I spent an hour in San Francisco this afternoon on a panel at Bandwidth, a conference about the intersection of music and technology, a subject I wrote about in Darknet. Fellow panelists included Maryrose Dunton, Director of Product Management, YouTube; David Todd, VP of Content, eyespot and Sudhin Shahani, CEO, Musicane; moderator was Kevin Crouse, Product Manager, MP3.com. Not sure if the session was podcast or videotaped. About 150 people were in the audience.

We chatted about the major music labels, business models, user-generated video, independent music, mobile platforms, ecommerce and where all this is headed. Maryrose Dunton was particularly perceptive about YouTube’s lynchpin role — and responsibilities — at the center of the personal media revolution.

Also bumped into Ted Cohen, who left EMI Music to co-found his own consultancy; author-consultant Kelli Richards; Brian Zisk of the Future of Music Coalition; Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz; attorney Colette Vogele; Morty Wiggins and Shane Tobin of Outhink, and several others. A pretty good gathering.

The other day I spotted Jack Valenti, who headed the MPAA for nearly 39 years before stepping down last year, at a lunch table at the Aspen Institute. So I introduced myself and we had a nice chat for a half hour. I devote half of Chapter 2 in Darknet to Valenti and the MPAA. His son, John, has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of the book and its central message: that the entertainment industries need to embrace their digital future by adopting new business models. The senior Valenti had nice things to say about the book as well.

So I whipped out my cell phone and Jack agreed to sit for a video interview. In this 90-second clip, he talks about grassroots creativity seen on video sharing sites like Ourmedia. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Just back from a week at the Jersey shore — at a house rental with a dock overlooking Barnegat Bay in Lavallette, NJ. Here’s a Flickr photo set.

NY Times: Bloggers Drive Inquiry on How Altered Images Saw Print.

[Adnan] Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, may not be familiar to many newspaper readers. But thanks to the swift justice of the Internet, he has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer. Executives said yesterday that they were still investigating why they had not discovered the manipulation before the pictures were disseminated to newspapers.

The matter has created an uproar on the Internet, where many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Mr. Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one. …

Here are 49 photos I took last week of Aspen and the Aspen Institute.

Here at the Aspen Institute one of the folks I’ve spent a lot of time with is Kamal Quadir from Bangladesh, founder of Cellbazaar. As Textually put it:

Bangladesh’s top mobile phone operator GrameenPhone, and USA-based CellBazaar have introduced a service connecting buyers and sellers in an electronic marketplace over the mobile phone.

“It’s like a more direct, more primitive e-Bay, a phone-based equivalent of newspaper classified advertisements. The concept was developed at the MIT Media Lab.

The service will enable sellers to list details of their products, produce or even services in a database while buyers can look for any of this information through SMS. It will not handle transactions, but will simply put buyers and sellers in contact with each other via mobile phone.

Kamal has described it as a sort of Craigslist for the developing world, where millions of people in Bangladesh, for example, are using mobile phones to cut out the middleman who rips off farmers and merchants and thereby benefit both buyers and sellers.