Archive for November, 2007
November 28, 2007 at 4:09 pm · Filed under content, media, ondemand, tv
The big three in the world of UK terrestrial have put aside their great big old media egos as well as their commercial rivalries to partner on a shared download service.
As the Guardian describe it, the partnership seems to make a lot of sense. And they’ve left the door open for other broadcasters and content owners to jump into the new service. Here’s some stats from the Guardian piece on the independent services already running from BBC, ITV and C4.
- Channel 4 was the first broadcaster to launch a comprehensive on-demand
service a year ago and a spokesman said 60m programmes had been viewed
to date, just under 10m of those online.
- ITV said almost six million unique users had visited ITV.com in October, viewing 2m programmes.
BBC Worldwide’s’ CEO, John Smith, pointed at the failure of the music industry to adapt quickly enough to a distributed online audience as a key driver to this initiative.
[He] said it
was a “historic moment” and that a key aim was to avoid the fate of the
music industry in losing control of its assets. “In the UK we felt
worried about what happened to the music industry,” he said. “[Apple's]
iTunes is a disaster for rights holders.”
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November 28, 2007 at 11:31 am · Filed under content, media, social networks
This is a couple of days old but top news nevertheless. ABC News and Facebook partner to bring ABC’s coverage of debates and issues onto Facebook. But doesn’t this kind of partnership further illustrate the point Mashable made yesterday that Facebook is creating a walled garden and limiting what we can bring in and importantly, send out of that garden.
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November 27, 2007 at 8:55 am · Filed under media, newspapers
Some payola on the NYT’s integrated newsrooom on beet.tv that’s interesting nevertheless. Why any media company wouldn’t want to create a system like this today is beyond me.
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November 27, 2007 at 8:18 am · Filed under community, content, media, social networks
Mashable makes a very simple point that from recent experience I can fully endorse:
I Don’t Want To Consume Media That I Can’t Interact With.
Reading Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death recently I was struck with the number of times I wanted to make a note or comment on the twenty something year old text. I was on a tube/bus/couch at the time and ultimately the moment passed. But with the Kindle, Amazon has the chance to take a huge step here. So far it hasn’t.
The Facebook analogy that follows is even more interesting though. For the average consumer Facebook is the most interactive social network. Not for Mashable:
It [Facebook] adds no value because I must disrupt my daily routine to interact
with my media. I’m sure that the idea for Facebook is to bring the
world inside it’s walled garden, but that’s just not happening, at the
moment. I can’t blog and reasonably expect to go through my many RSS
feeds and collaboratively edit documents with the team from within
Facebook.
Simply put, Facebook won’t come to me and be interactive, and I
doesn’t have the ability to let me exist completely within it. My
interactions with the web are well documented by my various apps within
Facebook, but it still has very little to offer me that can rival my
toolbox outside the system.
Instead of bridging that functionality gap, Facebook has decided that I
and my offsite actions online have been commoditized for public
consumption and marketing for those that can stay inside the walled garden. Doc Searls says that he can forgive Facebook
for reaching for the brass ring since Project Bacn is the “Holy Grail”;
this to me smacks of appeasement and far too conciliatory. Facebook is
sitting on top of a mountain of data, and while it may not be worth $15
Billion, it sure isn’t worthless either. There are a hundred other ways
to creatively monetize it (to much more accolade in the techosphere).
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November 20, 2007 at 2:21 pm · Filed under media, newspapers
This time from the Seattle Times. More later, particularly on the attack on Craigslist.
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November 8, 2007 at 10:01 pm · Filed under content, music
The Purple Prince of pop is suing his own fans in a bid to shut down fan sites showing pictures of the four-foot-nothing singer.
Giving away your latest album as a covermount is one thing, changing your name to a symbol is another and the rib removal rumours are just plain crazy. But what is the man from M-Town thinking of with this move?
This can only alienate fans who have already had to buy England’s worst newspaper in order to listen to their heroes worst album. Truly bizarre.
