How that U2 album was leaked

Some poor web guy at Universal Music is getting more attention than any web staffer could ever desire.

Universal Australia - located primarily in a cool, renovated warehouse in Sydney's The Rocks, accidentally released the latest U2 album for a few hours last week.

I'm a web producer that worked in the music industry for 6 years and can see how itKs occurred.

The release date was not until March 3 for Oz but a standing element would have appeared a fortnight out to pre-order the album NO LINE ON THE HORIZON. Poor sod has made it for sale.

He/she must now be sitting at home, fretting - not just that he/she is now jobless - that they:

A) got on Bono's angry radar
B) set back Universal a few hundred-thousand in CD or download sales
C) U2's manager Paul McGuinness is a large Achtung Baby himself and he's got heated before over file-sharing (strangely Bono amnd The edge are on record saying they don't care bout illegal downloads, just if u on-sell it)

D) started such a serious online boondoggle between file sharers and lastFM.

LastFM is an online radio/playlist sharing service. Allegedly, the US music industry's copyright agency RIAA got riled after the U2 release ended up on p2p sites 3 miliseconds after our web worker flicked the wrong switch. The RIAA is said to have demanded the playlist info from lastFM of thousands of subscribers.

Clearly, that raises lots of privacy issues of the kind that got facebook doing an about-facebook this week.

I knew the person doing the job previous to the current person in the role and they went on to great things in a global tech company.

This guy needs to start his CV afresh.


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Twitter goes mainstream but Australians still looking for "ON" button to PC

It all just gets away from us so quickly down here in Australia.

The websites now known collectively as 'social media' escape many people I know and even friends of mine who believe they are practically 'linked in' wouldn't have heard of a site with that name yet. Some are yet to join facebook and seem to be still waiting for it to die leaving all of us patsies exposed as trend lemmings.

Then twitter walks in the door. This facebook-lite seems to me a perfect follow-up technology for when we all get tied of posting items and albums hoping for a friend to post a three-word comment of recognition.

Twitter is like all the best RSS feeds amalgamated and thank God, it's usually made more personal by the human posting it.

Even CNN's postings have personality thrown in and they've already been credited with taking tweets mainstream.

You can run a twitter account from tjhe web but using a phone or computer application makes reading and posting nuch simpler.

It works with not 'friends' but 'followers'.

But start following a lot of regular twitterers and the feed of update jumps from distracting to overwhelming.

Twitter will probaby end up more like a news-social widget on people's devices where they follow a select bunch of people (friends and celebs) plus a few news /entertainment/ sport/business services.

So why is our nation of luddites skeptical at every new morph of the web?

Baby boomers are holding a lot of the most influential posts and until that changes, I imagine little else will.


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