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Throughout the decades that rock ‘n’ roll has ruled the earth the guitar has been the ultimate in phallic symbols. Wielded by many of the most famous men to stride the planet in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the guitar and the legendary status it can bestow upon those that have masterfully brandished it, is the ultimate weapon in the battle to pull the opposite sex.

Although many consider guitarists to play “second fiddle” to the lead singer, groupies that don’t fancy the singer will always head straight for the lead guitarist. So if you wanna tap into a bit of that ol’ sex appeal for yourself, either chick or chico, then follow these ten easy steps to “Becoming A Guitar Legend”.

1. First of all you’ll need a plank to beat. So head down your music shop and buy the cheapest one you can get. Don’t listen to guitar fetishist who’ll try and blind you with science, fuck the humbucker pickups and lowered action, what you need is something in a fetching shape and colour that you can strap round your neck. Remember to leave enough change for a cool guitar strap; ones with white lightening bolts down them are always de-rigueur shoulder belts.

2. You should now begin to practice. Don’t worry about being able to play anything just yet, it’s more important to rehearse your stance. Find a brightly lit room with a full-length mirror and hang your weapon of choice from your neck. Adjust the strap length so that your guitar nearly covers your kneecaps. IMPORTANT: do not use your guitar to cover your nipples. It may be easier to play guitar this way, but it is only necessary if you’re short-sighted or a complete gimp.

3. Once you’ve got your stance sorted, you then need to practice throwing some shapes. This should be done somewhere with a lot of space. Rehearse various pose combos until you get that “legendary” feel. You should at least be able to strum the strings with your strumming hand from a starting position above your head. The action should be circular and not angular. If you’re having problems with your technique, then you may require some extra reading. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a good reference guide.

4. Now you’ve got the basics sorted you’ll need to learn a few chords. Although somewhat tedious, this will be necessary to join even the shittest band. The easiest chord to learn is Em (E minor), so at least learn this one. The whole Grunge genre was based on this simple chord, so its significance – despite its simplicity – should not be overlooked. Another easy chord is A, although a nerve shattering three fingers need to be coordinated to achieve this chord, the importance of doubling your repertoire cannot be emphasised enough.

5. You may have noticed at this stage that there is a certain amount of difficulty in holding down all the strings at once so that the chord rings out. Do not fret; no extra time needs to be spent perfecting the chiming chord, because step 5 is: Buy Yourself A Distortion Pedal. Distortion pedals can mask years of inexperience. Plug together your guitar, peddle and amp (if don’t have an amp you can also use hifis with phono-in sockets. If it’s your parents’ hifi, do not ask to use it first, because the answer will be “no”). Turn your pedal up to full distort and strum your full chord repertoire. By now you should at least be able to play a C chord. C is the most popular chord in pop.

6. You’re now ready to join a band. Put up “Singer, Bass Player and Drummer wanted” adverts in all your local record and musical instrument shops. Or even put one here in the Gigwise forum.

7. Once you have a full line up it’s time to hit the rehearsal rooms. Make sure you take plenty of booze, fags, pasties and fizzy drinks with you. This step is by far the most tiresome. It is also during the rehearsal that you can spot ways in which you can upstage the lead singer with rock ‘n’ roll antics. Make sure you keep a good record of his/her shortcomings; your groupie to guitarist ratio will depend on your ability to look cooler than the frontman.

8. You’re now ready to take your one-man show on the road (yeah I know you’re in a band now, but remember who’s the daddy). You need to make a recording of your band’s performance. Don’t worry about this being of too high a quality, promoters and venue owners rarely listen to them anyway, they just look at your Myspace page and see how many “fans” you have, and if they do listen to your demo, fear not, you will not be booked on the merits of your demo’s sound quality. In fact, to really jump the queue, stick a chocolate bar in the post to your favourite promoter with a link to you website sellotaped to it.

9. OK you’ve got the gig. Time to perfect your image. Root through your parent’s record collection and find something with a picture of a group on the cover. Make sure it speaks to you as an artiste. Faking things at this point could make you look daft. The perfect image is a mixture of current cool and retro classic. DO NOT wear trackies and training shoes to a gig, (unless there’s been a Madchester revivial), EVER, and do not wear your Sunday best. To be a legend you need to look the part, at this point you may wish to watch Pirates Of The Carribean for Johnny Depp’s portrait of a rock musician. Purchase as much of your clobber second hand, this also helps you to look like you’ve been dressing this cool for ages.

