One of the loveliest things about Melbourne – besides the gorgeous green and gold trams, and Jungle Juice’s vegetarian bagels – is its lively literary calendar. After all, Melbourne was the second city in the world to be named a City of Literature. The Emerging Writers’ Festival has just announced its 2012 event program, so I’ve booked tickets to two events. Will keep you posted – I may go nuts and buy tickets to everything and tell my bosses I contracted Ross River Fever from my weekend in, erm, Frankston.

I used to work in the music industry (mostly in facets involving marketing and social media) and was once interviewed by Kyle Bylin on music industry business blog Hypebot about getting bands to view themselves as a ‘business’, Seth Godin‘s ‘meatball sundae‘ concept, superfans (ahem, Mel from Flight of the Concords), OTT self-promotion and Limewire. Have never blogged about it here, so… without further ado here is the first part of the interview, and the second part.

This is why celebrities should really get social media training if they are going to be doing their own tweets:

Or maybe common sense. For anyone who doesn’t know, Eos Chater is one of the musicians in electric strings quartet Bond. Pretty sure this is her real account because the verified Bond Twitter account has retweeted her tweets.

Anyone remember Ping?

It was first announced when I was working in the music industry (both in social media, and marketing for musicians) and at the time everyone was so keen. The company I was working for was one of the first to be able to ‘add’ official band profiles by iTunes in Australia, and there was an overwhelming response from musicians. So I added it to my iTunes at work and at home, and started following a few different bands. I couldn’t follow/connect/join/friend my pals on the network because I couldn’t figure it out and I don’t think any of my friends were actually using it to socialise or network.

The problem was that iTunes couldn’t get enough musical artists onto the network because they wanted to verify each and every one of them, and I remember being so disappointed because Pixies and Placebo didn’t have profiles at the time. Ludicrous.

Since then, the only impact Ping has had on my is a super annoying bar that pops up on the left-hand side of iTunes every time I just want to play music. The last four updates were videos from The Beatles… and were posted in August 2011. The two before that were from Nine Inch Nails, the first pictured below:

Now what? I think Trent Reznor has a very valid question. I hope this sinks into the depths of the internet (like Google Wave and Alta Vista).

On a tiny side note, go to Alta Vista. The logo is very, um, stylish.

By the way, my heart’s been recently captured by a certain little social media network called Pinterest. Along with millions of other females around the world. My username is tigerburning (after the William Blake poem). Follow my boards! I feel like a pirate saying that!

P.S. If you don’t know what Pinterest is, check out this little article/infographic.

So, Facebook recently switched over all brand pages to the new ‘Timeline’ layout. And I’m not a fan… yet.

There are a few things about the new format that I think are really neat. I love the cover photo. It’s a great space to really ‘brand’ pages with the look and feel of the company’s latest campaign. I do find it annoying that we can’t post any ‘calls to action’ (which I have done in the past with the old skyscraper profile pictures), but I do understand that Facebook’s doing this to prevent pages plastering cheap sales pitches across the top of their fan page. I also like the notifications module on the new admin dashboard and the messaging function. The ability to ‘pin’ pictures to the top seem like they might be useful for certain posts (e.g. sales and promotional posts that can’t be pushed through the cover photo) and being able to ‘highlight’ pictures across the Timeline width is a bit nifty. I do also like the fact that apps have tab boxes and the apps are now huge.

I also don’t mind not having a landing page for non-fans. Call me cynical, but I’ve always looked at the page’s actual content and apps before I’ve ever liked a page.

Things I loathe? There are quite a few actually. The admin dashboard is good in theory but ends up being incredibly glitchy and everything lags. I hate how unsolicited fan posts are now grouped together in one section rather than being organised among the page’s posts by time. My absolute biggest gripe with Timeline is that the design is just so cluttered that the eye doesn’t know where to look. Not sure if Facebook has ever considered perception or used eye tracking when designing its layout, but maybe it really should.

It’ll be interesting to see what Facebook changes and what it sticks to over the next few weeks. When they first introduced Timeline, we were all a bit annoyed that the ‘like’ layer on competitions no longer auto-refreshed after hitting ‘like’ but it only took a few days of people complaining for that to change.

P.S. Click here to see one of the Timeline pages I’ve been working on.