http://www.flickr.com/photos/jalm1/4270870194/

Containing a 3D motion sensor, the fitbit tracks your calories burnt, steps taken, distance travelled and sleep quality as long as you remember to wear it. You can connect it up with your social networks but balls to all that oversharing. Instead I’d be perfectly happy keeping my data within fitbit’s own, pretty great on first glance, social network. It tracks your progress over time, weight, foods, and allows you to set goals and see how your friends are doing – thus adding another motivational factor. I’m particularly interested in the sleep efficiency as it takes me forever to get to sleep once I’m in bed and it would be good to see it monitored.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnswords/4022080633/

I’m feeling very motivated and am going to be doing a lot of diet / fitness activities over the next month in the hope to have more energy for Glastonbury. Unfortunately, fitbits are so in demand that there’s a month backlog of orders. Still, one is about to be ordered and will hopefully be with me late June.

If you want one, they’re $99, but you’ll have to get a mate in the US to sort it out though, as they’re currently only available to order to American addresses.

Another ace blog I’ve seen recently is Londonelicious. Writen by an American girl living in London, Kristan writes really friendly, detailed reviews of restaurants around the capital which you can handily view by postcode. Ace for checking somewhere out, and also for suggestions when I’m trying to think of somewhere cool to go.

Now I’ve decided that hey, actually this is a great song and today went to try to find out some more about the band, and to hear some more of their music. Such is the beauty of the internet that I can do this. Googling them made lots of interesting articles about promoting things via various social communities across the web which I’ll come to in a bit.

As much as I work in the music industry and I absolutely can’t stand people blatantly thieving music it’s beyond my knowledge to think of a way to control this. But what do I mean? I am a huge fan of downloading and without MP3 blogs my life would be a lot less rich and I wouldn’t be able to perform my jobs as well as I do. In my ideal world, people would get new music from blogs (who are very careful about what they post and how much of one artist they post), if they don’t like it they’d bin it, or if they did like it they’d go and actually legally purchase the music. However that can be technologically managed I don’t know, but in this ideal world people’s morals would control what they did in an appropriate manner.

But screw all that, my point is that the way I, and indeed we, the world as a whole, consume music has changed dramatically probably more so in the last 12 months that ever before. Sure we remember the glory days of willing your modem to go faster as you downloaded all the stuff you’d just heard on the radio via Napster or AudioGalaxy but was there much discovery of new music involved back then? I don’t think so. Certainly not in my case, I was just after a method of getting the cds I wanted for free.

The advent of mp3 blogging and community networks has changed that completely. Responsible Mp3 blogs (i.e. those who care about the music) don’t just post a whole album with a quick ‘GET YOUR LATEST STROKES ALBUM FOR HERE’ link. They carefully chose the music they post (usually one or two tracks from an artist), write a detailed post about why they have done this, and link to places where you can purchase the music legally. I’ve discovered so much music this way and my consumption of music via radio has dropped to practically nothing. I nowadays only really listen to the radio when I’m in my car or er at work.

Anyway, yes, times are a changing. The 2nd way best way I consume music is via My Space . Whenever I want to hear more stuff from a band I always always always now try myspace.com/bandname and more often than not I get more tracks to listen to and generally more info about the music. It’s bizarrely much simpler than even going to the artist’s homepage. The 2nd part to music consumption on myspace is that bands can send you a friends request. Some people may choose to add anyone to their friends just to make them look popular, but I am very choosy. If someone sends me a friends request and they are a band, it makes me go over to their profile, listen to all the songs they’ve put up (usually 3 or 4) and then decide if they are ‘worthy’ to be on my friends list. Even if they’re not, I’ve still heard a band I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Via Myspace I got to know a band called Dead Disco and they are my personal top tip for 2006 from the strength of the music I’ve heard on there. I’ve never met them, or seen them live as they haven’t done any London gigs yet but I got in touch with them and they sent me a cd. Now I’m playing them to 2000 people a week at Popstarz and Miss-Shapes. This is all before they even got signed, released a single, or finalised their lineup. Extremely randomly one of them is from Blackpool and appears to have gone to my school for a bit. Small world and all. But here we go, I love this band who I only discovered through a message on myspace.

People need to embrace all these methods. Labels shouldn’t be shutting down mp3 blogs but should be saying sure do it, just please don’t put our singles up. People should be caring about music and not leaking whole albums for free. Labels can’t ignore the power that these blogs have, nor myspace, nor any other social networking tool that’s out there. They should all be used in people’s campaigns to maximise and excite the audience in previously unthought of ways. I want to be working with people who are similarly passionate about these methods and about using them to promote new small bands and building audiences to a frenzy.

These are good articles about The Veronicas case:
Winksite
PR Blogger

But now, thanks to some investigative googling from a frenchman by the name of Paul, I’ve just set it up to spew onto here with links daily. So now I can share cool links, and there can be some content other than my self-indulgent playlisting.

Rock on dingbats! (Oh that was just a random choice of word, but now I’m filled with a desire to play Dingbats, and I can’t even remember the concept.)

Hello TypePad (albeit still part of the same mega blogging empire that is six apart.)

I’m just playing about with things here at the moment. If you have any sexy design ideas you would like to pass my way then please do.

But for now… tread carefully.