The structure of the concert series goes hand in hand with the structure of Pandora itself.

In Pandora radio, you get customized, personalized “stations” based around music you already like and your own voting on songs (thumbs up, thumbs down). Ideally, you end up with stations playing tons of music that you like and helping you discover new music within the same range of taste as what you already like.

The concert series does the same thing, but for a larger area, and live. Pandora analyzes the preferences and voting patterns of subscribers in a given locality (e.g. Portland), then selects a band to play that area.

The show is at the Bowery Ballroom. Doors open at 8:00 PM, show starts at 9:00 PM. The shows are free and by invitation. A few tickets are available at the door starting at 7:00 PM, but given the venue, they will likely go fast.

Portugal. The Man – “Got It All”

Dawes – “A Little Bit of Everything”

On the YouTube.com/Lollapalooza channel, there will be feeds from the four stages, and, according to the YouTube blog, the webcast will last for the entirety of the festival. YouTube is even getting in on the celebration a little earlier by featuring some of the bands that will be appearing at Grant Park:

…we’ve been featuring video premieres from some of the biggest names playing the festival/webcast. On Monday, the Foo Fighters unveiled their affecting “Garage Tour” short film, which follows the band as they play intimate shows in people’s garages across the country. (Warning: the first vignette might make you cry.) Today, we feature headliners My Morning Jacket. We’ll have more premieres from bands playing the webcast through the week; keep checking back to youtube.com/music.

YouTube’s Lollapalooza page features the bands that will take part in the YouTube webcast, and judging by the list, it shouldn’t disappoint, even if you can see these performances in person. Included in the list are bands like the Foo Fighters, The Cars, Ween, My Morning Jacket, and Coldplay.

Here’s a screenshot of YouTube’s list of participating bands:

With that in mind, you can always curl up with your favorite device and live vicariously through YouTube’s Lollapalooza webcast. The fun starts this Friday at 1:30 pm, Central time. The first act to be shown will be The Vaccines. Simply navigate to the page in question and enjoy the show. Don’t forget your lighters.

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In 2007, plenty of interest among music fans manifested itself in numerous blogs. Billboard Magazine, once one of those outlets that owned music news, blogged about problems getting in the show.

However, music publication NME came through with the set list from the two hour concert. In a way this showed how far media coverage has come with the Internet, and how far it has to go.

Though NME followed up with a solid review, there was no stream to follow of the show. No audio, no video, no chance for some horrid, clever person to (horrors!) record this performance.

A once in a lifetime reunion should have had a greater reach than its audience. If the much-expected DVD of the concert does emerge, that would make up for this for a lot of fans. We shouldn’t have to wait for a DVD, not when modern multimedia streaming and content distribution networks could have made the show a lot more immediate to what would have been a grateful online audience.

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The MySpace Music Tour will begin October 16 in Seattle, Washington and will be co-headlined by two groups that have developed a following on the site, Hellogoodbye and Say Anything. Other bands will include MySpace Records artists, Polysics and yet to-be- announced special guests. The tour will include more than 30 shows in the U.S. in October and November.

"MySpace has served as a platform for countless bands and musicians around the world to showcase and promote their music to millions of fans online," said Tom Anderson, president and co-founder of MySpace.

"With the new MySpace Music Tour concert series we are able to bring people face-to-face with the bands and artists they’ve come to know and love on the site. The kick-off tour has an amazing line-up of bands and I know the MySpace community will be psyched to see them live."

The MySpace Music Tour will have a dedicated online community on MySpace, fans will be able to find tour information and purchase tickets. The profile will also feature content, including band blogs from the road, photo galleries and offers and sweepstakes for MySpace users to win a chance to go backstage and meet the bands.

The Rock Safe program is a part of the greater Houston-based MyCityRocks initiative, founded in 2005, which has spread, as these online viral things go, to over 100 cities. Yes, there’s probably one near you. MyCityRocks was founded as a community devoted to responsible and safe partying. Rock Safe is about staying safe online.

Houston will host the Rock Safe Summer 2006 Concert on June 16th, featuring local bands to raise awareness about online safety and collect donations for a local women and children in crisis center called The Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

Dr. Cliff Kurtzman, MyCityRocks’ executive director, tapped WebProNews after a Texas girl filed a $30 million lawsuit against MySpace.com, alleging she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old who had lied about his age.

“To help educate young people in how they can avoid this kind of a situation,” writes Kurtzman, “MyCityRocks and The Bridge Over Troubled Waters launched the ROCK SAFE program in April of 2006.

