I’ve been playing around with Tumblr. While I’m no doubt a bit late to the whole tumblelog concept, I’m definitely liking the casual-ness of it. No need to formal titles, ready ability to add different content types, and useful integration of feeds from other social apps (del.icio.us, twitter and, in fact, wordpress). It also looks nice. And is based in NYC.

Accordingly, I’m going to increasingly shift the focus of Sampled + Sorted to work (already have to large extent) and a new venture (called 8tracks) that will launch in limited beta next month. Meanwhile, I’m going to use my new tumblr page to aggregate my social app feeds, post music and photos, and do anything else that’s more on the personal tip.

WordPress for work, Tumblr for play.

Music & media: favorites, discovery, ventures & valuation

Why invest time in a blog? I guess primarily so that I can wax poetic on subjects about which I’ve some level of knowledge (or at least interest). Even without an audience, I suspect this will be a useful personal record and good exercise in chrystalizing my thoughts on things I care about. My topics of choice be undoubtedly be aligned around music or — more broadly — media.

Favorites

Given infinite choice online and increasingly inexpensive means for content production — in terms of time as well as money — a (if not the) primary value driver for media creators and consumers will be services and tools that allow creators to find an interested audience and consumers to find content of interest — in short, content matchmaking. One excellent and common way to facilitate content matchmaking, online or offline, is through personal, consumer-to-consumer recommendations. So, I’m going to do my part here for anyone who wants to listen.

Discovery

As might be expected, I’m particularly intrigued by online services and tools that help people find stuff of interest. Generally, content consumers do this in one of two ways: (1) finding or learning more about something that is already in mind, or (2) finding or learning more about something that is not yet known. The former is really search, which Google does well for URLs and others do well in specific verticals (Amazon, Wikipedia, P2P file-sharing). The latter I view as discovery, which is the mode that I find most interesting and that arguably provides the most value in a world of content abundance. I’ll discuss services and tools that I find most compelling in helping consumers discover content of interest.

Ventures

Tools and services that significantly improve people’s ability to discover music and media that they like are generally offered by a company, either as a feature (e.g. Amazon’s collaborative filtering-based recommendations) or as its primary offering to the consumer (e.g. Pandora’s personalized radio service). Being a business guy, I’m interested in learning about new such ventures and their prospects.

Valuation

Prior to business school, I worked in finance and accounting roles at Arthur Andersen, so I tend to enjoy the quantitative side of things as well as the conceptual. I want to explore and understand how the new consumer value created by digital and social media ventures ultimately translates into new shareholder value.

OK, I’ve been meaning to get my blog going for quite a while now. As my comp’d and largely unused TypePad account will be expiring soon, and I’m shamelessly eager to join the open source bandwagon on most fronts, I thought I’d give WordPress a try. So it begins…