Archive for content
June 25, 2008 at 5:19 pm · Filed under content, media, syndication
There’s always been new media. McLuhan traced the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to shifts in adoption, usage and availability of papyrus. Gutenberg, to paraphrase David Cameron, was the future once. So simply hailing or blaming new media for your particular organization’s respective good or bad fortunes is a little lazy.
I mention this in relation to the ever continuing debate over the death of news journalism and the role of bloggers in the media. I’m not particularly interested right now in what future news rooms will look like, whether they’ll be staffed by editors, journalists, bloggers or algorithms. What I am interested in is what makes this blog infused new media “new”. It seems to me it’s the conversation. Yes I’ve said this before in relation to broadcasting, but lets look at it again in the context of the written word.
Greenslade mentions this today.
I say this as a preliminary to explaining why journalists, especially print veterans like me, are so suspicious of bloggers. We have spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that’s wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.
The King James Bible wasn’t meant as a conversation starter, it was a diktat on how to live your life. When the Sun asked the last remaining person in Britain to “turn off the lights if Kinnock and Labour won the ‘92 election it was telling its readers exactly what to do, not inviting them around for a considered debate on the single currency.
Further on, Greenslade really nails the crux of what I’m getting to here.
I think journalists are failing to grasp that truth. Blogging, though democratic in spirit, does threaten the established order of journalism. I was inspired to write this after reading a blog posting by Adam Tinworth (courtesy of a tip from Kristine Lowe. Many thanks). Tinworth writes: “Most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process… They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”
Yep, it’s the conversation. Never before has it been possible for all range of people to have global conversations they way they are now. That scares much of the news media. It shouldn’t. Because never before has it been possible for the news media to facilitate and host conversations at a global, 24/7 level. We should be enthused and excited by these possibilities.
It’s what Ballmer was getting at when he referred to IP advantages over TV. And if Steve Ballmer at Microsoft gets it then so should any high ranking executive in the news business.
Now for the really exciting bit. These conversations shouldn’t just be left to the tail end of blogs and the depths of Technorati. They should be taking place all around our news media, both written (by pros and amateurs alike) and video. Tools like Discqus, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and for video in particular the Seesmic Wordpress plugin are starting on the edge of the blogosphere and moving in towards big media, but big media shouldn’t wait.
We have to start innovating around the conversation and that innovation should start with syndication.
Let’s wrap a the conversation around the content layer wherever that content is consumed and wherever there is a danger of the conversation breaking out. News organizations aren’t doing this quickly enough.
A practical example of what should be possible here is the Associated Press in the US.
The AP have been in the news over the past fortnight for trying to shut the convesation down, not allow people use their direct quotes as part of their everyday blog conversation. How stupid is this? Imagine the feds busting into your office and taking down the guys by the water cooler because they were quoting verbatim scenes from the Office. Ridiculous.
The AP actually should be embracing the conversation. Jeff Jarvis mentions that one way for the AP to move forward would be for it to stop homogenizing content and list the source news agency. Well how about this. How about it lets anyone take its stories, but as part of the deal you’ve got to take its simultneous conversation feed. And that’s an absolute must all newspapers and websites downstream of the original AP article. In one go this move brings in a huge amount of intellectual capital to the AP content eco-system. The AP ends up providing a centralized discussion engine, a virtual Speakers Corner.
All of a sudden we have an old media giant using its inherent advantages (relationships and distribution channels through all media) to enhance rather than shut down conversation. The challenge for the rest of us to how to do this without these advantages. We have our users and if our content is any good we have the conversation starters. That should be enough to get going.
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Cian O'Donovan
May 17, 2008 at 8:15 pm · Filed under community, content, media
Big thinking critical technology theory, yep, that’s what it takes to shake Keepfaking it from its slumber. Well that’s what we’re looking for in life and we’ve found plenty of it at Clay Shirky’s shirky.com.
