Syndicate the conversation

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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Steve agrees with Keepfakingit

June 7, 2008 at 6:45 pm · Filed under broadcasting, media

Looks like Steve Ballmer and Keepfakingit are pointing in the same direction on this broadcasters-treating-their-viewers-with-contempt theme we’ve been banging on about recently. Except Steveo is coming at it from a different angle. IP he says is the delivery method that will transform all media not just TV.

Ballmer notes to the Washington Post that kids playing XBox Live are interacting using TVs with people all over the world. Why? because they’re using an IP network that enables two way communication. He’s convinced that within ten years all media, TV, magazines, books, will be delivered this way. And once they are people can start talking to each other and back to big media.

Last night we contended that it would take all viewers having a device, a laptop, iPhone or some other wi-fi gadget (note all IP), on their lap before broadcasters were willing and able to respect their audience. Well here’s the other option. Deliver the broadcast to the device, whether that’s the gadget, or a set-top box.

Once that happens we can get on with building all sorts of interesting communities around the content. This surely is a better way of driving extra revenues for broadcasters than fleecing their viewers using premium sms and phone charges.

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Listen up y’all

June 6, 2008 at 11:47 pm · Filed under broadcasting, media, social media, tv

Summing up keepfakingit’s previous post: Broadcasters have for years in the UK shown nothing but contempt for their audience. Despite their audience paying their wages, the corporations have insisted that the AUDIENCE PAYS (through SMS, premium rate calls etc.) every time they communicate with the broadcaster. This is ridiculous.

Let’s examine a few facts here. I recently wrote about Clay Shirky’s assertion that people are clawing back some of the time they spend with their TVs and putting that into more creative endevours. Shirky calls this Social Surplus. As someone who works for a broadcaster and sees far too much TV, keepfakingit calls this common sense.

Now let’s look at a trend that’s on a huge upward curve in the US and is following suit in Europe, the simultaneous usage of PC and television. TV ownership per household is somewhere north of 3 right now (can’t find a reference so you’ll just have to trust me on this one) PC ownership is over two and rising fast. Something’s got to give right? According to Shirky there are only so many hours in the day we can consume (or create) media. Well not really. In ever increasing numbers people are watching TV whilst warming their knees with their 15″ Latitudes. IMing and Facebooking whilst contemplating which buffoon to vote out of Big Brother, by text of course.

Right now I don’t see any major broadcasters attempting to tap this in a meaningful way. Yes the news channels ask and use UGC in ever increasing amounts, but live TV has not yet embraced IM, Twitter or even simple commenting and ratings systems.

Dual users are still in the minority but there’s one breakthrough coming that’s about to push dual usage into the ascendancy. Usable, affordable mobile internet. When everyone’s got virtually free bandwidth in their pocket thanks to wi-fi devices, all of a sudden everyone has a conduit to shout abuse at Davina McCall.

And they won’t have to pay for doing it.
All of a sudden Soccer AM’s MySpace profile or Facebook group can have a meaningful roll before, during, and after each show.

It’s time for the producers and creatives involved in mainstream television to start listening at their viewers level, and maybe even start listening where their viewers are talking. With SMS and premium line voting now almost untouchable in the UK, what have broadcasters got to lose?

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Goal of the Season: Start respecting us

June 4, 2008 at 10:54 pm · Filed under broadcasting, media

The BBC are in trouble again today over what is essentially information flows and how they communicate with their paying public. The Daily Mail and other fine institutions of British journalism are claiming that the Match of the Day “Goal of the Season” result has been rigged. Their evidence, a ton of cash has been laid on a Emmanuel Adebayor, Arsenal’s Togolese hitman. True, it’s a great goal, but it had been only third favourite until yesterday. Something stinks.

Whether or not the BBC is in the manure for real on this one or not is irrelevant. The episode serves only to illustrate that at this juncture the public simply don’t trust either the BBC, ITV or any other national broadcaster in the UK. Thanks to stealing their viewers money by way of rigged phone-in and SMS quizzes the broadcasters have only themselves to blame.

