The NFL stadium bogus threat
Thursday, October 19th, 2006Here we go again.
Bob Orr has written a beautiful piece for CBS Public Eye called Be Afraid, Be VERY Afraid on the non-threat that was hyped by CNN and others yesterday of dirty bombs and NFL stadiums. He says “We blew it,” and asks, “What will we do next time?”
This is the type of thing that is killing our credibility with the people formerly known as the audience. It’s easy to second guess news managers who run on something like this, but Orr is absolutely right in saying that we need to find a way to restrain ourselves.
The real problem is this story was irresistible. It had the kind of sexy elements that get news directors to crank up team coverage — big crowds, dirty bombs, football, and a “warning” from the government.What it was missing was some substance and restraint from media outlets which let hype trump context. As I said, we blew it.
Mr. Orr asks a very good question. What WILL we do next time?
NBC Universal’s break with the past
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
This morning’s stunner from NBC Universal is just the beginning of what is a necessary top-line strategy shift for broadcasters of all stripes. Bob Wright, Vice Chairman of GE and Chairman and CEO, NBC Universal, announced that the company is laying off 700 people and cutting $750 million in expenses by the end of 2008 in a massive restructuring. Dubbed “NBC 2.0,” the plan is wide-sweeping and includes some truly remarkable elements. Here’s what Variety wrote this morning:
“This initiative is designed to help us exploit technology and focus our resources as we continue our transformation into a digital media company,” Wright said.The restructuring will touch all divisions of the company, which has in recent years, been the least-profitable division within GE. It is also a test of Wright’s heir-apparent Jeff Zucker, who is spearheading the initiative.
In television, the cuts will mean abandoning high-cost dramas in the 8 p.m. hour, because advertiser interest in the timeslot doesn’t justify the expense, NBC U Television topper Zucker told the Wall Street Journal.
Deep cuts are planned in news operations across the company. NBC News shows like “Nightly News” and “Today” have been bright spots within the network even as primetime has struggled.
Nevertheless, Zucker announced deep cuts to the $1.5 billion the network spends on newsgathering. NBC News will consolidate bureaus and cut staff, including on-air talent.
“Either you drown or you ride the wave,” said NBC News chief Steve Capus about 2.0, which he calls a necessary response to the “tsunami” of change. In a nutshell, TV news staffers need to quickly expand their skill sets and become proactive about contributing content on multiple platforms. They now have to compete with a tech-savvy workforce for these new digital positions. (Recent events have shown that media companies do not automatically shift TV staffers to the web. They lay them off and hire someone else who’s qualified.) And I also believe it’s critical that we redefine the nature of news and expand its boundaries……I would challenge the definition of “news” and focus on innovating new products that engage our users through the marriage of information and technology. While it won’t look anything like TV news, it will still inform, educate and enlighten. And journalism will still play an important role.
While I certainly like some of the statements I’m reading, the proof will be in how they execute all of this. The first sentence in the press release defines NBC Universal as “a leading global content company,” and that has only limited applications in a truly Media 2.0 world. It’s tough to compete with a leading global aggregation company like Google when your core business is content creation.
Wright’s statement that NBC is being transformed into “a digital media company” reminds me of the statement to shareholders this spring by Antonio Perez, president of Kodak. “We are now a digital company,” he told the gathering. In both cases, the transformation is essential for survival. Kodak admits that it waited too long before moving into the digital world. I don’t think that’s the case for NBCU, and I think they’re making a very, very smart move here.
I’m sorry people are losing their jobs, but let me state for the millionth time that this is inevitable. I think 2007 may well be a bloodbath, and that which isn’t drained next year will certainly flow freely in 2009.
It would be classless for me to say “I told you so,” so I won’t.
ZeFrank creates a new ad model
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Few people understand the desire of people to participate in “their” media like ZeFrank. He’s launched a campaign that allows viewers of “the show” to buy a placement on that day’s page. It’s hilarious, and by my count, Ze cleared $2,100 on today’s show.
