Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn-trusive

Check out the email I got from lastminute.com this morning. The subject title was, 'Celebrity hotels: who will you run into at breakfast?'. Seriously. What. The...? Lastminute are trying to sell hotel rooms based on the fact that famous people may or may not have stayed, or currently be, staying in them. They might as well have said, 'Scrape Bono's matted hair from the bath plug', or, 'Sniff Cher's soiled sheets'.

A little creepy, no? Assuming your customers are so lacking in taste and dignity that watching a crumpled Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas spoon porridge into his face at breakfast is a reason for them to want to part with their hard-earned money.

Lastminute.com, is your time up?

The future of Content Sharing

So the government have once again proved they are about five years out of date with Peter Mandelson's recent proposal to disconnect the broadband of those who are found to be file sharing. Hey, Pete! The horse is already half way to China, I wouldn't bother bolting the stable door if I were you, but welcome to the 21st century anyway.

It's impossible to enforce a ban on file sharing, so we should stop trying. That's not to say that it's now legal. Making copies of music has changed a lot since the days when kids swapped cassettes and crappy recordings deteriorated with each replication, copying MP3s is super easy and while it may not be stealing in the sense that you are depriving an owner of a piece of his or her property, what's being stolen is that owner's right to copy and distribute their work.

To the music industry in general, and small labels and independent artists specifically, digital has long equalled 'bad' and 'to be avoided'. So far the response in the drum & bass scene has been to adopt a defensive stance of aggression and denial – to everyone's detriment. Instead of standing on the beach like Cnuts (yes, Cnuts – look it up), trying to hold back the tides, the music industry needs to adapt to the new market.

Speaking of China, over there Google has displayed impressive foresight, sadly lacking in our own Secretary of State for Business and 'Innovation', by purchasing a blanket license to distribute music in that territory for free. Their rationale? That the content sharing landscape is changing so rapidly it's impossible to police, so might as well at least control the access to it as a loss-leader and wait for a money-making business model to emerge once it all settles down.

As Google have accepted, the record label 'command and control' model is becoming rapidly outdated, now the culture is all about cooperation and cultivation. Sharing is the key driver for listeners and so attention has become the new currency. While content providers and hosts are still figuring out how to handle the transition from disconnected to connected consumers, the opportunities for identifying new revenue streams are abundant.

Access to a format which holds that content is the most obvious place to start charging – licensing, internet tax, micro payments – all rich territories for growth. The majority of internet usage will be mobile in next five years and so interface is key – something iPhone and Spotify have very smartly delivered. London Elektricity's own iPhone app. is another great example of hooking attention by trading in access and then banking that attention in revenue once the listener is further into the London Elektricity 'brand'.

That's what services like apps do so well and what labels like Hospital are so good at doing, which is to treat content as an experience first, a product second.

URL to orginal article on Knowledge's site here: http://www.kmag.co.uk/editorial/blogs/rinse_and_repeat/the-future-of-content-charing

Tracie Egan

I interviewed one of my favourite bloggers and writers, Tracie Egan for Don't Panic. Read it here:

It’s kind of hard to define contemporary feminism. The bra-burning railing-against-the-patriarchy of old has been replaced by something subtler, more integrated. As well as the more traditionally serious, chin-strokey feminist issues such as planned parenthood, abortion, sex trafficking - the political issues, if you will - there is now as much of an appetite among feminists for discussion around more social issues, with sexuality, gender stereotyping and body image all requesting equal billing. Consequently the feminist movement has found itself fragmenting into sub-genres, and in response women’s websites such as Jezebel, Slated, Feministing and XX, have sprung up all over the web, each catering for a different ‘flavour’ of feminism.



By employing writers who are not afraid to show themselves as three-dimensional, clever women with personalities and senses of humor, these sites have helped to keep the debate relevant and give the movement bigger balls than ever. One such writer is New Yorker, Tracie Egan. An editor at Jezebel and former anonymous, since ‘outed’ blogger of One D At A Time, aka ‘Slut Machine’, Egan has written in disarmingly frank detail about her one-night stands, excessive drinking, fights with boyfriends, and sexually transmitted diseases.


