BigShinyThing

We’ve said before that last.fm and similar (but not as good) music recommendation sites are the future of music retail. Well it appears that CBS agrees with us - they’ve just forked out £140m for last.fm.

For those who have just joined us, last.fm was founded in the UK five years ago and it now has more than 15 million active users. It allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video-clips. What we love about the site is that it invites music fans to stumble upon new music and new genres (New Weird America anyone?).

Unlike a lot of media groups who seem to be frantically trying to build their social networking sites (a glance at the marketing press shows that it’s the buzzword du jour), CBS has recognised that the best aproach is to buy one ready-made.

The firm’s president and CEO Leslie Moonves told the BBC: “Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there.” He said Last.fm’s strength in building communities around music and syndicating content was “central to CBS”. He added: “Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS’s goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses.”

As part of the deal, Last.fm’s managing team will remain in place and the site will maintain its own separate identity. Here’s hoping …

Google has announced a souped-up version of online application suite Google Apps. The (un)creatively named ‘Premier’ edition offers enhanced functionality, more online storage, phone support and a bunch of other corporate-friendly features. All with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, for a flat USD50/person/year. Not just a tempting offer for small businesses who want to avoid spend on IT infrastructure — Google has already signed up Procter and Gamble and General Electric as flagship clients.

Sounds like value to us — importantly Google have also published programming interfaces for their office suite, so that third-party developers (or switched-on corporate IT departments who see which way the wind is turning and want to continue to justify their salaries) can enhance and tweak functionality. All that virtual team collaboration stuff? Already in place. Blackberry integration? Soon, probably. Yawn, then take a deep breath: next comes the modern bit.

Google Apps is the first mainstream system to give business users tools which really begin to acknowledge the cloud, tools which aspire to the benefits of those long-used by Linux hackers and wikipedians; tools with which to engage and work with strangers or competitors for mutual advantage. They aren’t there yet — Google’s initial focus is to get some traction in the mundane worlds of word-processing and data-crunching — but the trajectory is easy to plot: on- and up-wards into business-focussed social media. The challenge is to reshape — or re-create — traditional business processes into a form where they can really profit from such tools.

Companies find it difficult enough to move from Flash-heavy websites crammed with stale corporate nonsense, to actual conversation with their audience. It will be much harder for most to find a path on which they can make their borders more porous, their processes more diffuse, their knowledge more open, and yet still have an edge. But adoption of tools like Google Apps — even in their current early form — might serve to redirect people’s attention up from their desks, out through their screens, and into the cloud where the world is. It’s a start. Wait and see.

So, the theory is that dark energy, through some anti-gravitic effect, is the reason, maybe, that our Universe keeps expanding, rather than collapsing into itself. Maybe.

Anyway: hold that thought. Business zeitgeist in London over the last few months has been all about ‘getting to grips’ with social media as knowledge-management tool. Bright shiny lights going off over management heads across the city — if Wikipedia works so well in the real world, why not do it here: get all that tacit knowledge bedded in using tried-and-tested collaborative co-creation tools. I’m all for it. But I doubt that most management teams are anticipate the impact that skilling up with social media, if it really catches on in their business, might have on that business. Turn people onto these tools or, more particularly, onto the value and reward of participatory co-creation, by all means. But don’t affect surprise when you realise that their attention has turned outward, across your firewalls, into the 99.9999999% of the world where most of the things they care about — and 99.9999999% of the expertise that could assist them in their work — already lies. Social media isn’t about collapsing your business’s knowledge resources into a tight knot of hot intellectual property: it’s about joining the vast swirling galaxies of shared effort, collaborative problem-solving, open innovation.

The hackers have known this for years — but it’s only the Web 2.0-era intersection of hacker culture and second-wave digital entrepreneurship that’s exposed the rest of us to the dark energy-like expansionary effect of Wikis, open content, co-creation. First time around, management could read ClueTrain and pay lip service to its manifestos. This time around, business is opening the door to the tools, without still understanding their effect, if they’re actually embraced. There’s a reason they’re called disruptive technologies, people …

All copy from Cluster.