10. On the big night make sure you’re fully prepared for every eventuality, remember that fucking lead singer will try and be the sexiest and the coolest onstage. Once the gig is in full swing and you’ve thrown a few rock ‘n’ roll shapes you can now smash up your guitar in an unnecessary fit, dowse it in lighter fluid and burn the bastard. Don’t worry about widdly-widdly lead breaks and playing nice tunes, no one likes those bits anyway. You’re now well on your way to becoming a legend. The groupies are now yours. You’ll need to repeat step 10 a number of times until you attain widespread acclaim, and once this is achieved you can then unleash the guitar legend stock tools of the trade; alcoholism, heroin addiction and suicide/drug overdose. If you’re still alive after five years then either quit music (you’re obviously not up to the job) or return to step 1 and repeat the process.

When you’re building a business there comes a point where you have to hire some staff and obviously you want to hire the most talented people. But where to find them?

According to common belief (and Wikipedia): “Talent (in the sense of natural ability or giftedness) is not the same as skill, which is a learned process, and one which is enhanced or inhibited by an underlying talent.” That idea of talent being a god given gift that certain chosen people are born with has permeated mankind’s thinking since the beginning of time.

That’s not the case though and there seems to be a growing buzz around the idea that talent IS a learned process, it IS skill in fact. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers mentions the 10,000 hour rule, where experts in any given field are more than likely to have spent at least that many hours learning their trade. Likewise, Talent Is Overated by Geoff Colvin makes the point that every virtuoso spent at least 10 years of hard graft before they produced anything near a prodigious masterpiece and natural ability is down to ambitious parenting skills. There’s a great aticle on Boston.com about Grit being the real source of talent.

So how does this relate to the hiring process? Well, I’ve heard it said so many times that you need to have a degree to get a decent job nowadays, but I don’t think it’s a requirement at all. In my company there are 6 members of staff, two of which have degrees, of the three hired in the last three years, only one has a degree. There are also currently five  interns who work different days, one of which doesn’t have a degree. These people are where they are despite their education.

I didn’t study at university, so that clearly influences my belief that a degree isn’t required, but more than that, when I’m hiring people, I look more at work experience than anything else on a CV. I prefer to see a number of work experience placements and internships from as early as possible on a CV than just a three year study period. I believe that the best people are the ones that are passionate about what they do and who are willing to work at getting experience anywhere they can to make their prospects as good as possible.

Of course that doesn’t preclude us hiring graduates and I would certainly encourage anyone looking to study to pursue that route, as a three year study period can equally prove that someone has passion and is willing to work hard.

What I’m looking for  is people who are dogged, are willing to learn and who will go the extra mile to make something happen. And with time that equates to “talent”.

Have you noticed how often our culture, particularly in the UK, is to encourage people to stick with what they’ve got instead of pushing yourself to do more? How often have you heard the old adage that birds in the hand are worth more than birds in the bush? What’s this message supposed to be telling us?

Stick with what you’ve got.

Boring.

The truth is that what you’re looking at in the bush, is worth twice as much as what you’ve got now. The safe option is to stick with what you’ve got, but meanwhile opportunity is tweeting away right in front of you.

Recently a friend was speaking to me about something that they’d been thinking about doing for a long time but had never put any effort into making it happen. I could tell that they’d put a lot of thought into planning how they could achieve what they’d been thinking about. Perplexed, I asked why they had never gone through with their plan. Their answer? They were afraid that if they did, it might turn out to be a bad decision.

What’s the problem with making bad decisions?

Do the maths (or math, if you’re a yank), I can either:

1. do nothing, no chance of a pay off.
2. do something, chance of a pay off.

Say I make 10 decision, five of them are bad and they put me into shitty situations. Four of them aren’t so bad, but I don’t get anywhere with them either, just shit decisions, no-one notices, phew. Finally, I make a half decent decision. It pays off, woot! So, I have some shit to deal with and a pay day.

We all get hit with moments of indecision, but a decision, even if it turns out to be bad is better than giving in to fear and doing nothing.

I came across something weird today that might interest other online publishers. I got my regular Google alert via email about one of my sites Entertainmentwise.com, (you may be signed up for these yourself, you basically get a daily round up of any new mentions on the net that the Google Bot comes across) one of the links at the bottom of the email listed under Google Web Alert was for a page that looked like a normal Entertainmentwise page. I clicked the link thinking it would take me to my site… and it did. So I logged in and approved some comments pending, when I realised that the domain I was actually on was entertainmentsgossip.com. Thinking I was losing it I backtracked and sure enough the whole site was on this domain. How the hell did that happen?