Ze is obsessed with rubber duckies, so a big duckie plus a 50-character mouse-over message will cost you $50. For ten bucks, you get a tiny duckie, and $5 buys you a jewel. It’s very clever and allows the viewers to sponsor the show with whatever message they want. And don’t think Ze’s viewers don’t read the messages.
Pay attention, people. This is the kind of crazy idea that has potential.
(WARNING: ZeFrank can be quite “adult.”)
Quote of the day
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006Via PaidContent.org comes this gem from Martin Blakstad, Head of New Media, Granada International. Granada is an international distributor of television programming and is at the forefront of Internet Television (ITV) deals in Europe. “New” television content, he says, is all about W6 - what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. Here’s the money quote:
In five years’ time, I think that we are going to laugh at the thought we had to get home at a certain time to watch a certain programme.
More lessons from the CBS/Yahoo deal
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006Online Media Daily grabbed the story of the CBS O&O local news deal with Yahoo this morning, and there’s a line that I can’t resist. Writer Mark Walsh quotes a Jupiter Research expert as saying syndication is a “really important part of expansion on the web.” Then he makes the following statement:
Local news Web sites, in particular, need to connect with big Internet companies because their own Internet audiences often aren’t comparable to their local TV audiences.
Firstly, one of the dirty secrets about local news websites is that a bigger percentage of traffic than you might suspect comes from outside the market. This is especially true where companies already have deals in place with the big portals for text content. If there’s a big story in the market, traffic spikes, and those numbers are counted when dealing with local advertisers. One day, those advertisers are going to demand to know more about the people their ads are reaching, and that’ll be a problem. The point is that a station’s web reach within the market is already less than it seems, based on web statistics of visitors, page views, and ad impressions.
Yahoo is going to be selling ads to national advertisers in this deal with CBS and apparently not to advertisers that might compete with the stations’ own efforts, so there is already an acknowledgement that this “syndication” does nothing for the station’s efforts within the market. The notion, therefore, that syndication is an important part of expansion on the web is an illusionary fix, because it does nothing for the station’s LOCAL efforts.
Secondly, there exists within the conventional thinking of all local media companies the assumption that there is and will always be a demand for their products. This is why the revenue problem appears to be one of distribution, that if stations can only find the right combination of consumer touch points, everything will be hunky-dory. This assumption, I believe, is most deadly, for Media 2.0 is not about technology and multiple distribution channels; it’s about empowered people discovering their own information needs and ways to satisfy those needs. It isn’t so much that our distribution methods are archaic as it is that our product is archaic.
The people formerly known as the audience aren’t coming back, regardless of how many distribution channels we throw at them. They left for reasons we choose to deny, and this is why I teach that the disruption attacking Media 1.0 today isn’t as it appears. Our salvation is within the disruption, but that takes a level of humility I’m not sure many traditional media companies are willing to embrace.
CBS/Yahoo deal not the win-win it seems
Monday, October 16th, 2006Most things Media 2.0 are counterintuitive to Media 1.0 companies, because the rules are different and, in many cases, the opposite of what they appear. This can create a huge blind spot for traditional media companies, who are often too busy managing the bottom line to see the gaping hole in front of them.
The 16 CBS owned-and-operated stations have struck a deal with Yahoo to provide local news videos to the portal in trade for splitting the revenue on national ads that Yahoo will serve. This is a pretty big deal and the first of its kind involving local stations and one of the big portals. A TV Week report on the partnership notes that both sides win: The stations get a revenue boost, while Yahoo gets fresh video that advertisers will find trustworthy.
“The future of our TV stations is severely threatened,” said Jonathan Leess, president and general manager of the CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group. “Media buyers and planners are shifting dollars from traditional media sources. We need to do the same.”…Last month Yahoo served up 50 million videos across its sites from sources such as ABC News, CNN and Reuters, up from less than 4 million videos in September 2005, said Scott Moore, head of news and information for Yahoo Media Group.
