Category Archives: Innovation

05.01.08
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Everyblock for everyone

Thanks to Martin Stabe for linking to the news from Steve Outing that Adrian Holovaty will release the code behind Everyblock.com as open source. Everyblock is the Knight-funded project that Adrian launched last year. It’s an extension of his groundbreaking ChicagoCrime.org. Normally, I would just link to this via Del.icio.us, but this development is important enough to warrant a post. It’s Christmas in June, when Adrian said he will release the code as open source. This is a huge gift from Adrian and by extension the Knight Foundation, if only the industry will take it. Steve Outing has highlighted one application for Everyblock: Mapping classifieds.

When asked about the utility of mapping classifieds, Holovaty says that absolutely that’s a great use for Everyblock’s system. You can easily imagine the Everyblock concept applied to garage sale ads, lost-and-found listings, or real estate listings, for example. Mapping could be useful for other classified categories, too, but of course there are privacy issues to consider. (A private classified advertiser selling his car or bicycle might not want his ad showing where he lives, but since there’s a benefit to exposing that information, he should be given the option.)

There are other valuable points in Steve’s post. He is not alone in encouraging news organisations to begin thinking about geo-tagging. It’s not even that difficult to add geo-data to stories semi-automatically by parsing the data from the dateline, although the more local the story, the richer the data one would want to add. An increasing number of mobile phones include GPS functionality, and it’s not difficult to add this to story data. What about a script that would automatically add that data if the journalist used the data connection via bluetooth to file? We all should be considering adding a geo-data field to our databases. It’s a basic step that enables a vast range of journalistic and commercial applications.

And Steve and Adrian go one step further saying that geo-tagging is only one bit of meta-data that news organisations should be consider adding. One of the subtle changes the Guardian (my day job) has made to its CMS is to think about the information architecture of the site and the stories. Structured data, as Adrian has shown in several projects, allows news organisations to begin to make sense of vast amounts of information in novel and very useful ways. We can use our own meta-data to help show trends, make connections and add context to our journalism.

As Steve says, there are alternatives to Everyblock, and the code may not be applicable to all projects. However, I’m increasingly concerned about a ‘not made here’ complex amongst journalism organisations. You can see some of that in the comments on Ryan Sholin’s recent post about building a local news site from scratch. Some of the comments are critical of open-source projects Drupal and WordPress. I’m not a knee-jerk open-source advocate, and some of the criticisms are no doubt valid. But I think many open-source projects deserve consideration along with the custom CMS route. Morris Digital Works has done some ground-breaking work with Drupal. The New York Times has even gone as far as being a good open-source citizen by releasing some of their code on their Open blog. All the code that’s fit to printf(), as they say.

But I’m convinced that news organisations have more to gain than to fear from open source and projects like Everyblock. Open source can be another form of networked journalism. Instead of relying solely on your own development team, you can suddenly plug into a worldwide network of passionate developers.

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04.29.08
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The importance of pigheadedness

I just read an essay by Clay Shirky, Gin, Television and Social Surplus, about how the industrial revolution has resulted, after a brief period of societal gin-soaking, in a surplus of time and productive capacity which has been mopped up by TV sitcoms. Now, however, this social surplus is being put to use in things like Wikipedia, World of Warcraft and blogging. People are taking their spare time and energy and they’re doing something with it.

It’s a great essay, and I strongly recommend that you pop over and read it, right now, all the way through, because it articulates something that many of us know is happening, but which a particularly large chunk of the media hasn’t cottoned on to yet. It’s not the content of Clay’s essay that I want to further discuss, but one little line that has much broader ramifications:

The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out.

Every now and again I’ll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they’ll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they’ll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The problem with this interpretation is that these failures – which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed – are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I’d even call them necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn’t work. Sadly, we don’t often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.

There is a lot of failure in the use of social software in business, on the web, in civic society, but we need to see this as a part of the cycle, a step along on the learning curve. We can’t afford to stop experimenting, just because something failed once, or because it didn’t work out for someone else. And we can’t afford to take part in the Great Race To Be Second, either, because if you’re waiting to see how other businesses succeed (or fail) before you leave the starting line, you’re not going to be second, you’re going to be last.

From a business point of view, the nice thing about social software is that a lot of is is free or ridiculously cheap, so the monetary cost of failure is low and made up mainly of the cost of people’s time. There is no need to judge a social software project based on the same criteria as, say, a massive software deployment from a megacorp vendor that cost millions and took three years, yet these are the terms by which many businesses are judging their blog, wiki, or social networking experiments. And because the tech is so cheap, businesses can afford to run many small experiments to find out what works before they deploy tools more widely; indeed, they cannot afford not to.

But we also need to recognise that the biggest speed bump in social software projects is invariably going to be the social, not the software. The technology is improving every month, mainly because it’s being developed by small, nimble vendors who use the software they create and want it to be the very best it can be. But the tech is only a fraction of the battle. The rest, like Soylent Green, is made of people.

