Today’s Media 2.0 Intel contains contributions from Jeff Jarvis, JD Lasica, Doc Searls, Chris Anderson, and the Poynter E-Media Tidbits team in addition to those of myself and Steve. It’s a goodie, so enjoy.

NAB/RTNDA is just around the corner, and I’m really looking forward to this year’s event. I sense in my spirit a shift in attitude within the industry about things internet, and that’s
reflected in the program. I’m actually on the opening panel! Jeff Jarvis leads a Monday supersession on citizens media/blogging/user-generated content that is a first for the RTNDA. Mind you, this isn’t shuffled off into one of the concurrent sessions; this one is front-and-center. That one is Tuesday, and I wouldn’t miss it.

Here’s the “promotional copy” for my session, moderated by Miles O’Brien from CNN.

As consumers take command of their news options, newsrooms everywhere must transform the way they operate or risk being left behind. Join the leaders of this revolution in a strategic discussion of what we can learn from our audiences and what to expect as they become empowered with control. Learn how professional journalists can continue to be relevant voices in our markets and sustain a viable business. And discover ways that you can be that force of change inside your own organization, encouraging innovation now so we all will be relevant tomorrow.

Even this is a remarkable statement from an organization that represents an important part of the professional press, and it gives me great hope for the future. Read that one line: “Learn how professional journalists can continue to be relevant voices…” That’s quite a concession, because it implies that the relevancy of their voice is in question. It certainly is.

Miles asked me what three points I want to make, and that’s a toughie. I basically told him the following:

1. The key disrupter to the business of media is people, not technology. This is the key to understand all that’s taking place, because the press-public dynamic has been flip-flopped, with the public now clearly calling the shots. When we look at it as only technology, we drift down a path that won’t do much to resolve the disruption to our bottom lines. Relevancy is determined, after all, by them, not us.
2. None of this is “all-or-nothing,” and those who paint it as such generally have a big stake in the game, usually the status quo. Broadcasting will continue and we’re not all going to die tomorrow. There certainly is an evolution underway, but let’s not get caught up in the hype of the all-or-nothing crowd.
3. People want to know what we know and do what we do, and business models that support this will succeed in the near and long-term future. Think Gordon Borrell’s “ammunition” scenario: “The deer now have guns. What do you do when the deer have guns? Get into the ammunition business.” YouTube is the textbook example of this, a business that enables the deer to share their work with others.

This business of relevancy is damned important, and I think that pursuing it is our best bet for tomorrow. Unfortunately, overcoming our formulas — news by one-potato, two-potato, three-potato, four — is a significant problem for those who need to make the transition to something different.

Imagine an early 20th century convention of the whale oil industry. In the hall outside the meeting rooms sits the latest in blubber reduction technology, newfangled harpoonery, foul weather gear, and drowning insurance salesmen. Who’s best suited to talk to the group about electricity, someone from the Edison crowd or the research team representing the whale oil industry? Think about it.

This is exactly why I feel so different about this year’s conference. See you there.

Here’s a link to today’s AR&D Media 2.0 Intel newsletter. Enjoy.

A new study from Burst! Media points to the growing perception that the web is going to play a significant role in the 2008 political season. I’ve written before about how we cannot take for granted that this election will bring in political revenue at traditional levels, and this study suggests that an online political strategy is a necessity for local media companies. One caveat: this is a study of 2,100 online users who are likely to vote in the 2008 Presidential election. It does not include those likely voters who don’t use the web.

One-fourth of likely voters told the researchers that the Internet is the best place to learn about a candidate’s position on election issues or to research general election issues.

Men are significantly more likely than women to cite the Internet as the best source for election information, 28.7% versus 21.1% respectively. There are interesting differences in the response of age segments. Among the youngest likely voter segment (18-24 years), television (27.6%) and the Internet (24.5%) reign supreme for election information. The Internet clearly leads other media among respondents 25-44 years, and newspapers lead with older age segments (45 years and older).

Here are some other fascinating stats from this study.

– One out of five (22.2%) likely voters have already visited a 2008 presidential candidate’s website.

– 30.0% have visited an issue advocacy group’s website. The affluent (income above $75k) are more likely (39.7%) than all other income segments to have visited an issue advocacy group’s website.

– One-quarter have clicked on a web advertisement for a political candidate or issue advocacy group.

– 50.7% of likely voters would watch a video clip on a candidates website featuring the candidate discussing his or her positions on election issues.