“This is the first [deal] we have done for local,” he said. “We’re not finished yet. CBS is our anchor partner.” Yahoo is in active discussions with other station groups, he said.
…The CBS videos will play on Yahoo, but will include links back to the CBS station sites.
What happens if Google does a deal with ABC stations, and AOL or MSN does a deal with NBC stations? Suddenly, the local affiliates are duking it out on somebody’s else’s turf while spending the same amount of money they did when the battle was on their own. Or let’s say that all network affiliate video news is available via the portals. Does anybody really think the value of these stations’ sites stays the same when their material is available on the portals? And so a video view is worth exactly half of what it was before this deal. How is that good for the stations?
Please don’t get me wrong. I feel just as strongly that stations need to unbundle their content and make it available everywhere. But it is actually a Media 1.0, multi-platform distribution play, and that cannot be our only strategy.
This is why I’m so adamant that the Media 2.0 battlefield for local media companies is in the world of aggregating local databases (”but that’s not what we do, Terry”). THAT is what’s new in media, and we’d better get into it soon, or we’re going to completely abdicate that role to the likes of Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. It’s all about money, people, and already more than half of local dollars spent for online advertising goes outside our markets. If we’re going to make an off-site play with our videos, wouldn’t it make more sense for those stations that do local news in a market to combine their resources on a local video portal rather than making deals with the devil? At least on a local portal, the stations would get 100% (or at least a much higher percentage) of the revenue for their video plays, and they wouldn’t turn all those local eyeballs over to these wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The TV Week report says that Yahoo will sell ads on a national basis, but that is just a necessary step on the road to local. And make no mistake, that is where the big portals really want to be.
(Thanks to Lost Remote for the tip)
10 Questions for Al Estrada
Friday, October 13th, 2006In 1986, while I was news director of KLTV in Tyler, Texas, our station provided live news coverage of a pretty sensational murder trial that had been moved from our coverage area to San Antonio. That doesn’t seem like a big deal in this day and age, but we did it as part of an experiment with phone companies in Texas and Louisiana using fiber optic cables. This led to many futuristic discussions with engineers about fiber and its potential for the future. Fast forward to the internet circa 2006, and the opportunities seem even more staggering.
We’ll one day all be connected via fiber. It’s unlikely I’ll see it in my lifetime, but that doesn’t stop me from wandering down that particular stream from time to time. The cost to implement fiber-to-the-home is significant, but the financial payoff for the big telcos is even more significant, so it will happen.
There are many players in this space, but an announcement earlier this month by Optical Entertainment Network (OEN) in Houston got my attention. They’re providing a 400 channel universe, plus symmetrical broadband (10 Mbps up and 10 Mbps down) and other services to fiber networks anywhere in the U.S. Al Estrada is Chief Marketing Officer for OEN, and here are my 10 questions for him:
The web’s impact on overall ad rates
Thursday, October 12th, 2006In a report that has staggering implications for traditional media, it appears that advertising growth in the U.S. has begun to follow overall economic growth instead of leading it. If true, it’s evidence that the internet is relieving pressures on advertisers, and it throws an enormous monkey wrench into systems of calculating advertising growth.
According to Joe Mandese at MediaDailyNews, the report, from the equities research team at Merrill Lynch, says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation, and this is a first.
“Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking real [gross domestic product] growth instead of nominal GDP growth, as it did in the past plus some,” writes Merrill Lynch ad industry analyst Lauren Rich Fine in a report released early this morning. “This supports our belief that media no longer enjoys the benefit of above average rate inflation, rather the opposite where increased competition & measurement is putting pressure on rates.”… Neither Merrill Lynch nor TNS have explained why this is happening, but other economists, including GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith have suggested that at least part of the change may be due to the increasing efficiencies of digital media, which may be taking pressure off overall media inflation, especially in the traditional media, as marketers begin shifting budgets to lower priced online inventory.
