Songkick is a service which scans your listening habits and tells you when bands you like are playing.

I signed up and after downloading a quick app and scanning my Itunes (took about 5 minutes), I had this on my profile page:

I love all of these bands to pieces and they’re all playing in the next month. Result!

I love services like this which require no investment to get really great value back – Last.fm’s another one I find really useful for the same reason.

Thanks to Mike Stenhouse for the tip off. He reckons Version 2.0 is going to be even better..

Technorati Tags: LiveMusic, SocialDesign, SongKick

It did leave me thinking – do we really need speakers at conferences any more?

I read so much on the web at the moment that I rarely feel wowed by talks these days. I reckon we should think more about Unconferences and spend more time talking to each other rather than just listening.

Saying that, Josh Porter stole the show and I did enjoy his bit. If you’re into social design, his blog is probably the best thing around at the moment. The book’s very good too.

I think the Brum social media cafe idea that was coming out is killer. I’d definitely join and will help out if I can. A few more thoughts have come to mind but I’ll post these later when I’ve thought them through.

It’s great to see such a thriving social media community in and around Birmingham. Loads of interesting new people to meet – see everyone next time.

Some good ones:

I really want to write something profound about the social objects but I’m just too tired. I will soon, I promise.

This is great.

If you’re not familiar with the goings on in Digbeth, Birmingham then the basic story is that a few residents of brand new flats in Digbeth (well known capital of the Brum music scene) are complaining about the noise. The Spotted Dog is right in the firing line and is under threat of closing.

It’s all fairly idiotic. Check the Keep Digbeth Vibrant campaign for more.

It has it all: An ambitious idea way ahead of its time; an eight year story from idea through to conception; a fascinating mix of world-wide collaboration, physical devices (a handheld species identifier if you can believe it), totally unique data visualisation techniques; and at the end of all this we end up with something that is going to add a rather significant amount to the sum of human knowledge.

In short, a story of "how big things get done". Inspiring.

I’ll let him explain:

I’ve just created a new blog, Wishful Linking, to share links that may be useful and/or interesting to you as a creative professional. So if you’d like me to send you links to web pages about creativity, creative careers, managing creativity, intellectual property, creative industries, blogging, marketing, time management etc, then sign up for the RSS feed now.

If you don’t know him, he’s the guru when it comes to stuff like this. Get reading!

Nothing particularly earthshattering to report; however I must say I was surprised with what seemed to be a rather negative attitude towards Creative Commons (a new set of alternatives to Copyright, some of which allow others a greater freedom to distribute and re-use content).

Maybe it’s because the debate was dominated by a lawyer, but for me the prevailing question seemed to be "why would anyone want to give their rights away?"

Specifically, a number of people seemed to imply that putting any of your content for free devalues everything you do in the future. Excuse me? What?

As far as I’m concerned it’s going to get harder and harder to sell content direct. In fact it’s going to be hard enough just getting noticed in this world where everyone’s producing. Any promotion is good promotion. Getting your stuff out there is totally vital to building a name. 

Creative commons means that, if I choose, I as a producer have a way of legally allowing others to remix, copy and do whatever they want with my work.  If it’s done properly however, I can request that it’s always be attributed to me.

I think.there’s something really important about this. Going back to my last post – remixing, copying and attributing is vital to social media.  We need to have a way of telling people what they can and can’t do with our stuff. Hopefully most of them will take some notice.

Yes, people can exploit Intellectual Property, but they’re going to do that however you license it .

And as MC Paula LeDeau pointed out: "As a creative person you’re at far greater risk of obscurity.". I couldn’t agree more.

Working with social enterprises and other socially focussed organisations I started to realise that this concept could apply quite neatly to an organisation’s social impact as well as its financial success.

Put simply, instead of "stay small but sell all over the world", an organisation can now use the web to "stay small but influence all over the world". This is good news for organisations that want to remain small, nimble and innovative.

Instead of growing in influence by growing in size, organisations can now use the web to tell the world what they’re doing in great detail, start discussions and show others how to get things done effectively. Meanwhile they’re working on the next set of ideas. I mentioned an example of this in a previous post about my work with Impactt.

These ideas aren’t new, but I’ve found this to be a great way of encapsulating things when talking to socially focussed organisations about their web strategies.

Whatever kind of business you’re part of, check this out. You’re bound to find some useful stuff in here. Great stuff.

Great to see that one of the top ten, Diarised, is a project developed by our friends Made Media.

technorati tags:Diarised, DigitalCentral, Business, Plaxo, Basecamp, 37Signals, MadeMedia, Birmingham, 3form, CampaignMonitor, Guru