I followed up with a quick who.is, the domain is registered to www.moniker.com a domain name registering service. Either the actual owners of this domain are hiding behind Moniker Privacy Services or Moniker have registered this domain and this is their standard practice making them a very dubious organisation indeed. Sure enough the IP address on the who is is our server. So WTF is going on here?

I’m guessing that this domain bought very recently is being pointed at our site so that they get a traffic ranking from the content we have. We rank highly on loads of celebrity search terms which would be invaluable to anyone trying to either sell on the domain or start their own celebrity site with some traffic already coming in.

Unfortunately for Entertainmentwise this would almost surely result in some kind of penalisation for our content being duplicated on another domain. So… what to do?

Fortunately there’s an easy fix for this as it only takes a quick rewrite rule in our httpd.ini file (I know, we’re on Windows!) to permanently redirect from their domain to ours, meaning they won’t earn any Google juice from this scam!

This has really got me thinking as to how common this kind of Sitejacking is. I haven’t come across this before, although I’ll be reading my Google Alerts more thoroughly from now on and a few searches with terms I would have thought would fit this kinda scam haven’t turned up a result that looks like what has happened here. So I’m naming the phenomena Sitejacking and I’d be interested to hear from anyone this might have happened to or who knows how common it is.

BTW, for anyone who eventually gets here by Googling this and is looking for a solution, this is my fix, it will be slightly different on a Linux box:

RewriteCond Host: ^www.entertainmentsgossip.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.entertainmentwise\.com$1 [I,RP]

RewriteCond Host: ^entertainmentsgossip.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.entertainmentwise\.com$1 [I,RP]

This weekend we experienced huge traffic spikes on the Giant Digital network. We’d been experiencing high levels of traffic for the Rage Against the Machine for Christmas campaign that we’d been covering the last week or two on Gigwise.com and then Brittany Murphy unexpectedly dropped dead causing a huge traffic surge on Entertainmentwise.com.

Fortunately we were ready this time, with load balancing and caching in place on both sites there was an initial slow down as new servers booted up but then we were ready for action. According to Google Analytics (which is way out but gives you some kind of idea) on Gigwise on Saturday we had 24,968 visits, then Sunday while the final build up to the chart count down was happening and we were covering the angles we had a massive surge to 58,268 visits. That’s more than double and it was also a weekend.

Entertainmentwise told a similar story with 29,537 visits reported on the Saturday with a big jump to 58,850 visits on the Sunday.

I sometimes get so snowed under that planning for stuff that rarely happens can get knocked down a long to do list, but it just goes to show that it’s worth Being Prepared for things like this as no doubt we’ve opened up to a few new users.

I’ve recently started using Amazon to sell a load of old books and I’m hugely impressed by what a brilliant platform the site is. It’s got me thinking about how my businesses can Be A Platform too.

We’ve recently opened up our CMS on Gigwise.com to our contributors so that they can have more autonomy over publishing their own work. The old way was for them to email work to one of the editors who would cut and paste into the CMS and edit it, add photos etc. Now our writers can publish their own reviews and blog posts and photographers can publish galleries. It’s hardly ground breaking but it’s cool to see some of our contributors really getting involved and in our small way we’ve provided a greater platform for music journalists and photographers.

I’m sure there’s more we can do to open up what we have to be a platform for others, so I’ve got my thinking cap on and hopefully I’ll have some insights to publish soon.

Pete Cashmore (of Mashable fame) has made an interesting post on CNN about the top 10 trends to watch in 2010. I whole-heartedly agree with Cashmore that these are the most important trends to watch over the next year or two, although some of these will have a greater impact than others on the majority’s day to day life than others.

The trends quoted are:

1. Real Time
2. Location
3. Augmented Reality
4. Content Curation
5. Cloud Computing
6. Internet TV and Movies
7. Convergence
8. Social Gaming
9. Mobile Payments
10. Fame Abundance

Of these: real time, content curation, cloud computing, internet TV and Movies, social gaming and fame abundance are done. The big hitters in the next year are definitely going to be location, augmented reality and mobile payments.