This is surely a harbinger of things to come, folks, and we cannot say we weren’t warned. We don’t “enjoy the benefit of above average rate inflation,” because scarcity isn’t what it used to be. And in a week when many media companies issued weak quarterly reports (political advertising notwithstanding), this will put even greater stress on managing the bottom line for 2007.
Big money sports: a rant
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006In our changing media world, we’re learning that we have to accept the good with the bad, and nowhere is this truer than in the world of big time sports. We can find what we want when we want it, but where will we find it in the future?
When the NFL, for example, launched its own television network, it was just a matter of time before affiliate television took a back seat. The NFL owns the games, and they’re going to make the most of what they own. Oh, they still need the networks, but how long will that last?
So when the NFL made two new rules this year, nobody should’ve been shocked. It hurts local affiliates not to have their own cameras on the sidelines of NFL games, not the NFL. It hurts local affiliates not to be able to stream game highlights or interviews or anything shot at a stadium on the day of the game, not the NFL. These are inevitable means to an end that carves local television neatly out of the “business” of professional football.
Trust me, every league in every sport is paying attention, because the game — like so many other things in our modernist culture — is second to the money.
And it’s not just professional sports either. Witness the University of Tennessee suspending the privileges of a Knoxville newspaper reporter for not going through the sports information office to get an interview with an injured player. Now, a case can be made that the university should be able to “manage” information about its teams, but there’s no way the reporter in this case would’ve been granted the interview had he followed the rules. And the hoot of this particular episode is that the story was very positive.
“Student athletes” is business-speak for big dollars, and those dollars are what really needs protecting.
I’m a sports fan and a business fan. I enjoy games, mostly because they’re live and generally unpredictable. It’s that “participating in history” aspect of broadcasts that provides the appeal for me. I’m happy, for example, that I’m alive to watch Tiger Woods rewrite the record books in golf. In that sense, sports broadcasts are the original reality shows. I know they cost money and that teams and leagues ought to be able to profit from them, but, as with everything else in our society, there is a line that separates profit from greed, and that line is defined, not by business, but by customers.
And I think the business of sports is making a dangerous assumption about fans in its worship of the bottom line. Backlash is inevitable, although I’ve no idea in what form that will be.
Mobile 411: Another win for the portals?
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006A new report by market research firm The Kelsey Group is more bad news for local media companies. According to Online Media Daily, Google, Yahoo and MSN will become major players in mobile voice search after entering the directory assistance market by mid-2007.
The Internet giants will use mobile directory service as a means of launching new “opt-in” marketing businesses that will pose a serious challenge to traditional and free 411 services as well as the Yellow Pages, predicts Kelsey. The study estimates that more than half of Yellow Pages look-ups could be at risk with the entrance of big Internet companies into mobile voice search over the next several years.
Those of us in local media (and I’m speaking in the broadest possible terms) are locked into a devolving world that is rapidly crumbling as we circle the wagons rather than jump on the offensive. In the Media 2.0 world, which is where these pure play portals exist, opportunity abounds in a space governed by information databases. We simply cannot continue to sit back and let outside companies take revenue that could be (and I think should be) ours.
The inimitable Doc Searls
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006Great advice for all bloggers:
No doubt about it, I speed-blog. Sometimes I go deep, more often I don’t. But I know a number of people…who are just more comfortable in the long form than in the short…My advice…is to think of blogging as emails to the world. Who worries about emails being too short? Or not deep enough?
…Think of blogging as hitting. Sometimes you want to hit the long ball. Sometimes you just want to get on base. Sometimes you want to bunt to advance a runner. Thing is, you’re the whole line-up. Not just batting clean-up.