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November 6, 2007 at 2:53 pm · Filed under content
Jay Rosen spells out real clear just what’s needed for a top class news site in 2007.
The most interesting points:
- High quality aggregation.
- Original reporting from both amateurs and pro journos.
- Contextualize news into datasets and have mini-hubs around big stories and events.
- Geo-tagged info that can be accessed traditionally or by location (via maps, lists etc.).
- Blogging platform with most interesting content filtered up to front page.
The aggregation point may be the most alien to most traditional content providers. Getting old-school editors to link to ‘rival’ producers is going to be tough for most organizations. But for the content consumer this can only be a good thing that will only enhance the trust they have in the content provider.
Can content providers distinguish themselves in this way from being simply content creaters
Technorati Tags: news, content, jayrosen, aggregation, keepfakingit
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November 5, 2007 at 7:43 pm · Filed under content, media
Jeff Jarvis spells out the endgame for the ad industry in his column in the Guardian today. Right in the middle of it he points to the changed relationship between the providers of the world and their consumers, in this case Dell and their customers.
There it is: the fist. Dell and its customers are collaborating on the
creation of content, media and marketing - without content, media or
marketing companies. Advertising is no one’s first choice as the basis
of a relationship. For marketers, it’s expensive and inefficient. For
customers, it’s invasive and annoying. And targeted advertising is only
slightly more efficient and slightly less annoying. Clearly, the direct
relationship between a customer and a company is preferable. But that
direct connection cuts out the middlemen - that is the media.
Too few companies, whether they be electrical goods, service providers or content creaters are getting this. Guys, if you can engage a constant dialogue you don’t need as much of that eight figure ad budget as you think.
And when it comes to media companies this should be even more obvious. The act of providing the content can be the conversation itself.
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November 2, 2007 at 12:21 am · Filed under community, media
Nick Carr writes in today’s Guardian that Marshall McLuhan’s message is back. He’s probably right. But he then goes on to raise a couple of interesting points after dividing the world of content into temperate classifications.
Reading, to put it simply, is a lonely pursuit, while speech is a
social one. So when we became readers, rather than listeners, we
sacrificed our shared, tribal consciousness and became locked into
private consciousness.
Electric media, being cool technologies that promote interaction, would
bring back our lost tribal consciousness, McLuhan believed. But our
tribes would no longer be small, isolated groups. Because the new media
spanned the planet, we would become members of a “global village”.
Point taken. But are we really creating a new consciousness, and if we are, does that translate into community. For that’s what a village is. Can we create a truly complex and involved village through electronic communication alone. Where the structures are so well defined.
Every village needs rules, laws and constitutions as well as a means to enact them. Are we building these up with search engines, blogs and social networks? Are these internet constructs flexible enough to allow us to redevelop McLuhan’s lost tribal consciousness?
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November 1, 2007 at 9:21 pm · Filed under McLuhan, content
Nick Carr writes in today’s Guardian that Marshall McLuhan’s message is back. He’s probably right. But he then goes on to raise a couple of interesting points after dividing the world of content into temperate classifications.
Reading, to put it simply, is a lonely pursuit, while speech is a
social one. So when we became readers, rather than listeners, we
sacrificed our shared, tribal consciousness and became locked into
private consciousness.
Electric media, being cool technologies that promote interaction, would
bring back our lost tribal consciousness, McLuhan believed. But our
tribes would no longer be small, isolated groups. Because the new media
spanned the planet, we would become members of a “global village”.
Point taken. But are we really creating a new consciousness, and if we are, does that translate into community. For that’s what a village is. Can we create a truly complex and involved village through electronic communication alone. Where the structures are so well defined.
Every village needs rules, laws and constitutions as well as a means to enact them. Are we building these up with search engines, blogs and social networks? Are these internet constructs flexible enough to allow us to redevelop McLuhan’s lost tribal consciousness?
(I’ve just noticed this was never published when it was supposed to be. Stupid draft.)
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