Much has been made of live TV shows who kept asking for more audience responses after they’d already decided the result. Or production teams to asked for competition entrants from any part of the country when it was already decided that only those in a certain region would win. But these underhand tactics by producers and APs belie an ignorance and contempt of their audience by short sighted layers of management from top to bottom.

Let’s look at the facts, even if Ant and Dec hadn’t been taking the piss, and oh yes, taking the piss they were.

First, what the hell were BBC and ITV doing asking their audience to pay the relevant broadcaster so that said audience was “allowed” talk to them. Seriously. We pay expensive TV licenses in the UK that fund the BBC. And ITV is no bleeding heart charity. So why should I have to pay to tell Ant or Dec which crappy Cher rip-off I think deserves another shot next week. I shouldn’t. They should be honoured and thrilled that I want to interact with them.

Second thing, if I do find programming that is so compelling I want to communicate with it, or shout at it or whatever, surely there’s a better way than automated switchboards and text messages. These methods of communication, certainly in the context they are employed by the broadcasters do nothing but atomize an audience. They are one way missives that become detached and decontextualized from the viewer as soon as the send button is hit.

There’s got to be a better way.

There is a better way, and I’m going to list some tomorrow, so Grade, Thompson and Duncan, listen up guys.

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Media exclusion is plural

May 29, 2008 at 8:37 am · Filed under community, media

Keepfakingit writes one post on the impact of technology on society and then along come a whole bus-like fleet. So keepingitbrief, here’s quick comment on Jeff Jarvis’ post this week on the subject of media singularity.

Jarvis makes a couple of points.
1. The internet is not a medium but a place.
2. There are very few new mediums, just different ways (iPhone, online paper etc.)  of accessing them. This illustrates point 1.

Then to requote Jarvis quoting John Naughton:

While I’m blathering on about this, let me quote the wonderful John Naughton of the Open University and the Observer, who wrote this for an essay for an Ofcom report:

‘Media’ is the plural of ‘medium’, a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another, more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth. And that’s a very interesting interpretation for our purposes.

In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures – living organisms. The most famous example, I guess, is the mould growing in Alexander Fleming’s Petri dishes which eventually led to the discovery of penicillin.

What I want to do is apply that perspective to human society: to treat it as an organism that depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop. Any change in the environment – in the media that support social and cultural life – will have corresponding effects on the organism. Some things will wither; others may grow; new, mutant, organisms may appear. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium, and you change the organism.

This way of looking at our media environment is not new. I picked it up originally from the late Neil Postman, a passionate humanist who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and was an unremitting sceptic about the impact of technology on society.

I posted yesterday on the dangers of social exclusion from an increasingly ghettoized social cyber space . Naughton’s point above illustrates the point I made that it’s increasingly important for the gate keepers of these communities to recognize these dangers and tailor  online environments to be inclusive and open space. Yes they will naturally self select their populaces, but this doesn’t mean we should allow and encourage the building of cyber walls between them.

Naughton is reminding us of Postman’s thesis that the medium makes the messanger, or at least the person that receives the message. As long as we control the medium we should have a duty of care to that end-user.

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Social Surplus: Are things really going to get better?

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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SXSW: People are the killer app

April 2, 2008 at 12:28 am · Filed under McLuhan, communication, media, sxsw, technology

This is my last post on SXSW. It may be the most important one though. As I’ve written, I went to SXSW thinking it would be a tech event. I’ve come back to London with the realization that it’s not about bits and bytes. It’s about people. It’s about the keynotes and the audience who take on those keynote speakers. It’s about regular panels and the individuals who stand up and wait for a turn to ask a question at the mic. And it’s about all those lunatics who see a twitter calling for a mid-afternoon tweet-up at a random bar and despite knowing nobody turn up and make friends. Thanks for that twitter.

I would like to briefly go through some standout panels and keynotes at SXSW. He was subsequently outshone, or certainly out hyped by other big guns, but for me Henry Jenkins really brought his A-Game. Thesis: Society and its leaders and its media are switching from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture.