– Nearly one-third have visited the website of a candidate or issue advocacy group they did not or were unsure they’d support.

It must be stated that, as an online ad network, Burst stands to benefit from increased use of the web for candidate advertising, and that’s reflected in the study’s conclusion. However, this is what broadcasters are selling against:

The Internet provides candidates, advocacy groups and marketers with a “high touch” medium to reach new audiences and enhance existing constituent relationships. Furthermore, the Internet gives parties the opportunity to reach targeted segments in an environment that is highly engaging and, by the nature of politics, interactive. Take advantage of this environment by using creative and display technologies, like video, that not only provide substantial information, but also allow the consumers to easily pursue further research or action.

Given the significance of historical political revenue for television stations, it’s critical that we pay attention in this area. Candidate messages on YouTube, for example, cost them nothing, and there’s anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness.

Britteny, a Ball State University student, writing in the school’s “Notes from the Digital Frontier” blog, notes that YouTube is the new face of the political scene. “I actually think that this could actually do a lot of good in getting my generation more involved in politics,” she wrote, “and to make Americans in general more aware and more in control of their political expressions.”

If you don’t already have a political web strategy in place and functioning, you’re late to the party. Be forewarned that this is a dangerous position.

(Online Media Daily story)

Do yourself a favor and go read the reaction by Jeff Jarvis to the New York Times’ attempt to boost Tim O’Reilly for his proposed “rules” for bloggers. It’s a spot-on analysis that I won’t attempt to reproduce with my own words.

In a nutshell, O’Reilly wants the blogosphere to behave, and Jeff rightly calls this dangerous.

This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone — they’ll do us the favor — can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it’s not. It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do. And if I don’t, you can judge me accordingly. Are there rules and laws? Yes, the same ones that exist in worlds physical or virtual: If I libel or defame you on the streetcorner or in a paper or on a screen, the recourse is the same. But I don’t put up another badge on my fence saying I won’t libel you. I just don’t. That’s how the world works. Why should this new world work any differently? Why should it operate with more controls and more controllers?

The New York Times, of course, promotes the idea, because they would be well-served with a blogosphere that was forced to play by their rules.

Here’s the thing about blogs that most big-time media observers miss: while there are a few who rise to mainstream audience levels, the vast majority of blogs are just personal observations about this or that. If you don’t know that, you’ve never been to MySpace, and you certainly don’t have a MySpace account. Every MySpace user has a blog, and you’d be amazed at the number of people there who make entries. We’re going to give these people a set of behavior rules?

You see, this is all about big media’s obsession with the need to control what they view as a media threat. It may be a threat, but as Jeff and Doc note, the web is a place, and we don’t need artificial special rules to bring it in line with institutional life.

Blogging continues to grow, but the growth has slowed over the last year. The aggregate number of posts from all blogs is beginning to slow, too. These facts are according to Dave Sifry’s latest “State of the Live Web” report from Technorati, and it’s filled with fascinating stuff. Most notable is the title of the report — expanding from the “State of the Blogosphere,” which has been Dave’s traditional, twice-annual report — to the “State of the Live Web.” This is a good move, I think, because it helps re-position Technorati.

The Static Web is what Google searches. The Live Web is what Technorati searches. Fascinating.

The blogosphere is very much a “live” organism, so it belongs in the “Live Web.” And I like this term far, far better than the VC-generated “Web 2.0.”

Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.

What makes this possible is the rise in the use of tags across all forms of social media and the increasing implementation of tags by the publishing platforms supporting each form of media. Increasingly, tags have become a lingua franca of Live Web, helping to categorize social media while also indicating where people’s attention might be at any given moment. But because each form of media is published from unique platforms with their own established communities, the audience found itself hopping from platform to platform to get a sense of what might be hot at any given moment. Which is why our social media aggregation service — made manifest on our tagged media pages — is growing at a torrid pace.

Click to embiggen

There’s an important tidbit for mainstream media observers as well: the number of blogs in Sifry’s “Top 100″ most popular sites rose substantially during the period of this measurement (4th Qtr, 2006). Technorati views the popularity of blogs through inbound links, so it’s really a measure of authority.

During Q3 2006 there were only 12 blogs in the Top 100 most popular sites.

In Q4, however, there were 22 blogs on the list — further evidence of the continuing maturation of the Blogosphere. Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets. For instance, information not shown in our data but revealed in our own user testing in Q1 2007 indicates that the audience is less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com — for a growing base of users, these are all sites for news, information, entertainment, gossip, etc. and not a “blog” or a “MSM site”.