But before we get into the heavy stuff, what is it with Gilligan’s Island? Talk TV studies to an American and it’s the most discussed program of the 60’s. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire episode. Sure I grew up on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I thought TV entertainment was a common language. The Cosby Show, Seasame Street, Bewitched, all shows that spoke the common language of TV-Land-eese. Gilligan’s Island, a foreign tongue if ever there was one.
But back to the theory. Shirky writes in-depth and rather cohesively about the concept of social surplus. Social surplus is the time people like us are clawing back from TV networks by creating internet content instead watching two minutes of Madison Avenue four to six times an hour.
The rise of the web, the blogsphere, social networks and most probably LOLCats means that this decade is the first in which we’ve started turning our eyes increasingly away from the TV and onto something different. Note, I certainly don’t think these new endevours are necessarily any more worthy. But Shirky does. Hence, coupled to Shirky’s social surplus is the notion of the heat sink:
Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. This cognitive heat is now being directed elsewhere.
Let’s take that at face value. If we weren’t all stuck indoors watching plasticly enhanced actors living outrageous fantasies we’d all be doing something more worthwhile. Maybe we would.
Shirky then goes on to look more closely at the relationship between heat sinks and social surplus but I want for a second to dwell on the heat sinks. What else in society is a heat sink? Religion? Professional sport? Are these institutions sucking in society’s intelligence and thought time without reward? Probably, but so what if they are. Well, let’s go back and look at what’s happening to TV.
Traditional TV is imploding. A one to many broadcast model simply won’t work and the distribution model gets more and more confusing every year. One only has to examine the perilous state that ITV and Channel 4 are in right now to confirm this.
Organized religion in Europe is in exactly the same state. Turning up to church at an appointed hour weekly is a game more and more punters are unwilling to play. And how about pro sport? Well that’s a trickier one. Despite more money than ever going into Premier League football, average gates year on year are dropping. So maybe these heat sinks are cooling down and drawing less of the social surplus they once were.
So what does all this mean, for TV, religion and sport. Back to Shirky:
This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
So Mr. CBS/Viacom/CNN/Sky/ManchesterUnited/RomanCatholicChurch, it’s easy, let us produce and create and share with you. Give us the content, some safety scissors and glue and we’ll go to town on the catechisms.
Again though I’m not so sure. Sharing for sharing’s sake. Are we merely dreaming of Life 2.0. a dangerous principle:
It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.
Just why is the creation of badly photoshopped kittens a more valid use of brain space than taking in a dose of Desperate Housewives?
My thoughts:
Is this new creation on the internet actually good for anything? look at all the erroneous Wikipedia entries. Most of the content on PhotoBucket is rubbish. When did YouTube actually do anything for humanity?
Sure we have to find out where the users have been locked out of participation with big media/sport/religion. But “if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”
Ultimately we’re going to have to get the carving knives out, just let’s not fool ourselves that we’re creating a better, more cerebral society merely by letting the users play with the product.
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Cian O'Donovan
January 28, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under content, social networks
No meta data. No way of knowing who’s read a journal or paper before. Of knowing what they thought of it. At least unless you’re the librarian or have one of those special CIA computers that track books on particular subject matter like “The Idiots Guide to making Nuclear Fission in your living room”.
Ok, it’s too late on a Sunday night to go into this in depth, but the last post has me thinking of how we use libraries, or rather why I don’t. Why can’t I go down to Whitechapel public library and have the same experience I can have looking up a book on Amazon. Why can’t I have a better experience, after all, the public library doesn’t have the same commercial agenda as a publicly listed company. And an academic library is actually there to promote and encourage the transformation of information stored in books, to useable knowledge in someone’s head.
So why isn’t there a way to capture a reader’s thoughts as they’re reading or browsing. And of displaying this to the next 12 year old looking for Deathly Hallows. Or computational chemist looking for some shit hot molecular vibration modeling information. Libraries have to start organizing information differently. Turn the card files into networks. Two way networks and allow us to rank and annotate them. And communicate through them.