And this is where the problem with failure comes in. Generally speaking, people don’t much like change. They don’t even like choice all that much, although they’ll tell you that they do. They certainly don’t like failure, or anything that looks even remotely like it. (Especially in the UK, although I think that the US is a bit more tolerant.) And they don’t like trying again when things do go a bit wobbly.

Failure, real or perceived, is inextricably entwined with status and, frequently, if a project looks like it’s about to go bottom up, instead of figuring out how to save it, people figure out how to distance themselves enough to save face. In a business culture where rewards and punishments are focused on the individual, the teamwork and collaboration required to make a social software project a success can become too much of a risk. But if you’ve got the right skills and personality, you can turn that around.

To be successful at social software implementations in business you need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and relate to computers, tools, and each other. You need to understand how to introduce tools in a way that is non-threatening and which emphasises utility and benefits. You need to understand the political climate within your business, and know how to route around anyone who’s threatening to be obstructive.

Secondly, you need to be really pigheaded. If one team doesn’t take to a wiki, try working with another. If one blog fails, try to figure out why and then start another. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try again. After all, it’s only failure if you give up.

04.25.08
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Shovelware 2.0

When I started in online journalism, we struggled with aspirations that far out-stripped our resources. We were small teams passionate about creating a new medium but still dependent and subservient to legacy media – newspapers and radio and television stations. We yearned to do original journalism but often had to settle for ‘re-purposing’ other journalist’s content. We did as much as we could that treated the internet as its own medium, that developed multi-media story telling methods that simply weren’t possibly in print or in linear, broadcast radio and television. But most of it was simply shovelware: TV and radio scripts transcribed and thrown up online and print stories chucked on the internet. Or as Whatis.com says:

Shovelware is content taken from any source and put on the Web as fast as possible with little regard for appearance and usability.

It’s sad to see that so-called integration sometimes isn’t really about integration at all. It’s about a maintenance of organisational and internal political status quo. It’s about maintaining the dominance of print and broadcast and the subservient, derivative position of the internet. It continues to miss or ignore the opportunities the internet provides for journalists, which now isn’t defensible in terms of audience numbers, advertising revenue or future prospects for growth. And as my friend and former colleague at the BBC, Alf Hermida, says, it just doesn’t work. The BBC is advertising for a “web conversion producer”. I wonder if this is a position to produce web-literate producers from television and radio journalists. But seriously, Alf says:

This is a flawed concept and risks undermining the reputation for excellent online journalism that the BBC News website has built over the past 10 years. In any case, we tried in the early days of the site when I was a daily news editor, and it didn’t work.

It also implies that online is an after-thought, picking up the scraps off the broadcast table, rather than considered an equal.

Now, I’m not arguing for internet primacy over other media. This is not a zero-sum game. The legacy media still make most of the profits in real money terms, despite the double digit growth rates in online revenue for the past few years. Just as I say that the internet and on demand digital medium need to be understood on the basis of their own strengths, television, radio and print still have unique strengths. As Steve Yelvington says, the internet is one of the centers for a successful media business. He adds:

My rule of thumb is a simple one: Use the right tool for the right job. The Internet’s strength is collaborative interaction; print’s strengths are linearity, focus and serendipitous discovery.

But as news organisations struggle, some for survival, they will fail if, due to organisational in-fighting, they repeat the same mistakes of the late 1990s. Those few of us in online journalism who survived the dot.com crash have seen this before. Unfortunately, while we have a decade or more of experience, we digital natives still don’t have the political capital when we go head-to-head with the powers that be in our own organisations. If media bosses want to engage in Shovelware 2.0, they can use that shovel to bury their own businesses.

04.15.08
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Real-time innovation in news organisations

Ryan Sholin has started a great conversation about how to create cultural change at newspapers.

The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It: Moving from the Paper business to the News business isn’t as simple as picking up a different skillset; it’s about changing the mindset of journalists.

It reminded me of a question I’m often asked about cultural change: How do you turn journalists into bloggers? The simple answer is that I don’t. I find journalists who happen to be bloggers or who show an interest in blogging, give them all the technical and editorial support that I can, and then I try to share that knowledge and success around the organisation.

How do I spot a good blogger? I ask whether the journalist is already aware of other bloggers writing in their beat. I try to determine whether they are willing to engage with other bloggers and people who comment on their posts. In short, are they ready to join the conversation?

Sharing the success stories helps spread the culture. As David Anderson of Fairfax Digital in Australia told me recently, you need success stories to tell your managers, and I would say that you also need success stories to win over journalists, who are professional sceptics. You have to spread culture up and down the organisation.

I’ve been fortunate. At the BBC, I had support at all levels for digital experimentation and, when I came to London, it was great to see evangelism from people like Richard Sambrook, the head of the Global News Division. At the Guardian, we’ve got digital evangelists all the way up to The Editor’s office. However, both the BBC and the Guardian still grapple with cultural change. And I couldn’t agree with Ryan more when he says you can’t mandate change from the top down.