Example: Survivor and Lost’s level of audience participation. These prime time shows do not exist without their online audience examining every last secret detail of every frame of every episode. This has resulted in a cycle of proucers feeding and feeding off online communities set up for these show and means that these audiencs are some of the most engaged in network tv.
Exampe: Barack Obama talks using the post-boomer inclusivity language of ‘We’. Hillary Clinton does not. ‘I’ plays a big part in Clinton’s speeches and represents a person born of a political generation that wholeheartedly embraces the one way medium of TV. That’s over Mrs. Clinton.
Daniel light adds to Jenkins’ thesis in his excellent post:

“This isn’t presented as happening at the expense of individuality or self-determination. On the contrary, this is not communism but communalism, seeing the interests of the community best served by the divergent creativity and initiative of we, its constituents.”

Social Networks such as Twitter and Seesmic are obvious manifestations of this communalism. They represent the audacity and urgency of intimacy that I think Jenkins talks about.

Mark Zuckerberg
A whole ton of stuff has been written about the Zukerberg/Lacy interview. It was a cringe worthy affair. So what, let’s get on with the show. Neither Zuckerberg nor Lacy came across as particularly interesting individuals in person, but I do want to examine a few points Zuck tried to get out between acts of audience revolt. Sure, audience participation via online social network back channels is interesting but not in a huge manner right now. Come on, this is one of the biggest geek fests on the planet, if it’s going to happen anywhere it’s going to happen here.

One interesting side note is the reference Zuck makes to how Facebook is helping revolutionaries in Colombia. Look at the Guardian piece on FB’s backers. Is this thus a huge surprise. Government and big business have sought to control information and access to information since mankind invented media. ie forever. The reformation was enabled by Guttenberg’s wresting of information control from the Catholic church after all. If I’m the CIA, you better believe I want to control, or at the very least have readily available access to these information paths.

One worry here is that as with Google, as large corporations start to gain an ownership on our information and relationships they can massage these in different ways. McLuhan’s statement on medium and message rings true. Our thoughts and the way we think adapts to the medium. Control that and control the message.

Zuck stated quite audaciously that Facebook represents the biggest paradigm shift in media since the launch of the newspaper industry. Maybe he’s actually right, did anyone think of that?

Newspapers didn’t shift society’s thought functionality on their own, it took the invention and adoption of the telegraph to put them over the edge. The telegraph removed the limitations of space and time on the newspaper industry. The newspaper press was then free to become the first medium to involve human interest and sentiment en masse. With that the telegraph ultimately dimmed the privacy of the book form.

Nearly 200 years later social networks are doing a similar job in dismantling barriers of intimacy in our communications. The generation of school children on Bebo has grown up with almost a complete, non-technological, tool set to use social networks to communicate.

Commentators in their twenties and older wonder how this generation is going to grow up and hit the work force with all their teenage trials and tribulations shared online for the potential employer to vet. But that isn’t the employee’s problem. They are comfortable with their shared intimacy. It’s the employer who’s going to have to deal with it. In the past decade we’ve had two presidents in the US and a leader of the opposition in the UK who have crossed this Rubicon in terms of records and recollections of student drug usage. This is surely the start of a societal change from punishing past indiscretions to an open acknowledgment of mistakes.

We’ve already stated that the newspaper press wasn’t the catalyst for the changing of media consumption in the 1800’s. It was the Telegraph. And so social networks. Flash AJAX deployments and integrated APIs aren’t the killer app here. These aren’t changing society. But what might do that that is the integration of mobile devices. This is why Google is spending so much on Android and wireless. It may be that Social Networks will finally come of age and be the instruments of change that MZ proports them to be when they fully embrace a mobile world. And most of my highlighted tech plays in my earlier  post had distinct mobile aspects.

So to Frank Warren
I’ve been a fan of PostSecret since I first saw it in some Sunday supplement or another. It’s collage like art/intimacy I think connects with a lot of people. We’ve all got something hidden inside us.

However seeing Warren’s name up beside Jenkins and Zuckerberg was something of a surprise. This guy’s an artist/currator. How does that fit into an interactive conference?