There was a time music was accessed by artist name, album name or song title only. Didn’t matter if that was online or in Virgin Megastore. MySpace changed that. Now we find new music through networks. There’s a lesson and a model there for our libraries.
David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” dealt well with why this information is needed. Now we need an altruistic version of Mark Zuckerberg to build an Open Source network for Libraries worldwide to hook up to.
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Cian O'Donovan
January 28, 2008 at 12:26 am · Filed under McLuhan, content, social networks
First off a full disclosure: I read John Naughton’s “The Networker” column in today’s Observer on printed news sheet version I bought from Hackney Road’s best minimarket, Ince. I’m sure Gutenberg would be delighted by that, as no doubt Mr. Ince was when I handed over my £1.90. A lot of money for something I’ve gone and re-read online for free. I think by admitting that I’m removing myself from the demographic this post is all about but such is life.
A couple of thoughts on Naughtons words, or more to the point, the study by the British Library and UCL on the information-seeking habits of young people he refers to. The report says amongst lots of other interesting things that we are spending as much time searching for information as consuming it. It also states that we’re not spending much time on the media once we find it. We read, then move on to the next object on the same horizontal plane.
What does this mean? It means two things: first Google, Amazon and iTunes have a ways to go in terms of getting us media easier and quicker. There’s a debate swirling at the moment about human search and what it has to offer a world in which Google are paying all the best engineers to make sure their algorithm stays in first place. Of course that assumes that finding the information is the end goal. Sometimes the search is as entertaining as the media at the end.
Take Twitter, it could be said that the micro blogging application/universe is really a passive search tool. I connect/follow all those I think will point me to useful data and hey presto, I get pointed to media I invariably find interesting. This is a form of human search. And because of the social nature of the search I enjoy the process as much, if not more than the end result. Marshall would be proud, in this case the medium really can be the message.
Second, isn’t this method of consumption very much like the way we use some social networks, and I’m thinking MySpace in particular. We connect, consume media that our new friend has posted, then move on. All the time we’re at the same rung of the hierarchical ladder.
Over the past 12 months many have looked at News Corps purchase of MySpace and wondered if maybe Rupert Murdoch in his senior years had shot his wad on Tom co. Facebook was the cool new thing led by a twenty-something year old with the best PR since Mother Theresa. But the Facebook fanboys have been quiet of late. MySpace has been getting some spring cleaning and the media-model it’s build on is looking sound enough.
So what does that add up to? Well at the end of their report the British Library team come to some conclusions. They say the days of paid-for library searches, additional pins and passwords to get into bespoke cataloguing software, and separate, non-connected databases for online and offline information are over. Users just couldn’t be bothered. Users want a one stop shop. Users want to use their Google toolbar. If libraries want to remain relevant they’re going to have to open up and let Google, MySpace or whoever it may be in.
Posted by: Cian O'Donovan
January 6, 2008 at 10:07 pm · Filed under communication, community, content, media, politics, social networks, sport
Jeff 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?
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December 27, 2007 at 2:51 pm · Filed under brands, community, content, media, social networks
From 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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December 5, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under content, magazines, media
Roy 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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December 3, 2007 at 4:59 pm · Filed under community, content, magazines, media, politics
Interesting 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:
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Take a page out of the playbook of what differentiated MSNBC.com from the pack. Have almost as many graphics and design experts as writers on staff.
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Provide a feature that you simply don’t have space for in your newsstand product:
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.
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Make the sites as interactive as possible. Time took a good step in this direction by having its readers pick the questions it asks celebrities in its regular feature.
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Use the Web to explain the news as comprehensively as possible. Don’t simply report the story on the Internet — give such information as a chronology. The Wall Street Journal’s Web site routinely does this, and it pays off.