Putting people (back) into the television audience
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006Nielsen’s decision to include College dormitory viewing as part of the Nielsen people meter ratings should provide a welcome bit of relief for those broadcasters whose programming targets younger people. Wayne Friedman at MediaDailyNews explains:
In a pilot test conducted by Nielsen last October, many 18-34-skewing networks and programs gained traction. “Adult Swim” showed big 20 percent gains in viewing, MTV was up 10 percent, and ESPN had 6 percent more 18-34 viewers. Two now-defunct networks also saw improvements: WB was up 6 percent, and UPN was 4 percent higher. The traditional networks–which are generally older-skewing–scored smaller gains than cable networks: ABC and Fox each grew 3 percent; NBC was 2 percent better; and CBS inched up 1 percent.
I think these folks (and others) should be a part of the universe, and I’m happy to see Nielsen acknowledging that TV viewing isn’t just done in the home. It’s always been an issue of methodology in the past, and we have to assume Nielsen knows what they’re doing (did I actually say that?). Heading into 2007, broadcasters are going to need all the help they can get, and Nielsen works for us, right?
Nielsen has also announced plans to “fuse” internet and broadcasting numbers to provide its customers with another way to sell advertising. As I’ve written before, however, I don’t expect new media measurement systems to come from incumbent media players, of which Nielsen is certainly one. We’ll see.
More thoughts on Google and YouTube
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006I woke up this morning with Google on my mind (a hit tune, if I ever heard one), and I want to talk directly to broadcasters for a bit. If that’s not you, just bear with me.
I wrote yesterday that broadcasting took another blow in the Google/YouTube deal. Let me explain a little more.
In any community, Media 1.0 distribution is with the form of the medium. Newspapers pay people to take the paper to your house (or, increasingly, spam your mailbox). The airwaves for radio or television in your town carry signals via spectrum licensed by the FCC. As long as you have spectrum — and consumers have a way of receiving that spectrum — you have a business. Scarcity is what gives you financial success, and that’s what’s turned upside-down in the Media 2.0 world.
As broadcasters, our decisions about new media have been largely brand extension strategies, and while this is a good thing, it ultimately plays into the hands of the Googles, Yahoos and MSNs of the world. We’re trapped, because we don’t realize that scarcity doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
New media companies understand this, however, and the new scarcity is created by aggregating as many “pieces” of media as possible in one place. Why does this work? Because there are far more people creating content than there is time for people to consume it. Therefore, trusted, smart filters (or smart aggregators, as I call them) become desirable. Who does the filtering? Sometimes, it’s a person or people, but increasingly we consumers do it ourselves — by voting with our time and our eyeballs. Who doesn’t automatically go to the “most viewed” section of YouTube to see what everybody’s watching?
One of the fundamentals of postmodernism is that people trust each other more than hierarchical and self-serving institutions.
Our new media strategy to make our content available everywhere (unbundling) is smart, because we want our content to be where the eyeballs are. In so doing, however, we need to understand that we’re feeding the beast that will ultimately destroy us. This is only acceptable if we move quickly to create our own local smart aggregators.
The longer we insist that our viewers must come to our websites to access our content, the sooner will come our demise. Our brand means scarcity over-the-air, but it’s just another pixel on the page of Media 2.0.
I also think it’s foolish to dismiss the Google/YouTube marriage as “moronic” from a legal perspective. Mark Cuban is obsessed with the copyright issues involved when people upload material that he doesn’t believe is theirs to upload. I respect Mr. Cuban and think he’s providing a valuable service by making his views known, but I also think that many aggregator sites function as common carriers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that safe harbor rules apply.
There certainly is enough grey area to warrant a complete overhaul of copyright law (it’s not “property”), which I believe is long overdue and will benefit both consumers and content creators. There’s a lot of money at stake here, and I think people are willing to pay for art. However, I don’t think consumers are wrong in rejecting the demands of the record and film industries who have — through their lust for gold — taken the art out of artistry and replaced it with formulas and hype.
