Diego, where I'll give the closing keynote on the next Wednesday, but only after coming back up to San Francisco to moderate a panel on the New Rules of PR at Buzz2000 on Tuesday. So bear with me if I can't keep this up on a daily basis over the next week or so.

First came Courtney Love, whose speech a few weeks ago totally exposed the paranoid hypocrisy of The Record Industry, and posed an alternate business model based on the real relationships between musicians and audiences:

Now comes Tom Matrullo, who was one of the very first writers to grok the Cluetrain,

Tom Matrullo

both as a site and as a book. His review of the book, like everything he writes, is thoughtful, deep, informed and original.

Earlier today, he sent me an item that so totally knocked me out that I did something I had avoided up to that point: I downloaded a Napster client and put the thing to use. I'll go into that adventure shortly. Meanwhile, dig this —

It is my extreme privilege and pleasure to debut these notes, which are, in my somewhat qualified opinion, the best corollary to Cluetrain that I've read to date. Also the best corrolary to Courtney's speech. If markets are indeed conversations, we're gonna be talking about both of these items .

Some background. On page 79 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, we say this:

The Shipping View

During the industrial age, the movement of materials from production to consumption – from flax to linen and from ore to musket – was a long and complicated process. Potentially vast markets had potentially vast distribution needs. The development of new transportation systems eased the burden, and global systems flourished. Even huge distances could be spanned so that products could be delivered efficiently. Inexorably, business began to understand itself through a peculiar new metaphor: Business is shipping. In this shipping metaphor – still the heart and soul of Business as Usual – producers package content and move it through a channel, addressed for delivery down a distribution system.

Still, I didn't know how it applied to Napster until I read this, from Tom's notes:

7. If the Cluetrain Manifesto http://www.cluetrain.com turns notions of markets upside down, Napster turns the trucking template inside out. Napster enables the nonce deployment of love via self-organizing labyrinths that defy central distribution models. Like the Manifesto’s position that "Markets are conversations," Napster gives us a place for people’s music to be held in common, not consumed.

8. Music has always had underground modes of dissemination. Remember how Every working musician had their cheap xeroxed "fake books"? Napster was difficult to conceive because we forgot sharing. Central distribution of intellectual property (IntelProp) via channels, trucks, ships, presses, wires and microwaves — "trucking" for short — was all we could remember. In that system, music is not what gladdens our souls. It is mediated Product inserted into dead bodies, shipped and sold for good hard cash.

9. We used to need the corpses — CDs, vinyl, tape, etc. We, the sorryassed multitudes who couldn’t get to the Met, to La Scala, or to Ozzfest, to bask in the unmediated presence of the Voice, the Artist. IntelProp vampires fed on our failure to arrive at the live act. Trucking is the wounding prosthetic that grows inside our disability to be present, as advertising infects us with discontent on which it dines.

10. And this spawned Content. Corporate distributors only see numbers, units, penetration, market share. To understand Content, you must ignore it. Pay attention only to containers.

There's a lot more — twenty points more, to be exact. Read 'em.

As for Napster, Courtney says this:

At this point the "record collector" geniuses who use Napster don't have the coolest most arcane selection anyway, unless you're into techno. Hardly any pre-1982 REM fans, no '60s punk, even the Alan Parsons Project was underrepresented when I tried to find some Napster buddies. For the most part, it was college boy rawk without a lot of imagination. Maybe that's the demographic that cares -- and in that case, My Bloody Valentine and Bert Jansch aren't going to get screwed just yet. There's still time to negotiate.

But hell, I thought: let's press on anyway. Let's look for something short and kinda popular from a bygone decade, like "When the Morning Comes," from Neil Young's After the Gold Rushalbum. No soap.

Then I thought, "It can't be possible that they have Mike Auldridge. He's

Mike Auldridge

too country, too traditional, too ... well, good. And forgotten. I've been trying unsuccsessfully for years to replace my lost vinyl copy of Blues & Bluegrass, which we used to play on WDBS radio in Durham, North Carolina, back in the mid Seventies.

Far as I'm concerned, Mike Auldridge is just the most soulful dobro player who ever lived, and Blues & Bluegrassis his best album. Backing him up are Lowell George, Linda Ronstadt, David Bromberg, Donny Hathaway and a bunch of other first-rank session musicians. It's a magnificent album, crowned by "Bottom Dollar," one of Mike's way-too-rare vocal performances. It's a perfect song, with Linda Ronstadt's sweetly ironic harmonies soaring above Mike's honey baritone.

So I typed "Mike Auldridge" in the "find" box and seven selections came up. Incredibly, there it was. Good God. Somebody with the handle 'wellvis' had "Bottom Dollar" in a 1.2 MB file at the other end of a 64kbps connection. I double-clicked and about five minutes later it was playing out of my speakers. Hearing it filled me with joy and tears. I hadn't heard that song more than a few times (on an old tape, now also lost) in more than twenty years.

So I looked Mike up on Google and found "Blues & Bluegrass" for sale on a European site called NetBeat. It took me less than five minutes to gladly pay about 25 Euros for the album. Looks to me like the technologists, the connoisseurs and the Tip Jar people are working that perfect system pretty well.

24 Notes on Napster: A Commonplace Book for Today