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Keep the staff nonbelievers as far away from the Web as possible. If editors or reporters are ambivalent about or hostile to the Web (like many have been at Time Inc., and you can’t fire them all), don’t let them corrupt
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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December 3, 2007 at 4:00 pm · Filed under community, content, media, politics
Vint Cerf comes over all Bono and guest edits the Guardian Media. Whatever that means. Anyways, the man who came second to Al Gore in inventing the internet gets to lay the smack down on what he feels is the state of the aforementioned internet. And he doesn’t mention his job not doing any evil once.
What Cerf does do though is take a good snapshot of what, after thirty or so years of bottom down development and growth, the internet is allowing us to do.
It takes decades if not generations to fully understand the impact of
such inventions. We are barely two decades into the commercial
availability of the internet, but it has already changed the world. It
has fostered self-expression and freed information from the constraints
of physical location, opening up the world’s information to people
everywhere.
He’s not wrong. But the next point is fascinating, particularly given his employers’ upcoming mobile spectrum bid(s):
And it still has a long way to go. Today, barely one in five people
around the world has access to the internet. Yet around three-quarters
of the world’s population lives within reach of a mobile network. In
the decade ahead, many people, especially in developing countries, will
have their first contact with the internet via a mobile phone.
This is a big point on a number of levels. Google are serious about being a big provider of what is looking like the planet’s primary platform for internet delivery. On top of that layer they are the undisputed heavyweight champ when it comes to organizing the information on that platform.
The second interesting point Cerf seeks to hightlight from what surely could have been a very long list is this:
Unlike previous communications technologies, the internet enables both
one-to-one and one-to-many communications, as well as many-to-many
(such as wikis or Digg). Distinguishing between these forms of
communication isn’t always easy. But the net is still a young medium,
and discerning where personal contact blends into public broadcast will
become easier as time passes.
Taking on Postman’s reading of McLuhan, message, medium and all the rest, this is a huge communications development we’re at the cusp of. How will true many-to-many communications for the masses transform the very nature of how we think and organize ourselves as a society. What sort of impact will this have on democracy as well as popular entertainment?
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December 3, 2007 at 3:41 pm · Filed under content, media, newspapers
This is going to keep running for a while and it looks like Jeff Jarvis has the powers of citation in his corner in his online fight against the New York Times’ Bill Keller.
Jarvis: In a speech in London for the Guardian, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller says this about bloggers and this blogger in particular:
“My friend Jeff Jarvis, a blogger of long-standing and
professor of journalism at the City University of New York, refers to
news bloggers as “citizen journalists”, which has a sweet, idealistic
ring to it. Jeff, like many of the most ardent true believers in the
blog revolution, suggests that the mainstream media can be largely
replaced by a self-regulating democracy of voices, the wisdom of the
crowd.“
Jarvis: First, I have never said that the crowd of bloggers would replace
mainstream media and professional journalism. That’s a red herring that
is too often attributed presumptively to bloggers and their advocates.
It’s never properly cited because it can’t be. Where’s the link to the
quote with me saying that? It’s fiction. I don’t say that. I don’t
believe that. Jay Rosen shot that fish in the barrel a year and a half ago when he responded to hearing it again from Keller’s deputy Jon Landman:
“Jay Rosen says that no one is saying that news will be
decided by poll. Nobody is saying that we don’t need reporters. Nobody
is saying that you should stop reporting and just listen. But these
things are being said: The audience knows a lot of stuff and if you
don’t tap that knowledge you’re not keeping up with your craft. And
journalism has become interactive and if you’re not interacting, you’re
not keeping up with your craft. And, he says, trust isn’t made the way
it was; the trust transaction is different.
Jarvis: So can we please can that talk and stop accusing bloggers of wishing to eliminate journalists?
Sure, Jarvis can lay it on thick about blogs from time to time, a blog hasn’t cured cancer yet I don’t think, but Keller’s barking up the wrong tree here in a big way. He’s coming off just the way the NUJ did in October when they put the boot in the new media practices alleged and assumed.
Not promising from the executive editor of the USA’s paper of record.
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