“The goal of ROCK SAFE is to proactively help young men and women enjoy online social networking in a manner that is safe and responsible, and to provide them with tools and information they need to avoid individuals that might be abusive or predatory.”

The more novel of these tools is the AddMe Card, a sort of business card teens and young adults can have made through the organization. The AddMe Card is for new acquaintances young people meet offline, say at a concert or party, but are wary of giving out personal information like phone numbers or email addresses.

Instead, the AddMe Card has a photo and a link to an online profile on a site like MySpace. MyCityRocks will also provide HTML code for posting Web-versions on new friends’ profiles online.

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The first concert to be made available via Crowfly Digital Entertainment will be Mark Knopfler’s July 13 date at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. The download will go on sale tomorrow from the musician’s web site for $14.99.

Former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler commented, “I have never objected to fans recording performances for themselves. However, with this new technology we are in a position to give our audiences something of the highest quality they can keep as a lasting souvenir of the night.”

Downloads from Crowfly will be encoded with Windows DRM technology. However, the company says it can adapt to use any DRM technology or music file format. That poses the possibility of Crowfly providing downloads in Apple’s AAC format, which would make it compatible with the iPod.

And should the video iPod come to pass, this could be another source of video content, provided of course the company could negotiate a deal with Apple to permit this.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Gates’ presence on a stage shared with the likes of Elton John, REM and Coldplay may have seemed out of place to some but he was also in the presence of famous friends and fellow humanitarians such as U2 singer Bono.

Gates was introduced to the crowd by Live8 founder Bob Geldof who praised the charitable work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and hailed the software tycoon as the world’s most important philanthropist. ”

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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And who did I find there? Mark Brnich, director of technical services for Eighth Day Sound. He was in charge of the audio at the concert.

Oh, I’m so excited! He’s a Tablet PC fan. In fact, he was using a Motion Tablet PC to run the hall’s audio. He says he loves his Tablet PC because it replaced a whole rack of gear. I wish I remembered the name of the app that was running on it. It was quite cool looking. He had digital access to all the amps.

Oh, and you Mac fans? His crew was using a Mac to record the concert. The keyboardist had another Mac up on stage, presumably to load various samples into his keyboards.

The lighting? Was done by a custom board that had a computer and display screens in it. They didn’t know if it was running Windows, but it sure looked like it.

The concert? Was great, but we’ll never go back to the Everett Event Center again. They ushers there were downright rude and the accoustics just weren’t what I expect.

During the concert at one part a video was running on the screens behind the band. In it they made fun of the music industry with its “falling profits.” Basically made fun of the industry’s anti-MP3 stance. In the cartoon they blew up a building with a sign denoting “EMI” which, in the cartoon, stood for “Endangered Music Industry.” That made points with the fans at the concert.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Forrester Research http://www.forrester.com/ in concert with
http://Shop.org recently released an online retail shopping study
in which they conclude:

“Shoppers will increasingly use search engines like Google,
Overture, BizRate, and DealTime to find not only retailers, but
also specific products. As email becomes less effective,
retailers need to learn and test the search engine landscape.”

Forrester Research should at least have a bit more clarity. The
“search landscape” is incredibly diverse. Let’s look at shopping
search as a part of that landscape, but first let’s take a look at
the underlying “geology”.

Here’s a list of Major portals and their shopping search resources
from an unscientific “click to see” tour conducted on May 19, 2003.
I’ll address each of those mentioned by Forrester and then a
couple more.

Google has a shopping search function in ‘beta’ that is free right
now called Froogle at http://froogle.google.com but they also have
a PPC program called “Adwords” that gives paid sponsor listings
along the right side of the normal (non-shopping search) result
screen. Google is pure search when used from the front page or
through any “Google” hosted search box available from thousands of
sites. Standard results here do show those “Adwords” paid
listings, but they are very clearly labled “sponsored links”.
Which is likely to give “shoppers” the best result? If you want
*information* the standard search is best. If you want to visit
the site that has bid the highest for the search phrase you typed,
then by all means, visit that link!

Overture is a Pay-Per-Click engine that nobody uses directly
(can’t go to http://www.overture.com to search for anything),
searchers see the results from Overture displayed on “partner”
sites and portals like MSN and AOL as “sponsor listings”. Overture
PPC listings are displayed in differing ways by different portals,
but essentially those results are served up to searchers as the
top 3 or 4 results on a page depending on the partnership
relationship Overture has with the portal you do your search from.
Where do you see Overture results? Straight from their “About
Overture” page they tell us “advertisers can bid for placement
in search results that Overture distributes to affiliate partners
such as MSN, Yahoo!, CNN.com and InfoSpace.”

