Millicent, the super lo-fi, low-cost, use-it-with-web2.0-things is profiled in today’s MediaGuardian. This is great. I think. Particularly the distributed collaboration aspect.
Let’s see if we can get a demo of this for a team that is split in three locations around the British Isles and is producing non-live content for web and broadcast. We’ll post some results here maybe.
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Posted by: dsBlogs with cartoons, that’s the way it should be done, and nobody does it better than Hugh McLeod.
His post on “social markers” has some great insights. But it’s the example Hugh uses that really catches my attention. By using the Boston Red Sox, McLeod points out probably the greatest social marker on the planet. At least for the 50% of people with “Mr.” in front of their names. Sure beer and pussy are pretty big ones too for us males, but if sport wasn’t invented for this purpose someone like Mark Zuckerberg would have to round up some funding to do it.
So why do so many sports websites fail to get this? Sure there are some great community sports ventures, I’m thinking sportingo.com and the like, but big media hasn’t done a lot of note other than the standard web forums as seen on the likes of espn.com and skysports.com. These simply do not engage users the way social nets do. Sports news and analysis is piled high on the back of an 18 wheeler running red lights on a one way street.
This is something Setanta.com can build on. Right now Setanta is showing the best slate of big-time boxing fights the UK has seen in years. It’s a sport with renewed vigour because of the likes of Joe Calzaghe, Ricky Hatton and David Haye. And the boxing community has jumped in and are using any available means of communication to tell us how much they like it. We simply have to give them a better way of communicating this passion than web forums, reply boxes to articles and email addresses.
Great cartoon btw Hugh. 
The Serpentine are showing McCall and Tyndall’s “Argument” on Thursday 17th January. Any takers?
A screening of McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s feature-length film
Argument, followed by a presentation by artist Aurélien Froment, whose
work deals with archives and film as a metaphor. Argument is a dense
and provocative feature-length essay examining one issue of the New
York Times magazine to investigate the ideology of news, the language
of fashion and the construction of masculinity.
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Posted by: dsPaddy Power paid out on Mr. Obama taking the whole Democratic nomination before the New Hampshire primary. Why? Well like his compatriot Tony O’Leary, Paddy Power jnr. has never been one to back off some (relatively) cheap publicity. That and the fact that 7 US polls had Obama in the lead 24 hours before polling.
Poll are like campaign debates. Pseudo-events that are created and facilitated for a media that will not engage fully with candidates and pose the tough questions. In this case the polls were dead wrong. By up to 13 points.
This has huge implications for all candidates from here on. And as CJR.org points out there are no easy answers for the pollsters. The answer for the media outlets: Lead with the facts guys and let’s get over the numbers and the spin.
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Posted by: dsJeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.
The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.
The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.
Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure. It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!
But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.
So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.
Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?
As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.
Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?
Posted by: dsIn the week that Big Brother once again pokes its nasty head out of room 101 here’s some words from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media pp 67:
Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of informations seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Adding McLuhan’s two points together: if we get social we get rid of Big Brother and the rest of our navel gazing “reality culture”. Yet it could be argued that “reality” media is the apex of media development in the four decades since McLuhan wrote the above. It’s not an argument I’m going to make right now though. That’s one for Andy Duncan over at Channel 4.
Posted by: dsFrom Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture:
The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants - and for that reason, the social functions of gossip hold when dealing with television content. It isn’t who you are talking about but who you are talking with that matters. Gossip builds common ground between participants, as those who exchange information assure one another of what they share. Gossip is finally a way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others. As cyberspace broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it becomes even more important to be able to talk about peope we share in common via the media than people from our local community who will not be known by all of the participants in an online conversation. Into that space step the complex, often contradictory figures who appear on reality television.
Jenkins mentions this in relation to building community around reality TV. But really this applicable to all relationships and Jenkins brings it up after a discussion on building brand champions/agitators in the community.
So the questions arises, how can brands and media owners facilitate this gossip? Is this where they interact with the social networks or should they even be trying to own this or merely interact with it.
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Posted by: dshttp://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-12/mf_morris
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Posted by: dsRoy Greenslade writes up some pointers on why the Economist, unlike the US magazines mentioned below, continues on an upward sales and revenue curve.
It’s free market economics are too much for my likings generallly but it’s hard to disagree with Greenslade’s well made point that it knows it’s audience really well and goes out and grabs them by the balls every Friday:
I often think that the magazine is a little like the BBC World Service,
dispensing well-informed reports about what is happening around the
globe to the people who need to know or, just possibly, those who think
they should know. The difference is that The Economist comes at matters
with a strong point a view. It is, genuinely, a viewspaper with a
strong commitment to the free market.
Technorati Tags: theeconomist, keepfakingit, greenslade, media, magazines
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Posted by: dsInteresting piece from Jon Friedman of MarketWatch on the decline and fall of the magazine. And what the modern American editor is doing about it (not a lot in many cases).
Five easily bloggable points jump out:
namely, the back story. Readers love to know the Inside Story on a big event. Let your reporters explain HOW they covered big news, and give them an opportunity to tell their stories. Yes, some blogs do this, too, but not often or well enough.
your site with their lethargy or disapproval. Listen, the Web is the most exciting part of a modern journalism enterprise for ambitious writers and editors. If they haven’t figured it out by now, to hell with them.
The point on graphics design vs extra copy writers I think is massive. It’s all too rare on news websites to see good illustration and it’s something that fits very well into the more protracted deadlines magazines allow.
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Posted by: ds