Well let’s look at what interactive means. Warren has created more direct interactions than perhaps anyone in the auditorium. And on an incredibly intimate level. It’s fair to say that Warren knows how to extract the intimate in just about anyone. The hour long talk featured quite a few tales of anonymous secrets, but the amazing thing was what this outpouring of secrets did to the audience. The Q&A section, or rather mass secret section produced one spontaneous proposal of marriage, lots of confessions and one hug from Frank for a woman who fell into floods of teams in front of 2,000 super-geeks. Wow. Nothing I write here can do him justice. Some of his talks are online. Find them.

Four points from Jane McGonigal’s talk on the happiness industry. All recent research on happiness points to four key areas that are pre-requisites for bringing happiness to a life:

1. Satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Time spent with people we like
4. A chance to be a part of something bigger

What’s this to do with interactive? Jane’s a multi-player game expert. And multiplayer games bring all four of these in spades. If your industry doesn’t it’s time to think why not.

So on to other highlights. George Kelly gave the most sombre talk of the weekend. He read like a Telegraph obit. The funeral was that of the newspaper industry and George obviously cares. Not that that’s going to stop the declining sales, slash and burn approach to the world’s news rooms and a mass exodus of advertisers to green online pastures.
That leaves me with this question though which I want to explore over the coming months. is it a given that these forms of communication and participation will jump the gap between international geek community and mass adoption. Facebook has done it, but can Twitter and Seesmic really go mass market in their current guise or will they simply be sold off for their API’s. Does the real innovation lie in ancillilary apps?

Finally some learnings at a basic level. Despite our web 2.0 tools it’s vital to connect in a real way, not just at a Facebook or MySpace level. Without real interaction, and maybe even face to face communication these web2.0 relationships do not mean a whole lot. Gary Vaynurchuck understands this. Watch how he communicates with his audience. But big media doesn’t. It they get Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, it’s at a marketing level. Useless.

Nike is a company that I find absolutely offensive for their continued outsourcing/labour issues, BUT they get this. They are using their brand and social status to connect people in the real world. More companies need to get this too. And like Nike they may well be companies that haven’t done this before. If you work in the world of sport, an area that is invented to accomodate social interaction you better be thinking this or you’re going to be left way out by your audience.

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SXSWi 2008: Technologies and applications

March 27, 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under communication, media, sxsw, technology

I went to SXSWi expecting to be dazzled by technology. I wasn’t. Instead I was impressed by the application of technology. That may not sound like a huge difference. It doesn’t matter how good the technology is after a certain point, it’s the passion the user-base brings to the table that puts an application or a service over the edge.
So back to the point, the impressive technologies and apps were those that were being used, that had all the ad-spend but none of the on-the-ground grubbiness. I’m thinking you in particular Silverlight.
In no pearticular order shout outs to:

Utterz
If I had a US phone bill I’d have been using this in a big way. A tumblr crossed with friendfeed for mobile access (kinda). (I think).Utterz is just about unique enough to work. It can be accessed via any mobile or landline in the world and it connects to your kitchen sink.

Seesmic
Didn’t take the convention by storm the way it could have, but for my money it’s the best insta-vlogger on the market. Once it perfects it’s mobile interoperability and good video handsets (ie a few more N95 clones) come down in price Seesmic is going to explode. So see me after SXSWi 2009.

Friendfeed
I thought FriendFeed was going to save my life. It aggregates all you ‘friend’s’ web2.0 feed and delivers them in a daily dose. But now I’m not so sure. After using the service for a couple of weeks I’m starting to think spam! Maybe I should just turn off the daily notifying email. Lifestream services are 10 a penny right now, and the word on the twitter feed says the best two out there are FriendFeed and Social Thing. We’ll see.

Meebo
Meebo’s been around a while. The best thing about it? It works. Meebo were a major sponsor for SXSW but their investment went beyond some sales inventory in the guide books. They created a live chat room for every panel of the interactive conference and they were used as a pretty good back channel for some of the discussions. So far so 1999. But it worked. Social networking doesn’t have to ride the zeitgeist like a Harley every day of the week. Nothing wrong with improving proven concepts.