Location

Location has been growing in importance in the last year or so, most notably with location based gaming like Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Lattitude. Of these three Google lattitude is the most obvious to go large as their map API is already ubiquitous and with geo-location can only get more and more useful, not to mention that Google’s satnav innovation will blow TomTom and the like out of the water. But this will pale into insignificance when Facebook and Twitter take geo-location into the mainstream.With more and more people using the web on their phones finding your friends on a night out will be even easier. As your mates tweet and status update from the pub or club they’re in you can find them (if their geo settings allow it) and join them for a drink. This is either going to be a great way to party virtually any time you’re out drinking or a huge pain when all your facebook friends acquaintances stalk you on a quiet night out. Maybe it’s time to prune those “friends” from your Facebook account? With Twitter this is no doubt going to make the micro-blogging platform a huge boon to citizen journalism as twitterers tweet from events as they happen live.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is such a hugely exciting area of mobile technology right now. In simple terms while using your mobile phone to view the world in front of you, software will overlay what you see with information from the internet. In future this will make you the Terminator but for the coming year this will make finding places that you’ve never been to a piece of piss. Meeting a friend? If you’ve got the post/zip code then it will point you in the direction of your destination. Trying to find a decent restaurant? Hold your phone up to the entrance and read reviews. I’ve even seen this software demonstrating how to find Brad Pitt in Amsterdam. If you’ve ever read any William Gibson books then the very idea of this technology will send shivers down your quivers. The only thing missing is a sexy name for it, augmented reality is a mouthful and AR conjures up images of Lawnmower Man’s ridiculousness. Of course Layar may well become the Sellotape or Hoover of its day.

Mobile Payments

Mobile payments have been hanging around the side lines for the last five years or so but 2010 is going to be their second coming. With mobile carriers, banks and even Google all making it easier for us to make micro-payments there’s no doubt that this is going to become a more and more common way to make a small transaction. Onus is on retailers to get this right but the big change will be played out on the internet as paid for content behind pay walls will make some pay-per-article business models come to fruition. This is already an everyday thing in Japan though so expect to be buying from vending machines with your iPhone any time soon.

These trends are really exciting changes coming to the mainstream, keep yo eyes peeled!

As is necessary at the end of things like years and decades there’s been a load of these top tracks of the noughties lists and I’ve managed to disagree with just about all of them. Even the Gigwise 50 Greatest Songs of the 2000s included waaay too many Radiohead tracks for my liking! Obviously the old saying goes about opinions and arseholes, so, here’s my top 100 tracks from the last ten years. Actually just a few caveats, this is actually my favourite 100 that are on Spotify as I wanted to supply a Spotify playlist as well. So there’s actually about another 20 tunes I couldn’t find on there, plus there’s probably another 20 that I hear in the office but don’t know the names of or my booze addled brain has forgotten. Also, only one song per band, otherwise this list would have been a lot less varied. Anyway, here’s the Spotify link: Best Of The Noughties. Enjoy!

P.S. To all those moaners who say there’s no good music around these days: open your ears!

And the list:

At the Drive-In – One Armed Scissor
The Rapture – House Of Jealous Lovers
Peaches – Fuck The Pain Away
The Knife – Heartbeats
Hot Hot Heat – Bandages
Jay-Z – 99 Problems
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Gold Lion
Missy Elliott – Get Ur Freak On – LP Version
Add N To (X) – Take Me To Your Leader (Make Me Really Happy)
Test Icicles – Your Biggest Mistake
Feist – My Moon My Man – Boys Noize Remix
Foals – Hummer
Battles – Atlas
The Mars Volta – The Widow
The Cribs – Mirror Kissers
Bloc Party – Helicopter
The Maccabees – Love You Better
Mystery Jets – Two Doors Down
Jamie T – Sheila
Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out
The Young Knives – She’s Attracted To – Radio Edit
The Rakes – 22 Grand Job
Art Brut – My Little Brother
M.I.A. – Paper Planes
Bonde Do Role – Office Boy
CSS – Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex
New Young Pony Club – Ice Cream
Shitdisco – I Know Kung-Fu
Kings Of Leon – Sex On Fire
The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
The Von Bondies – C’mon C’mon
Louis XIV – God Killed The Queen
Electric Six – Gay Bar
Dizzee Rascal – Fix Up, Look Sharp
Roots Manuva – Witness (1 Hope)
Crystal Castles – Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs Health)
Hot Club De Paris – Shipwreck
Klaxons – Magick
Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch
Metronomy – A Thing For Me
Peaches – Kick It (feat Iggy Pop)
Secret Machines – Nowhere Again
The Bug – Poison Dart
Gorillaz – DARE
The Strokes – Last Nite
The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster – Rise Of The Eagles
The Horrors – Scarlet Fields
Operator Please – Just A Song About Ping Pong – Kissy Sellout’s White Stallion Remix Radio Edit
Prodigy – Hot Ride
Kanye West – Gold Digger
Jay-Z – Swagga Like Us
Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal
The Raconteurs – Steady, As She Goes
Animal Collective – My Girls
The Big Pink – Dominos
LCD Soundsystem – Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
Friendly Fires – Paris
The Futureheads – Stupid and Shallow
Beastie Boys – Ch-Check It Out
TV on the Radio – Staring At The Sun
Interpol – Evil
Editors – All Sparks
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – The Rest Will Follow
The Flaming Lips – It Overtakes Me
Portishead – Machine Gun
MGMT – Kids
Black Kids – I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
Miike Snow – Animal
Johnny Cash – Hurt
Snow Patrol – Set The Fire To The Third Bar
Laura Marling – Ghosts
Lupe Fiasco – Kick, Push
Tokyo Police Club – Tessallate – Tom Campesinos! Remix
Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma
Death From Above 1979 – Blood On Our Hands
Tapes ‘n Tapes – Cowbell
Belle and Sebastian – I’m A Cuckoo
The Polyphonic Spree – Soldier Girl
Peter Bjorn And John – Young Folks
Bat For Lashes – Trophy
Björk – All Is Full Of Love – LP Version
Wolfmother – Woman
Gossip – Standing In The Way of Control
The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name
The Killers – Somebody Told Me
Kasabian – Club Foot
The Vines – Get Free
The Hives – Hate To Say I Told You So
Pure Reason Revolution – The Bright Ambassadors Of Morning
Tom Vek – C-C (You Set The Fire In Me)
Nine Black Alps – Get Your Guns
Shy Child – Drop The Phone
David Holmes presents The Free Association – Don’t Rhyme No Mo
The Golden Virgins – I Am A Camera
Late of the Pier – The Bears Are Coming (Original)
Dan Le Sac – Thou Shalt Always Kill
The Libertines – Don’t Look Back Into The Sun
Bombay Bicycle Club – Always Like This
The Go! Team – Ladyflash
Sigur Rós – Hoppípolla