BizRate and DealTime are specifically “Comparison Shopping Search
Engines” where a business bids for listings in order to have their
products show up in comparison list of like products on a Pay-Per-
Click basis at partnering sites and portals. Although you can go
to those sites directly to do your shopping searches, not many do.
They get those results fed to them by the site they started their
shopping on and seldom consider the source of the results or who
partners with whom to serve them those results.

You’ll often hear people call Yahoo a search engine, when it is in
fact, a directory. Yahoo does have shopping search but it defaults
to their own Yahoo store owners, nothing outside of Yahoo Stores
is served by Yahoo if you start in the
http://search.shopping.yahoo.com page linked from the top of Yahoo
under the “shop” icon or any of the links titled “shopping” at
Yahoo. This means that if Yahoo doesn’t host the store you want to
shop at, then you won’t get any meaningful “comparison” shopping
results but it does fit Yahoo’s paid Directory business model.
If your ecommerce site is hosted by Yahoo stores, then you are
already benefitting from being in their network of shopping sites
and will turn up in searches from Yahoo pages. Consider this if
you can’t afford your own ecommerce site or getting it indexed on
the free search engines.

As mentioned above in the “About Overture” quote, MSN serves
results from Overture PPC from within the search function at MSN
search, but if you start at the MSN front page, (the default home
page for millions of non-tech-savvy consumers who don’t know how
to change their browser settings to display a different home
page), you’ll see that MSN simply links directly to the home pages
of hundreds of huge retailers. Those retailers pay a hefty fee to
MSN to be linked from front page links and more to be linked
throughout the “shopping” sections of MSN in all of the links
displayed on any of those pages at http://shopping.msn.com

What does shopping search mean to the small retailer online?
Here’s a rundown of where you should focus your energy in the
shopping search game.

1) Once you have an online presence, make certain you have your
site optimized for the search engines by including LOTS of good
text-based information about your company, your products, your
ingredients, your industry and your company philosophy throughout
your site. This is the basis for turning up in what is called
“organic” search results. Those results that are free and show up
on non-paid searches. You’ll do best when you limit graphics and
images to small logos and product photos. Include your keywords
often in page text, “title” metatags, text links, headlines and
body text. This represents the least expensive strategy.
I have a small client that has never spent a dime on advertising
but his site ranks number one for the phrase “fragrance free
lotion” which I’m proud to say we achieved for him with simple
optimization techniques. Check his ranking at any google partner
site. Here’s a search on CNN.com that reflects his search phrase.
http://tinyurl.com/c5sg To learn more about those techniques visit
http://www.website101.com/metatags.html

2) When you’ve optimized your site for all the important search
phrases for your product or service, then move on to the next
level of shopping search marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising.
This strategy allows you to gain top positions or at least
increase your visibility through being one of those “sponsored
links” that is displayed above and beside those “organic” search
listings at dozens of large portals and search sites. To learn
more about that type advertising visit the following articles
describing PPC engines and programs in more detail.

http://www.searchengineoptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/index.html#PPC

3) If you operate an ecommerce web site that competes with major
name-brand retailers for organic search terms as well as PPC
phrases then you may find it more economical to contact one of
those shopping search engines. BizRate and DealTime are both PPC
shopping search programs where you become a part of their list of
comparison of like products, so be prepared to see your
competitors listed here as well. But the benefit of being in the
same area as your competitors is well known and understood by
major retailers who will sometimes open up new stores right beside
well-established competitors to gain new customers. See
http://www.bizrate.com or http://www.dealtime.com

4) Finally, search outperforms advertising in most circumstances
on the web. There is no question that Forrester research have it
right when they say, “retailers need to learn and test the search
engine landscape.” Be aware of the fact that advertising is an
interruption to any surfers who are looking for information
online, but search is an active move to FIND INFORMATION
about products and services online and search results that provide more
information first, will show up first in any search. Only after
you’ve provided that information on your site should you consider
paying for your traffic in any form, including PPC or those
shopping search sites. Here’s an article discussing search versus
advertising online.

http://www.searchengineoptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/SEO_vs_Advertsing_ROI.html

Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of
in-house content managers http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm
as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at
http://WebSite101.com and blogs about SEO at http://RealitySEO.com
where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.