Twitter
Last night twitter saved my life. Glad to see Gary Vaynerchuck is on the same delayed reaction post SXSW buzz as Keepfakingit. Read and watch him here. garyvaynerchuk.com—twitter-vs-facebook kinda. I endorse his view on Twitter completely. Though my Jersey accent isn’t quite so pronounced.

Wordpress
When the bloggers of the world combined at SXSW they did it in a sponsored press-area-esque room called the BlogHaus. And Wordpress continues to dominate the market. Not an interesting statement but a true one.

Viddler
Is Viddler the most interesting streaming video player on the market right now? It could well be. I saw nothing at SXSW from Brightcove or YouTube or any of the other big players. It’s time for someone else to step to the plate. Viddler may be ready to go. It’s got the social comment thing down. And it looks nice too. Check it.
Drupel: Fast Company have just jumped aboard the good ship Drupel and at a panel on the current state of CMSs the open souce solution looked good.

Next New Networks
I’ve already said it but these guys are where CNN was quarter century ago. And they’ve got the feet-on-the-ground professional approach to content that means they may succeed where the podcasting and blogging aggregators have failed. Theirs was also one of the best parties. Public displays of Rock Band in an adult environment is a good thing.

Android
I didn’t hang with the Google guys. Not my scene. But amongst those whose scene it was, Android was making a serious impression. There may be no such thing as the mobile web, but it’s going to take a big heave to get the world’s population mobile access that really works. And there’s no denying that that’s what the world’s internet population wants.
I’ve seen enough shysters in my time telling me they were going to make me, and those I represent, rich from half-baked mobile apps. Mobile apps aren’t going to make anybody rich, but apps that can go mobile are. And Google are primed to pick up some of that revenue. If I were a startup, or a blue chip app creator, I’d make sure I had an incubator with with Android developers beavering away on something. On anything. Can’t win the game if you don’t know the rules.

Live.Rezpondr.com
So that’s the overview. But I keep coming back to the people and the talent at SXSW. live.rezpondr.com is a great example of smart creatives using a host of different services to put together a media package that meets specific events, in this case SXSW. So big shout out to Phil Campbell and Documentally. Big media could do worse than bring these guys in on a consultancy gig to shake up their news room.

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SWSXi 2008 Themes

March 25, 2008 at 8:28 am · Filed under communication, media

So now we’ve got a mission statement for SXSWi 2008. Or at least I do. What are the supporting themes that are going to shape and direct this media adventure? From the hip: Personality and Participation.

The first formal panel I attended on Saturday was “Quit you day job and start video blogging” chaired by Next New Network’s Tim Shey. The panel featured Shey along with a host of video blogging pioneers. A couple of interesting points worth noting. First off, all of these people were talent and talented, knew how to act in front of a camera and crucially had something more interesting to say than the “fed-the-cat” stories that many blogs consist of. Whether the distribution medium is network tv or online vod, talent is talent. You simply can’t succeed without it.

The second more interesting point taken from this panel was I think mentioned by an audience member (note, the audiences at SXSW are the best in the business, but more of that later). The current state of play for online video producers and aggregators was likened to that of CNN and the cable networks in the US thirty years ago. The cable nets were a new game in town, run by young entrepreneurs who could think quicker move faster and than their counterparts in CBS, ABC and NBC. And crucially the FCC had limited jurisdiction meaning that there were virtually no limits on what the programmers could do. They utterly changed the rules of TV. Well guess what, that’s what it looks like to those working at the likes of Next New Networks. As the barriers to entry for online video networks lower, the truly creative are taking over from the truly geeky. The talent is spending more time on the shows and not worrying about html, bandwidth and hosting. And the likes of NNN are putting in place a layer of professionalism to bring in the revenue and quality control.

One question that has only occurred to me since SXSWi relates to the level of audience participation these new video producers are bringing to their shows. It would seem that they should be ahead of their network cousins. Are they? The subject simply didn’t come up.