Here are some of the facts, thanks to Doc Searls:

70 million weblogs
About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
1.4 new blogs every second
3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December (see here)
1.5 million posts per day, or…
17 posts per second
Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
English second at 33%
Chinese third at 8%
Italian fourth at 3%
Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
English the most even in postings around-the-clock
Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
2.5 million blogs used at least one tagged post in February

Each week, Steve Safran and I publish a newsletter that goes out to a rather large distribution list. I’ve decided to post a link here each week after it goes out (the newsletter is available online, too).

Here’s this week’s Media 2.0 Intel.

Occasionally, you’ll find something repeated that I’ve entered here, but most of it is new stuff. Enjoy.

I’d never heard of this guy until Doc Searls wrote about his new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. I’ve ordered the thing, because it’s important for me to read this stuff, even though I can tell you it’s all bullshit.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Amanda Chapel, aka Strumpette, interviewed Keen (”interview” is perhaps too generous…”worship” would be better) and posted parts of it on her blog.

CHAPEL: Your book sounds like a total refutation of the premise and proposal that is the Cluetrain Manifesto. As Cluetrain is accepted as bible, that would make your book heresy! Your thoughts?

KEEN: Yes, my book is in the heretical tradition of modern dystopian writers like Huxley & Orwell as well as contemporary American cultural critics such as Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell and Neil Postman. Cluetrain established a biblical orthodoxy around the four C’s: “community”, “citizenship”, “customer” and, most ludicrously of all, “conversation”. What it tries to do is displace the ethical and cultural truths that have traditionally defined our civic life — and replace them with the feel-good language of public relations. At the ideological heart of Cluetrain is the absurd cult of the amateur with its denial that real “truth” or “expertise” can ever exist.

…CULT OF THE AMATEUR is not a book written for Web 2.0 radicals. Instead, it was authored for mainstream Americans — parents, business people and educators — who are troubled by the more extreme cultural and economic consequences of the hyper democratic internet. I expose the dangers not only of “citizen media” like blogging and wikis, but also of online pornography, gambling and identity theft. These are issues that have a significant impact on real people’s lives and need to be publicly discussed and debated.

To which Doc, one of the authors of Cluetrain, responded.

Good God. Where to begin?
Well, not only did Cluetrain contain no “four C’s”, but neither the words “citizen” nor “citizenship” appear anywhere in the original website or the book.
While Cluetrain certainly has an ideological heart, it’s not “the cult of the amateur”, or the cult of anything.
And while I don’t yet know which “ethical and cultural truths” Andrew is talking about, I’m damn sure Cluetrain’s authors would never hope to replace them with “the feel-good language of public relations”. Which we crapped on rather forcefully…

I predict that Mr. Keen will sell a lot of books, because there’s a lot at stake here, and he’s “tickling the ears” of those who wish things to stay exactly as they are. The mainstream press will give him all the publicity he needs to sell books and make money, and that’s really what this is all about.

I agree that the Modern culture is under attack, but who’s to say it doesn’t deserve it or need it. What exactly is Mr. Keen trying to protect? The 20% of the population with 80% of the wealth?

Damned amateurs!

And many people create, because it’s their life, not their livelihood (thank you, Harry Chapin). Ask funtwo if he feels slighted because 15 million people have seen his rendition of the Canon in D. Does he deserve a seat at Mr. Keen’s table?

I’m sorry, but the real tip-off about the foolishness of this book is its title. Calling amateurs a “cult” is an insult of the highest order, and Mr. Keen should be ashamed of himself. What about amateur astronomers, huh? They’re robbing the pros of all their glory, so why not attack them, too?

The biggest mistake all critics of the personal media revolution make is the assumption that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not, and we shouldn’t buy the books of people who try to make it so.

This book will no more derail the Cluetrain than any other self-serving diatribe from the status quo. The only train wreck here is Andrew Keen.

When I first began writing about things new media, I made the choice to do so from the perspective of people instead of technology. This is because I firmly believe that people are driving technology, not the other way around. You can “understand” technology until the cows come home, but that won’t translate to new business until you closely examine what’s taking place with people.

Ironically, it is the tech company folks who understand this, not the media companies. That’s why they’ve been able to come up with concepts like eBay, Amazon, Google, and a whole host of others, while we’ve continued to play the mass marketing game of days gone by.