Best of the Noughties, this post on Gigwise.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion going on about how News International, Microsoft and a local newspaper group are going to kill the newspaper industry cold stone dead over the next year or so as they move to put their content behind paywalls so that the general public will only have access to “credible” journalists work if they’re willing to cough up either a subscription or a per article micropayment.

There seems to be a chasm dividing the two camps of agreement on this issue. Over on the right wing we have self appointed keepers of quality media who claim that their huge conglomerate businesses can’t survive unless they start charging punters instead of giving away their hard earned work “for free”. Over (and I mean a hell of a way over) on the left there are the information-wants-to-be-free brigade who seem to think that journalism is something that can be done by anyone with little training and has little or no real financial value. Some of these far lefties even seem to think that Twitter replaces real news coverage. (UPDATE Twitter doesn’t replace real news coverage!)

But as is always the case, in reality, things aren’t so black and white. As I’ve already discussed on the Giant Digital blog there could already be a marketplace for 4 million paying online newspaper customers in the UK alone, not to mention what size that market could be internationally. Certainly, a walled content garden could be worth millions of dollars annually for a company the size of News International.

However, this approach will not work for everyone. A regional newspaper group Johnston Press are also set to take their online content behind a paywall and players of this size are going to utterly kill their chances of increasing their revenue by closing off their local coverage from the outside world. Johnston Press sell their local weekly newspaper for 45p a shot and plan to charge a three month subscription for £5 providing (as pointed out by one of their employees) a massive saving of 40p over a three month period. When the BBC provide exactly the same coverage for free it’s unlikely that anyone is going to cough up any amount, however small that is for local news.

For huge media outlets with trusted brands (whether they should be trusted or not is a different matter) there will be an audience who will be willing to pay a small amount of money to continue to get news from their preferred sources, but for many brands that have always been online, the websites that I own included, there will not be the willingness by the public to suddenly start paying for content. Not that our content carries less value or influence, but users are very unlikely to pay for news from these sources after getting them for free for years. It is way too easy to go somewhere else for something similar and free.

This whole plot line reminds me of the music industry’s bid to get downloaders to pay for content they’d been consuming for free, which has probably been compared to death by now (and we all know where that story ended up, with multinationals charging us for music), but maybe less obviously of the bottled water industry which also caused a stir when it first started out. I can remember when the very concept of buying a bottle of flavourless water in a clear plastic bottle was seen as utterly ridiculous. “This will never catch on”, “down with this sort of thing” people used to say. Bottled water industry, worth $146.5 billion last year. Makes you think, huh?

Rupert Murdoch and chums will be laughing all the way to the bank on this one, but that’s cool because there will be a whole slew of people who will prefer to consume news for free that used to frequent NI et al’s websites who will be browsing on news sites that were born and bred on the internet and that means more advertising revenue for smaller/newer companies like mine. And of course, the mugs readers who have coughed up their subscriptions for newspaper+ will still be using the rest of the free internet after their 5 minutes of “proper news”. Surely a win-win for all concerned.