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Each of us is a fan of music, but the way in which we, as consumers, get our music is constantly changing. From 78s, 45s and 33s to cassettes, CDs and beyond, our love for music hasn’t changed, but the format we listen to it on has.

With the advent of music downloads, P2P filesharing and digital music, consumers are forced to make ethical choices based on how they get their music. So, be honest now, are you a clean music fan or do you ever use filesharing services like Limewire or Ares? As the cliché goes: You wouldn’t steal a CD, so why would you do it online?

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is forever on the rampage against people who indulge in filesharing and illegal music downloads. Jammie Thomas, the world’s most infamous and dumbest advocate of filesharing, was sued for $220,000 by the RIAA for using the filesharing service Kazaa. The landmark ruling last year sent ripples through the filesharing community.

CD sales are declining. While the record industry would like for legal music downloads to pick up the slack, this has not been the case thus far.

According to IFPI figures released recently, the growth of the digital-music industry slowed in 2007, increasing just 40% after doubling in 2006. According to IFPI CEO John Kennedy, for every one legal music download bought, 20 more are procured illegally.

The RIAA has consistently targeted American students for filesharing violations. Pre-litigation letters are sent out to universities based on the IP address of suspected filesharers.

The letters are then passed onto the students, who are given a choice: pay an out-of-court settlement of several thousand dollars or be sued and, more often than not, lose.

Illegal music downloads cannot be stopped; filesharing is a part of modern life. Technically, it is theft, but the music industry was so late in dealing with it that it is now an entity that is out of control. Furthermore, how many of those people standing against filesharing have, at one time, copied casettes or burned CDs?

Targeting students and suing people for hundreds of thousands of dollars will not solve the problem. The vast majority of people who use filesharing programs do not do so for profit, but for personal use.

When Radiohead released In Rainbows in October last year, it was a slap in the face to the music industry. The band asked fans to choose what they wanted to pay for a digital download of the album, thus underlining the fact that music is changing. However, when the CD was released at the turn of the New Year and went to the top of the album charts in the US and the UK, it proved that people do still want CDs and that, perhaps, record labels still have a role to play. There must be a middle ground.

The music industry is at a loss now. At least one positive step is the news that Last.FM will launch a service allowing users to stream the entire library of tracks from the world’s four biggest record labels. Users will be able to stream tracks for free up to three times before having to pay for them.

There was further hope with the news that QTrax was to relaunch and offer legal, free music downloads with the support of the “the big four” record labels. Sadly, the launch has been all but scuppered as three of the four have come forward to deny any involvement with QTrax. The relaunch looks set to fall flat on its face.

What is needed for the music industry to survive are not attempts to eradicate filesharing, but improved ways of capitalizing on changing consumer trends.

I’d like to open this up to the barn here because it makes for a healthy debate.

Is filesharing morally wrong and what, if anything, should be done about it?

Angel is a decent sort of bloke who took a hiatus from his pro-blogging dream to write for music-download blogs like officilares.com and filesharing blogs like iownmymusic.org.

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8 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

It seems that every time I visit a blog, I see features that I didn’t see on the previous blog. With so many different developers and designers out there, I often wonder what kinds of plugins and which ideas really are best for a website. The list below will summarize a few of my favorite plugins. These are the plugins that help me to optimize, and monetize my blog most efficiently.

• Optimizing
  • Akismet Spam Blocker: This is an absolute must! Blocking comment SPAM can be a constant challenge without this plugin. All you have to do is get the free API and click “activate”. I think that some people are hesitant or just plain lazy and end up not getting the needed API for this plugin. It’s free, it reduces your workload automatically, and it works!
  • All-In-One SEO Pack: This plugin is really a must for any blogger or website developer. “This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO”. The All-In-One SEO pack helps you to effectivey raise your search engine ranking on a page-by-page level by adding tags, descriptions and titles more efficiently.
  • CForms II: Every blog needs a contact page. Although much more than just a contact page form builder,CFormsII is a full-featured, AJAXian plugin that makes it easy for you to create forms and add them to your pages. Including SPAM protection like CAPTCHA imges is a snap. Although the interface may seem a bit complex, this plugin is really the Cadillac of forms for Wordpress.
  • Google XML Sitemaps: Submitting your sitemap to Google manually can be a time consuming task. Lucky for us, there is this free plugin that does it automatically after every post. Not only does it keep Google abreast of your updates, it also helps to increase your findability on web searches.
  • ShareThis: Social Bookmarking is a great way to gain site visitors. Accounting for a large chunk of traffic and exposure, adding links to sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon is now really easy to do and takes just one mouse click.
  • Viper’s Video Quicktags: Adding video content to blog posts can be a real pain. You can’t really do it in the visual editor and sometimes the code just doesn’t work properly with Wordpress. Viper’s video quicktags helps to ease the process and makes adding video to your posts a snap.
• Monetizing
  • AdSense Manager: Do you have Google AdSense? Then you know that sometimes adding the code to your site is not as straightforward as you’d like. With this plugin, you can automatically generate AdSense code and position the ads via widgets.
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith: I’m not really sure if this belongs in this category or if it belongs in the “optimization” category. FeebBurner FeedSmith helps you to easily make available and visible your FeedBurner feed. The reason I have this here is that I monetize my RSS Feed, so if you don’t have or use FeedBurner to manage your RSS, you really should!
  • PayPal Donate: If you want to have an easy way for your readers to send you money, than this is it! Adding a quickly recognizable PayPal button to your posts or pages, this plugin makes it easy for you to receive money through PayPal.
  • RSS Footer: Tying in with the above mentioned FeedBurner plugin, RSS footer is the “how” you monetize your RSS feed. Adding affiliate links or paid advertising is a snap and you can be as creative as you want to be in how to monetize the feed.
  • Triggit: I’ve been using Triggit now for about a week. It’s so easy to add links to Amazon, Commission Junction, Shopping.com, and others, this plugin makes monetizing your blog really easy.
  • WP-Amazon: Amazon.com is one of the world’s biggest online retailers. Now adding contextually relevant links to your posts is a snap!