I’m back to thinking about this today as I prepare to speak to Phyllis Slocum’s class at the University of North Texas here in Denton. My talk is A Media Lesson for Today from 15th Century Europe. It contains a gem that is most fitting as we watch events of contemporary media history unfold.

“The Church” dominated culture at the time, and they did so through protected knowledge. The priests were the keepers of the Word of God — the source code of the culture — and they used their position to essentially govern. When movable type came along, Gutenberg printed the Bible. And when Wycliffe and others followed with common language translations, the ruling class (The Church) said, “The jewel of the elites is in the hands of the laity.”

The power of knowledge was in the hands of everyday people. Anybody could become a priest. Authority was challenged, and the whole world changed.

It’s interesting to note that one of the first reactions of the church was to propose licenses for those who could print the Bible. This sounds vaguely familiar today as the world of the professional press tries to deal with the exploding world of the Personal Media Revolution — pejoratively dubbed “User-Generated Content” by those of us who can’t handle the fact that the “jewel” is once again in the hands of the laity.

We’ve entered an era in human history when empowered people are changing everything. There’s money to be made in this new world, but the ticket for entry requires, among other things, a willingness to let go of the weighty baggage of the world that preceded it.

The jewel isn’t ours anymore, and, like the Bible and the church, maybe it never was. Our future business goals would be well-served by accepting this simple reality.

Oh, and by the way, the media is just the beginning.

(NOTE: I published an essay on this topic a couple of years ago.)

Ten years ago today, Dave Winer started his blog and, in so doing, launched what is now known as the blogosphere. He’s brought back the content from that first day.

There are arguments that others were blogging before Dave Winer, but it was Dave’s enthusiasm, talents and gifts that moved the rock (just like Podcasting). He has been instrumental in helping many others launch their blogs, including yours truly and this one.

Congratulations, Dave. You’re a true pioneer.

Everybody who travels has stories like these, but not everyone who travels has a blog with which to share them.

I was in Seattle on business last week and was scheduled to come home to Dallas mid-afternoon Friday. I got to the airport in plenty of time and was relaxing near gate A-8 when a crowd started to gather around the desk. My rapier quick mind assumed something was up, so I meandered that way and discovered that my flight — and others to Dallas — had been cancelled due to severe storms in North Texas.

Okay, I thought. I have a First Class ticket, so I’ll just get on the next flight. Well, it turns out that wasn’t until 5:35pm Saturday, over 24 hours later. I did what everybody else did and attempted to make arrangements with other airlines, but I ended up at the airport Hilton.

What exactly does one do for 24 hours under such circumstances? I should add that I was exhausted from the trip and out of clean clothes — a risk of “traveling light.” Restless, agitated and exhausted, I found I couldn’t sleep. Moreover, a group of Africans occupied most of the rooms on my floor and they had a serious party going on. They also chose the hallway to make cellphone calls, so even my ear plugs didn’t work. I was in that state where you get between asleep and awake, so I never really got any rest.

Saturday morning came, and guess what? There is nothing but infomercials and bad cartoons on Saturday morning television. It was raining, so I couldn’t just go for a walk. Work, I thought. I can work. Nope. I had no juice whatsoever. So I relived the last few years of my life by looking at pictures on my computer. That took an hour. I played computer games. I went to the gift shop several times.

Mostly, I just got mad.

Checkout was noon, so that meant a lovely afternoon at the airport. At least I could watch people there. A woman was tossing a rubber football with her son. She threw like a girl. A teenager dressed like a hooker read Cosmo in the corner. Two young boys raced back and forth on the escalator moving sidewalk. A man in a yellow jacket slept on one of the benches.

I can’t remember how many times I heard the woman say not to leave your carry on items unguarded.

I walked this way and that. I bought one day’s wireless service from at&t and checked mail. Nobody writes on Saturday. I browsed the gift shops and bought some Starbucks. I ate a cookie. I went back to the gate and the woman was still throwing like a girl.

My heart sank when they announced that my flight was delayed 45 minutes. I couldn’t even let my mind get near ANOTHER night at the Hilton. Imagination can be an awful thing sometimes.

Eventually, I got home to my dog and my comfy bed. I realize today that I completely missed the 31st of March, 2007.

(Pan to Rod Serling) Limbo, they say, is like purgatory, perhaps worse than hell itself. For Terry Heaton, there is indeed no place like home — returning from a day like no other — a day that time forgot — a tormenting journey into — the Twilight Zone.