Broadcasting loses in the Google/YouTube deal
Monday, October 9th, 2006
So YouTube has merged with Google to become YoogleTube (I made that up). It’s the biggest event since Rupert bought MySpace, and he got the better deal.
There’s going to be a TON of analysis on this over the next few days, but here’s what a few interested observers are saying today:
Cory Bergman of Lost Remote:
How it is that Apple and now Google have become the destinations and marketplaces for video on the web? They’re the new networks using the same currency — video — as TV has for years. It’s because they’ve not been constrained by old media thinking……While traditional media scrambles to protect and incrementally improve its bottom line, companies like YouTube, Google and Apple are pursuing new opportunities focused on the user. And that’s what sets them apart.
Fox is in a very unique position vis-à-vis this deal. News Corp chief operating officer Peter Chernin recently told investors that 60-70% of YouTube traffic comes from MySpace. While direct integration with Google could certainly make up for part of this traffic were MySpace to shut off YouTube access, it would still be a huge blow. And Fox is also the owner of much of the copyrighted material contained on YouTube.Google is in a precarious position. Fox could, subject to the terms of their agreement with Google, take their search business to Yahoo or Microsoft, who would be eager to take the deal. They could bury YouTube in copyright litigation which at the very least would require YouTube to pull down Fox content. And finally, MySpace could flip a switch and kill much of YouTube’s current traffic.
Why did Google buy YouTube?1) Google has to amplify (and protect) it’s key revenue stream - ppc (pay-per-click). Video ppc is a higher value domain, and a hugely untapped one.
2) Google wants assets at the edges of the value chain which can exert market power against 1.0 publishers - just like it’s doing in book search.
The more of these assets it has across media markets, the greater economies of scope it can ultimately realize; the flipside of these scope economies is, of course, the more market power it can exert.
In other words, Google’s goal is to redesign a more efficient value chain.
3) Google Video failed miserably.
Steve Rubel is happy for everybody, while rolling his eyes at the same time.
Maybe now we can all stop focusing on minutia M&A stuff and focus on bigger, meatier issues like where social media is all going and what it means. I am reluctant to even link to this because it’s been written about to death. It’s a deal. Now it’s done. Woo hoo. Good for Google. Good for YouTube. Great for social media. Even better for the blogosphere because we won’t be talking about this much longer.
To local broadcasters — those people, as Cory mentioned above, who USED to own the video niche — it means getting pushed further down the value chain, to the expensive “content creator only” position. Local stations are still too busy trying to beat each other in the “real world” to see that forcing people to their own portal was never a good consumer choice for viewing video. Why should I, after all, visit four or five websites to view the day’s news? And absent a single local platform for viewing all local videos, people will continue to use YouTube and a hundred clones. And so it goes…
I think broadcasting took a(nother) big hit today.
Lucas: “We don’t want to make movies.”
Monday, October 9th, 2006Variety reports that George Lucas is getting out of feature films and into television, but not in the way you might think. Read these graphs carefully for their underlying meaning and their message to all of us:
George Lucas has a message for studios that are cutting their slates and shifting toward big-budget tentpoles and franchises: You’ve got it all wrong. The creator of “Star Wars,” which stamped the template for the franchise-tentpole film, says many small films and Web distribution are the future.And in case anyone doubts he means it, Lucasfilm is getting out of the [theatrical-release] movie biz. “We don’t want to make movies. We’re about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we’ve moved away from the feature film thing because it’s too expensive and it’s too risky.
Spending $100 million on production costs and another $100 million on P&A makes no sense, he said. “For that same $200 million, I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That’s 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that’s where it’s going to land, because it’s going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable.
The lesson here is that of the film industry killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and the same thing is taking place across all mass media fronts. When the bottom line runs things, it’ll sooner or later destroy itself, especially when the people formerly known as the audience have their say. Who wants to sit through 20 minutes of commercials and another ten minutes of movie ads to eat popcorn and watch another Hollywood formulaic piece of crap? The “star” system is broken. The “control scarcity” system is broken. People are sick of being manipulated, and Lucas wisely sees that turning over his work to the internet’s long tail is the smart choice for tomorrow.