I hope this list has given you some sense of how easy it is to manage your blog. The links above are free plugins that help me to optimize and monetize my blog, and I hope you find them useful. What plugins would you add to this list and what kind of plugins do you wished existed for Wordpress?

Nick is a 20-something full time grad student and full time IT guy. Specializing in Information Architecture, he often dabbles in online projects. His latest project, a blog at http://www.learnhow2earn.com, is a blog that details his online money making experiences. Like what he has to say? Check him out and drop a comment!

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40 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

So you want to make money online? Why not give freelance writing a try? No, this is not one of the more glamorous online careers, but there is a lot of money to be made if you are willing and able to work hard. Just like any other “online career” you can carve out a niche, and from there begin to make a boat load of cash.

Of course, before you can become a freelance writing stud you need to know a little bit about the way the industry works. Here are three tips that will allow you to start an online freelance writing career within a matter of days.

1. If you want to become a freelance writer, you have many markets in which you can dabble. For most, online markets are the easiest to break into. As a writer specializing in online works, you will be creating articles for webmasters, sales pages for affiliate marketers, and web copy for corporations. Just remember, you do not have to necessarily make all of your money online. You can branch out to other markets such as magazines, local newspapers, newsletters, etc.

2. To become a successful freelance writer, you need to bone up on your marketing and networking skills. If you want to have success sooner rather than later, surround yourself with people who can help you achieve your goals. In many cases, you will be able to turn one freelance writing client into another, and so on. As long as you are always networking, your business will always grow.

3. You want to be a freelance writing stud – produce high quality work. Just as Johncow.com produces high quality content, you need to do the same if you want your career to take off. Remember, your clients are not paying for trash. They want your best, and when you give it to them, you will find plenty more work waiting for you around the bend.

With these three tips, you should be able to start an online based freelance writing career. There are quite a few opportunities available online for writers. Is there going to be a lot of competition? Sure there is; this is the case in every industry. Take blogging for example. But if you offer good work within your niche, you are going to find clients who are willing to pay you respectable rates.

Keep the above three tips next to your computer, while also adding some thoughts of your own. If you can write solid content that is free of errors and easy to read, you should be able to find freelance writing work. You may not want to make this your full-time career, but even as a part-time endeavor it offers many benefits.

Chris Bibey is a full-time freelance writer who details his income at ChrisBlogging.com. Last year, he earned in excess of $65,000 as a writer. 

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22 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

This is a slightly modified version of Matt Cutts post about how to protect your Wordpress Installation.

1. As Matt recommends, lock down your wp-admin directory using this. He uses an .htaccess to block all but a few IP addresses, but there are other ways to do this as well. Here’s Matt’s code. I’m sure all you Aspie’s out there are getting a kick out of this.

2. Once again following Matt, hide your plugins directory by dropping an empty index.html file in wp-admin/plugins directory.

Here is where I diverge from the Google-God.

3. Install the Instant Upgrade Plugin. Make sure you back everything up before performing the upgrades. I haven’t had problems, but others have.

4. Install the Wordpress Database Backups plugin. I have mine set up to email me a backup once a week.

PS - John Cow needs the Lighter Admin Drop Down Menus plugin for this site.

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30 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Making Mooney online can be troublesome when our blog resides in a far off pasture where no one can see it. If you are like me, then starting a new blog means a lot of man (or cow) hours refining the design, networking with other site owners, and writing content. But how exactly should we go about gaining reader traffic? We can join the latest blog network and hope to become famous overnight, or we can create content that sparks an interest in a wide audience. Here is one secret to increasing blog traffic.

Tell the udder truth.

 What does this mean, exactly? This may mean we completely disagree with the current posting meme in the blogging world. This may mean we see a money making opportunity where others see a scam, and we say so on our blogs. This may mean we scream like feral animals in our blog posts about the blog network others are swooning over. This may mean we moan and complain throughout the blogosphere and direct people to our posts on the subject.

Why do we do this? Controversy breeds traffic.

What topics do we love to read? Does the same trite content from one blog somehow trump the same trite content of another? What about when we surf from blog to blog and see everyone glad-handing the same service, software, new blogging network, etc? Doesn’t it get old? Give them the teet, herd. The teet. Let them know the udder truth. It may not be easy, but we will learn and grow a community from our own fearlessness.

What if they hate us, you ask? Well, we have thick hide. We can communicate and defend our hatred of whatever might need exposed. Take a look at The Cow’s post on the Entrecard system. He stomped down on the heart of the Entrecard discussion, and look how many comments came of it. 126. That’s 126 compared to the average twenty to thirty on other topics.

Take a look at everything in the blogosphere. Use a critical eye and expose the udder truth. You may not begin to see a traffic spike immediately, but over time you will gain the respect of fellow bloggers, develop discussions, and boost readership.

 Jason Boom is a long-time blogger with a new home at www.jasonboom.com. Visit his blog to watch as he explodes on the internet with information regarding blog writing, networking, and marketing. Give him a herd welcome!

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34 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post