If I wanted to be annoyingly post-modern, I could just leave this blog blank and claim it was a gesture of solidarity, but I’m not the strong silent type, so instead, I’ll actually write something…

Okay, so, today, lots of American web radio stations are staying silent, as a form of protest against the royalty hike that’s due to come into play on July 15th. The hike consists of a charge of $0.0008 per song, per listener, and applies retroactively from January 1st 2006; it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it soon mounts up, especially if the station is at all popular. Big companies may be able to absorb the cost and carry on, but lots and lots of smaller stations will have to shut down instead.

I’m not entirely sure how anyone thought this would fly, but fly it has, and with the clock ticking, this radio silence seems to be a last ditch attempt to get someone somewhere to see sense. The music industry has undergone a lot of changes in recent years, and it just doesn’t seem to know how to deal with them — look at the problem of illegal downloading, the interminable DRM fiascos, and the attempts to extend the life of copyright on songs.

The problem is, though, that with each new move to thwart what the industry sees as a threat to its livelihood, it’s shooting itself in the foot. DRM hasn’t been a brilliant success, because everyone hates it, it can be cracked fairly easily, and people who were going to pirate stuff just pirate it anyway. Meanwhile, legitimate customers get penalised as they find they can’t play their paid-for downloads on their MP3 players because for some reason they aren’t compatible. Making examples of people by suing them in the hope that the rest of the downloading world will get scared hasn’t worked; and threatening internet radio might be the craziest move of all.

Radio stations are a way to get music heard by the masses, who will then go and purchase said music. Sure, some people may record songs from the radio and not buy them, but those are a minority. If greed means that radio stations stop broadcasting, music sales will go down. Nice work, guys.

So if you’re wondering why the Internet’s quiet today, you can find out what’s going on at www.savenetradio.org.

The statement issued today by the BBFC suggests that, in its world at least, banning Manhunt 2 is a great bit of publicity for the classification board, and for British standards on the whole.

Ummm, does anyone else have deja vu? It seems like Manhunt’s sole purpose for existing is to generate moral outrage; and, in the process, to create press coverage. A couple of years ago, games retailers were pulling the first Manhunt game off the shelves when it looked like a teenager murderer had been playing it. As it turned out, the game actually belonged to the victim in that case; but the publicity had already done its work, encouraging people to buy the game from anywhere that still stocked it.

This time round, the BBFC has deemed Manhunt 2 to be such an immoral piece of work that it shouldn’t be sold to anyone: Rockstar had applied for an 18 certificate and was denied.

(As an aside: what on Earth could it possibly have contained to merit that? This is the same BBFC that passed Hostel Part II uncut, and awarded the gorefest that was Final Destination 3 a 15 certificate. Madness.)

What’s going to happen? Well, people will be intrigued as a result of the publicity and, seeing the BBFC as a bunch of stuffed shirts trying to ruin their fun, get their hands on an illegitimate copy of Manhunt 2 as fast as humanly possible, of course!

The thing is, even in the first case, retailers didn’t really care about protecting the youth of today or any of that nonsense; it was just a nice bit of spin. The BBFC seem to have imagined banning the sequel demonstrated thatstandards of entertainment and conduct still existed, and that it was still a worthwhile moral guardian. Actually, what this has done is create a buzz for Manhunt 2, and foul up the BBFC’s public image in the process. (The mileage of Daily Mail readers may vary.)

The phrase is so common that it seems unnecessary to ever say it, but clearly not everyone remembers it: no publicity is bad publicity. Now, how do we get the BBFC to “ban” IT Pro…?

If there’s one thing the Internet is really good at, it’s organising campaigns.

Look at the recent push to bring back Veronica Mars: fans managed to organise themselves to send 2040 Mars bars, as well as 4,848 Snickers bars, to the offices of the network that cancelled the show. Original, clever, and probably completely without success, though I guess we won’t know till all that chocolate gets delivered. Other TV shows have inspired similar campaigns; see Firefly, Jericho, Farscape, and so on.

Sure, once upon a time, people might have organised letter-writing campaigns, but with the help of the Internet, it’s a lot easier to get people mobilised, as well as to raise awareness.

Another example is the sheer number of petitions posted online - and the number of signatures on them. The Government’s e-petition site alone lead to petitions being raised that gathered thousands of signatures, and though these might not have actually provoked any action, they do at least get read, and responded to.

The thing that made me think about it today was the Blog Like It’s The End of the World meme, organised for tomorrow. Bloggers from around the world (probably primarily America, mind you) will spend June 13th writing their blogs as if there was a zombie uprising occurring. There’s already a list of blogs committed to doing it, but I suspect more will jump on the bandwagon once it actually starts (and I’m considering it myself!).

The odd thing is that this doesn’t appear to be tied into any particular product. Maybe it was inspired by Romero’s forthcoming Diary of the Dead; and if this stunt was being coordinated by the PR team behind that, it’d be genius. There are ways and means of making communities work for your benefit … not many companies seem to have realised that yet, though. But there’s potential there.

I’ve spent much of this week signing up for social networking sites. Primarily to write an article about them, I admit, but also out of curiosity. I keep getting invited to various ones, or getting notification e-mails that someone’s tried to add me as a friend on some site I don’t belong to, and I always mean to check them out, but never quite get round to it…

In short, the only thing I’ve learned this week is that people might use multiple sites, but the one they really rely on is MySpace. Messy, buggy, and constantly down for some kind of maintenance or other, MySpace is still king of the castle when it comes to networking - socially or otherwise.

Because some of the ’social’ bit’s gone out of it now, hasn’t it? Maybe it’s the Murdoch influence, or maybe it’s just rampant cynicism, but … who uses MySpace to make friends any more? Maybe teenagers. Everyone else is there to try to elbow themselves forward in their careers; to make connections that they otherwise might not be able to. And since MySpace is where everyone else is, it’s there that you need to go to make your mark. There’s no point being on a network if there’s no-one else there to network with.

So, yeah, in conclusion, if you’ve got something to promote, no matter what it is, MySpace is probably going to be your first stop nowadays. I’m starting to buy into that old superstition about mirrors and cameras stealing your soul, though; I think some essential part of myself might now be spread all over Facebook, Bebo, Twitter…

There’s going to have to be a backlash at some point. Otherwise we’re all going to start melding into one another like some horrific thing from an 80s horror movie.