This is something all of us in the Media 1.0 world need to be doing.
Quote of the day
Monday, October 9th, 2006Via Jeff Jarvis:
Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited: “In the next two to three to four years, community goes from the edges to the core. Otherwise, you’re not going to have a business.”
Amen!
Primarily a media creation
Sunday, October 8th, 2006
One of the things that I continually run up against in my dealings with people in broadcasting is a weird kind of naivete when it comes to acknowledging the degree to which the people formerly known as the audience are hip to what we do, especially our hype. Here’s a great case in point.
I love ESPN SportsNation. The silly polls are fun to participate in, and the results can be viewed on a Flash map that breaks down the vote state-by-state. This morning’s question dealt with Terrell Owens, the over-hyped, over-rated egomaniac wide receiver of the Dallas Cowboys. He’s returning to play in Philadelphia, a place where — for those of you who’ve been living in a vacuum the last couple of years — he had a falling out with the entire team. Such drama (yawn).
Of 100,000 people who voted this morning, more than 6 in 10 view the whole thing as “primarily a media creation.” And these are FANS!
Now, in light of this kind of unscientific evidence, how do we continue to behave as though everybody loves us and falls for our hype? We don’t, and it’s one of the reasons we have an audience problem.
In many ways, this is simply what we in broadcasting do. It is, after all, a mass marketing medium, and the way you gather a mass is to hype, and to those who do it well go the spoils. And you know what? “Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and maybe there will always be an audience for it.
But it would be foolish to ignore this as one of the elements in the rise of the Personal Media Revolution.
Goodbye Tower Records
Saturday, October 7th, 2006Tower Records is shutting down, acquired in a bankruptcy by a company that plans to liquidate its assets. 3,000 jobs gone. They cited industry pressures like sales declines, music downloads and competition from the WalMarts of the world. It’s the end of an era, folks. Pay attention.
(Thanks, Doc)
The need to define (to exploit)
Friday, October 6th, 2006The good folks at Pew have come up with a report (.pdf) that attempts to quantify the term “Web 2.0.” It’s a fun read, and the task is a bit like trying to rope one of those slimy creatures from Ghostbusters.
And while O’Reilly and others have smartly outlined some of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 applications –utilizing collective intelligence, providing network-enabled interactive services, giving users control over their own data–these traits do not always map neatly on to the technologies held up as examples. Google, which demonstrates many Web 2.0 sensibilities, doesn’t exactly give users governing power over their own data–one couldn’t, for instance, erase search queries from Google’s servers. Users contribute content to many of Google’s applications, but they don’t fully control it.Instead, the Web 2.0 concept was intended to function as a core “set of principles and practices” that applied to common threads and tendencies observed across many different technologies.2 However, after almost three years of increasingly heavy usage by techies and the press, and, as the writer Paul Boutin notes, after “Newsweek released the word, Kong-like, from its restraining quotes,” critics argue that the term is in danger of being rendered useless unless some boundaries are placed on it.
At AR&D, we call that Media 2.0, and we have a pretty simple definition. It’s an umbrella under which to place that which is enabling an increasingly informed, empowered and participating general population. Life, people; it’s about life. All Media 1.0 is top-down. 2.0, however, is collaborative and bottom-up. How can it not be about life then?
When a Media 1.0 company attempts to pull this into their realm, whatever it pulls ceases to become Media 2.0. I would argue that Google is very much a Media 2.0 company, and it doesn’t matter who controls what. The result of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible is the product of Media 2.0.
We must not make the mistake of thinking that technology and technology companies are doing anything new. It’s people, folks, and that’s the horse that’s left the barn.
Dinosaurs on my doorstep (again)
Friday, October 6th, 2006It’s that time of the year when spam arrives at the front door. Where do I opt out?