That the old networks still don’t understand their audience isn’t even a question. Exhibit A: the text and phone scandals that hit BBC hard and brought ITV to its knees in 2007. Had these institution a clue about how to communicate with their viewers the voting rip-offs simply couldn’t and wouldn’t have happened. But back to Texas…

I suspect participation has been a theme of SXSWi since its inception; come on, ‘i’ is for interactive. But let’s take a quick look at what participation meant in 2008. Every single one of the tech companies that I’ve highlighted here have mass audience participation as either key USP or a key functionality component.

I’ve already mentioned audience participation. During every single keynote, panel and talk there existed back channel conversations involving the live audience. These conversations were formally or informally hosted by the likes of Meebo, Twitter and Utterz. The more astute chairpersons paid attention to these back channels and directed conversations accordingly, props here to Robert Scoble and David Dylan Thomas amongst others. The less astute and plain bad (I’m thinking Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg here) simply lost control to a collective intelligence in the auditorium that was simply too powerful for them to handle. It was amazing to be in one of these auditoriums, filled with maybe 2,000 normally sedate tech people, and be part of a collaborative revolt against the person meant to be directing proceedings.

If this behaviour is going to happen anywhere on Earth it’s going to be SXSWi, where thousands of the earliest adopters are gathered trying to out-geek each other. But there will come a point when these technologies and behaviours go critical and spread to the outside world. This was the participatory theme of 2008.

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SXSWi 2008: Initial thoughts and overview

March 25, 2008 at 8:13 am · Filed under McLuhan, communication, community, media

SXSWi finished a fortnight ago. Over those two weeks I’ve traveled home, read what others have had to say on the event and tried to pull some of those thoughts together. No apologies for the delay, there have been some advantages to waiting this long before writing about SXSWi.

Below I’ve attempted to distil and bottle my version of the SXSWi elixir. Maybe it’s easier to start off with what for me SXSWi is not. It’s not a tech conference in the manner of E3. It’s not a West Coast think-in á-la TED and it certainly isn’t an economically driven cock-fest such as Davos. It shares common factors with all of the above, as well as some PodCamp, BarCamp and any other kind of tech/media trade camp show that you may care to list. It takes elements from all of these, cross pollinates and spits them back out into one very social and sociable long weekend in Texas’ capital. What struck me most of all was the insights into current media culture on display. By that I mean media in its truest form, as extensions of our senses, not the definition of media limited to depressing discussions on the state of our commercial mass media such as network TV and the newspaper industry. I was so taken with this big picture look at media that since the event I’ve dusted off “Understanding Media” and gone back to McLuhan to structure some of my thoughts.

Of course I’ll put an asterisk against the opening words here. This is my take, there are a thousands others many of which will show deeper and more informed insight than myself.

It is human nature to look for patterns and assign themes where only true randomness exists. I’m most definitely guilty of that below, but I think it still worth while to look for common threads across the five days of SXSWi. Reading the discourse coming back on the event online one concept is calling out over all others. With the year that’s in it let’s call it “the audacity and urgency of intimacy”

Through posts on the themes, technologies, events and questions of SXSWi I intend to show that the out of control freight train that is new media is pushing social communication into truly new places and there isn’t anybody out there who really knows where it will ultimately take us too. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt and certainly not myself.

So let’s take my newly minted paraphrase backwards. The Intimacy comes from the new level of connectivity society is embracing, particularly those under 20 and living in the West. We’re connecting and sharing our lives at a base level never before done through a mass medium. This is urgent in that we’re pushing these connections right now and regardless of consequence. The teens of today may be in their thirties before the ramifications of this new connectedness comes homes to roost (that sounds like a warning, it isn’t, I’m optimistic for this Bebo generation). Finally the audacity. Anyone who has heard Mark Zukerberg speak his enthusiasm for Facebook’s mission can’t help but describe him using the adjective ‘audacious’. He believes he’s fueling a media revolution not seen since the dawn of the modern newspaper. And he thinks that despite the very public pushback the likes of Facebook’s Beacon are getting. Zukerberg may well be right though.

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