You say it best...

When you say nothing at all

So warbled Ronan Keating on the Notting Hill soundtrack… like so many songs it was a cover. Originally sung by Keith Whitley in 1988, it was written by two leading country songwriters, Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz. Don had written for Kenny Rogers penning the earworm ‘The Gambler’ well it might not be an earworm for you but you got to know when to hold them.

I hope Paul and Don did well out of the royalties from Notting Hill, copyright was a simpler time before we turned copying into ‘training’ and made it legal.

Still let’s try and avoid the gravity of that black hole which continually sucks everything creative into its accretion disk.

Though out of interest you may have heard LinkedIn is going to pay creators to make human posts. This occurred less than a week after I watched an interview with the CEO of People magazine. He had already pivoted his company to sell human content to AI for them to ‘train’ on and was producing more content for less than ever before. His prediction was that AI companies would become publishing platforms - paying creators to make human content to keep their AI machines running…. I think I’ve seen that movie before…

Anyway less than a week later I see LinkedIn moving to a paid creator platform. Is it because the AI content had overtaken the human content and they were running out of things to train on? I don’t know but I suspect that they are just trying to get ahead.

What will that mean for Substack in the future? If content isn’t generated by AI here then it is heavily used or talked about - at least I see a lot in my feed - but then I also see a lot of art - eat a duck and the algo sends you a flock of seagulls. Who in my opinion had an excellent guitarist, Paul Reynolds, the Grammy award committee thought so too… though if I recall David Bowie wasn’t a fan.

Have I escaped the pull of the accretion disk? Hmm… it exerts a very strong pull but I think we can slingshot past it and get into chatting about Substack being a place of interest beyond readers.

Lately Substack feels like Coca Cola having its middle age crisis and offering New Coke, Cherry Coke and Vanilla Coke. Changing a recipe is… um… a recipe for change. Sometimes best practice is actually best practice… though wearing asbestos is probably not.

Not only do we have notes but also videos and not just videos but streaming videos and even a recording studio to make it easier. Actually the studio is not bad and simpler than messing around with multiple tools. The streaming side… I don’t know…

There was an excellent post by Mack Collier that mentioned how a writer needed a break and not sure what to do pointed a camera out the window and streamed the sheep outside. Apparently they did quite well… though I suspect they had a good audience to begin with. Perhaps Cecilia At The Kitchens Garden will do something similar on her return to the farm, it could be quite the vibe to check up on her wild hogs.

Anyway, I gave it a go… not streaming sheep or hogs but rather streaming my painting.

Here’s some initial thoughts.

• its fairly foolproof

• it works (which is more than what YouTube did for me in the beginning)

• you can connect OBS - hooray! So multi-cam is a breeze

• the compression is okay but not as good as YouTube

• Its easy to make clips for uploading from your original recording

• The clip it made and suggested was pretty good

• It does a good job of transcription - picked up my kiwi accent well

• I thought the audio wasn’t as good as YouTube

• Substack doesn’t have a library of music to add to your background

Substack wanted to connect me to YouTube and upload there as well - however I didn’t trust the compression from Substack to also go through the compression of YouTube and turn out okay.

Naturally I was talking into the void - hard to pick up viewers from the feed unless you are a paid stack - I might experiment with different times to see if people will tune in however unless the content is right then people value their time so may not join anyway.

I did wonder if streaming is the right way to go here on Substack but sometimes I have nothing to say at all… so maybe its best to stream when I have nothing to say.

There are so many things to be polarized or triggered by these days, what people are saying, doing, thinking… change has come whether we like it or not and continues to accelerate faster than I would like… video was not the intention of this platform but then neither was AI a year or two ago. Still here we are.

So I will be doing some more video streams - if they turn up in your newsletter feed and you are not interested then please unsubscribe - my intuition tells me that I will do best by streaming and I hope you drop in and check on the journey every now and then… if not here then on YouTube.

Wishing you an excellent and creative week ahead.