“I was always more interested in celebrating the more fun aspects of liberation”, says Egan. “So that’s why I wanted to write about sex. I wanted to be as honest as I could. If people think that women who have sex are sluts then I guess that makes me one. Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s kind of like a Rorsach test for sexuality. Anyone who is uncomfortable with themselves and their own sexuality would get uncomfortable with any sort of honesty or reality about sex.”

For many, a lot of Egan’s contributions to the feminist conversation come from a challenging and uncomfortable place and this has won her as many fans as it has detractors. Speaking of the comments posted on One D At A Time, she says;

“I didn’t care when some stupid guys would say ‘you’re so disgusting, you’re such a pig’ or whatever, what bothered me was when women who are otherwise intelligent and would describe themselves as feminists got really pissed off at what I wrote. Not that they have to find someone else’s sex life endearing and funny, but I thought that they would at least be able to see the purpose in writing about something like sex and they could at least see the humour or entertainment in it. It doesn’t mean that someone who writes about their sex life isn’t as much of a feminist as they are. By being critical of another woman getting attention for speaking her mind they’re being critical of women speaking their minds full-stop.”

It would be easy to mistake, or even dismiss Egan’s online persona as that of provocateur, but to do that would be to miss the point. Egan managed to oxygenate the debate surrounding all such double standards and female sexual guilt in a piece she wrote a couple of years ago for Vice magazine titled ‘One rape please (to go)’ about her recruitment of a male escort to ‘rape’ her.



Understandably, the piece hit a few nerves and Egan drew criticism for being an irresponsible rape apologist. The obvious intellectual defence was to say that by orchestrating her own 'rape' she was making a statement about reversing the locus of power and control in a scenario that is almost always about a man wielding power and control over a woman. But the shouty caps lock brigade slightly overlooked the real point of the piece, which was that Egan was daring to admit to something that hundreds of thousands of women would falsely deny for fear of appearing un-feminist; that she fantasised about rape. What Egan asserted was that as an autonomous sexual person, she was entitled to take ownership of that fantasy and even act it out if she wanted - a freedom of choice and sexual expression perfectly in keeping with feminist principles. Unfortunately in the event, the escort didn’t quite manage to deliver and instead asked her out on a date. Egan declined.



What feminists like Egan do is to not only call out double standards between men and women, but also call out double standards within feminism. Despite identifying as feminists, women can still perceive falling for the wrong person, not using protection, drinking too much, having sex on a first date, and hating their bodies as signs of failure, as if somehow to be fallible is to be ‘un-feminist’.



“I don’t think that women should always have to strive to be altruistic, do-gooders, nurturing, peace loving vegetarians or whatever”, says Egan. “It’s not about being a better person than men, it’s about proving you’re a person, the same as everyone.”



Of her blog, Egan says;

“I wasn’t trying to be all ‘Look at me’, it was more about ‘Hey, does anyone else feel weird about putting a tampon in and then having to poop immediately afterwards?’ ‘Am I going to ‘deliver’ it if I push too much?’ I just wanted to be able to relate. I mean, that’s what the internet is for: porn and connecting. Like, I would write about having herpes and a girl would email me and say ‘Thank you so much for writing about it because I felt so gross and disgusting and like no one was ever going to marry me’, and I was like ‘Wow you really thought no one was going to marry you?’ I mean herpes is just like a form of Chicken Pox on your vagina, if it happens, it’s going to be ok.”



For a movement whose discourse has always been about proving women’s strength and equal capability to the patriarchy, examining the flaws of our gender is bound to make some feel uncomfortable. But the danger then is that feminists are holding themselves to higher standards than they would impose on men.



“It’s like the thing with Sarah Palin”, Egan says. “I understand why she would be hated for her stance on abortion and rape kits, but I disliked that people were saying, ‘She’s only popular because she’s pretty, she’s so stupid’. We won’t have true equality until a woman as stupid as George Bush could be president. Why do women have to achieve so much more than men just to be equal to them?”



“I think overall if there’s one mission or goal for feminism across the board it’s about achieving equality through being people rather than superwomen. If I were the boss of feminism it would be about having choices and not about dictating what those choices should be or judging women for what the choices they make are.”


URL to original article on Don't Panic's site here: http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/arts/is-tracie-egan-feminist