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As March settles in, making no signs of forgetting February’s weather, it seems crazy to think that it might be almost time to embark on another year of Edinburgh Fringe adventure. The next couple of weeks will prove busy ones in the offices of Fringe venues and producers across the UK and around the world as the reduced price Fringe registration deadline rolls around on Friday 19 March.

If you are bringing a show to the Fringe this year and don’t have all of your ducks in a row just yet don’t worry too much, Fringe registration only opened on 1 March and the final deadline for inclusion in the Fringe programme isn’t until 21 April 2010. So what is the cost of missing the early deadline a week on Friday?

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There comes a time where we are all asked to make presentations. For many, and I know I have been guilty of this in the past, it mainly tends to involve working out at incredibly short notice what you are going to say, scrawling it all down into something like a Word document and then copy and pasting the resultant spiel onto an obligatory Powerpoint as bullet points. Depending on how good you are at improvising, you then find yourself reading almost verbatim from the Powerpoint screen behind you, all but ignoring your audience and quickly skipping from slide to slide.

I’ve had to make a couple of important presentations recently: one in front of other management students telling them about the three month academic placement I was on working for Perfect Pitch in London, the other pitching ideas for a dissertation – my Management Research Paper – in front of classmates and academic supervisors. For both of the presentations I chose not to use Powerpoint and instead experimented with a web based alternative called Prezi.com

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Facebook is the world’s most popular social network. In spite of the media’s current fixation with Twitter this study from the beginning of the year shows just how powerful Facebook’s numbers are: 350 million users is not to be sniffed at and something that Twitter, with a predicted user base of around 18 million, has quite a long way to match.

I personally would consider myself somewhat addicted to Facebook. Whenever I open a new browser window I find myself drawn to click the bookmark link that sits on my quick bookmarks bar. When I don’t open it straight away I have a copy of my news feed automatically show up on my iGoogle homepage and when I’m waiting for the bus its inevitably the Facebook and Twitter apps that I check whilst waiting for my lift into town.

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Twitter is only as useful as the people you follow. Here are 100 theatre people to follow on Twitter so that you know what’s going on and keep you up to date. You’ll be surprised the number of people who follow you back, engaging in conversation with you. Remember to retweet and @reply to be active in your online community

Update: Thank you for all of the feedback on who to include in the list. Harnessing the power of other people’s Twitter lists and suggestions you made the list of 100 has now swelled to 129. Enjoy.

London Theatres

Follow them all in one click with Twitter Lists

1. @NationalTheatre The National Theatre on the Southbank, with six or seven productions in repertory at any one time.
2. @OldVicTheatre Led by Artistic Director Kevin Spacy. Original home of the National Theatre company.
3. @NTLive The National Theatre’s initiative to broadcast live theatre to cinemas.
4. @TheRSC The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) based in Stratford-upon-Avon but perform worldwide.
5. @RoyalOperaHouse Home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.
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There may be no business like show business but professional performers can certainly borrow techniques from other industries to promote themselves. Just like the real world, new media is all about building lasting relationships. Use the tips below to help turn the web from a way to while your time off to finding your next big gig.

Here are my top tips for how actors and professional perfomers should promote themselves using New Media:

1. Buy your own .com

Actors are increadibly lucky in the way that the industry protects stage names, with uniqueness guaranteed by Spotlight and Equity. Once you have your stage name registered, or even before you sign on the dotted line, check if yourname.com is available. If it is – jump on it! We’ll come back to what you should do with your domain name once you’ve bought it, but the most important thing is to make sure its you that controls it. There is a common misconception that domain names are expensive. They’re not! A .com domain can be bought from sites like GoDaddy.com for as little as £6.35 a year and are an invaluable tool for self promotion. For as long as you continue to pay an annual fee, you have complete control over that domain.

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Readers probably do not need reminded that YouTube is not a trivial website.  Figures published by independent firm comScore within the past couple of weeks estimate YouTube has been serving over 100 million videos per month since January 2009. Using black magic and some interesting data collecting techniques Beer Planet reckoned that in August of last year YouTube was hosting somewhere in the region of 144 million videos of which 19.8% are music videos (Media Tech Cultures).

So the short and long of it seems to be that YouTube has a pretty hefty selection of official and unofficial music videos, effectively turning the site into the world’s biggest jukebox with a selection of dance videos, live performances and lip sync renditions by every kid with a webcam. The problem with all this music floating about on the internet is that the artists want paid, well, technically at the moment its the publishing companies through their collecting society, who are wanting paid. If you look back at my previous blog entry you will find me exploring the ins and out of the music copyright system and hopefully get an idea of the issues involved and which industry rocks the money is to be found under.

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So this evening’s blog post seeks to answer one very important question, a question which to date no one has actually asked me but which I feel I should answer: why doesn’t Re:place Radio play Britney Spears? I know, now that I pose the question you are intrigued.

Well there are the overarching reasons such as I wouldn’t play Britney Spears on my podcast if you paid me and I think Re:place Radio’s tame A&R Man Mark McNeill would have something to say about it as well.

To really get to the bottom of why we as a podcast network can’t go and play any music we want I am first going to go through a brief explanation of the copyright surrounding recorded music, referencing Wikipedia where necessary so that you can go and draw your own conclusions about how the giants in the music industry at large have chosen to interact with the new media landscape.

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