Anyone who has worked with me will attest that sometimes I get frustrated at the pace of change in the industry. I really thought digital journalism would be further along by now than we are. The dot.com crash wiped out a lot of talent in the industry and set us back years. And I’ve crossed swords with a fair number of nay sayers. I’m not sure there is much we can do for the close-minded, and the need for change is urgent enough that arguing with the Andrew Keens in the industry just isn’t worth your or my time.

Industry scale change will only come with time. The industry is struggling because the depth of digital culture is still too thin and still so new. Don’t sweat that. Don’t even try changing your organisation wholesale. We might have the experience, but as Steve Yelvington says, we still don’t have the political capital. Many of you will run into middle management who ‘own’ the bureaucracy and have an investment in the status quo. They’ve spent several years supporting the Andrew Keens because it protected their position and power. Now, they have a new strategy: They are fighting over who owns change rather than focusing on actually creating change. While they’re fighting, us digital journalists need to get on with it:

  • Start small with an event or story-based project.
  • Bring the cost of the project down as close to zero as possible from a technical standpoint. Use open-source or free net-based services.
  • Try one new multimedia story-telling feature or engagement feature with each project.
  • Debrief. Learn. Repeat.

This is based in part on my interpretation of the Newspaper Next project. As Steve Yelvington says:

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

This is real-time innovation. Try journalistic projects with existing tools and learn journalistically and technically from that. That takes zero development and relatively little time. It’s about editorial creativity, not about development cycles or budgets. If you find something that works, then you know where to focus product development. What can you do with Twitter, blogging software, YouTube, Seesmic or FriendFeed to create a journalistic project and help build your audience?

03.25.08
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The world according to newspapers



Note from the creator of these maps: Colours indicate the same thing. However, a country can appear in red if it’s in the top 10% but still shrink, as the top 3 countries concentrate most of all media attention. Note from me: Clicking on those buttons launches hi-res images in their own windows.

As an American who now lives in London, but has worked for British media for just shy of 10 years, I have more than a passing interest in how the world sees the US and how my fellow Americans see (or fail to take much notice of) the rest of the world. After moving to London three years ago, things that I thought were particularly American characteristics I now see as part of human nature. I thought it was a particularly American problem, and particularly a problem of American media, to look inward. But all countries and the media that serve them do this to a certain extent.

We all see the world through our own cultural lenses. We all understand the world through our own place in it, centered in the culture we most identify with. That cultural centre might be a place, a country or a group of people. For instance, I see the world through the cultural lens of the global geek collective I feel a part of.

This visualisation was posted on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog and was cross-posted from L’Observatoire des Médias by Nicolas Kayser-Bril. I found one of Nicolas’ comments on the Online Journalism Blog really interesting:

The model I’ve used shows that a country is less covered as it’s further away from London. Each 100km lead to a country’s getting 1.9 less articles per year in the Daily Mail, 2.3 in the Guardian (provided you take S Africa, ANZ out of the sample, they skew the data).

The publication most global in its coverage was The Economist. Their readers are often global citizens, moving from country to country with multi-national companies or for various branches of the United Nations. They need a quick overview of our increasingly globalised world.

I lived in Washington DC for more than seven years, and I’ve lived in London just shy of three years now. Capitals sit in a position above their countries and, relative to the power of the country, also above the rest of the world. It’s a privileged and often myopic view. It’s global in the sense that all roads lead to Rome. The media centered there cast their gaze around the world from this vantage point, and their gaze never falls far from their perch. However, it’s not just Africa that gets ignored but also less fashionable parts of their own countries.

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03.18.08
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Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody at RSA

This is a paraphrase of Clay’s talk at the Royal Society of Arts.

Clay Shirky, here comes everybody: the power of organising without organisations.

It was chaired by Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy.

You can find a biography of Clay a shirky.com and wikipedia, Clay interjects. “Wikipedia has done a better job,” he said.

We have reached an age when this stuff is technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.

It’s not about gee-whiz adoption that we can do x. The book in one bullet point:

Group action just got a lot easier.

HSBC last year decided a great way to recruit new students is with interest-free overdrafts. Accountants called them back said it wasn’t such a good idea. HSBC counted on switching is hard, and however mad the individuals are, there will not be any kind of serious response.

They hadn’t counted on Facebook. To HSBC’s horror, thousands of people joined. Out of no financial information, the students began sharing information. They wrote up incredibly detailed instructions. If you want to switch to Barclay, here is how to do it.

This got the attention of the newspapers. The organisaitonal advantage that HSBC had is now ended. The students co-ordinated a real world protest.

HSBC: We didn’t know you would be upset. Obvioiusly, we’re a customer service agency.

This didn’t happen because the customers were upset. This happened that customers were upset and they were co-ordinated. They could talk to each other. They recruited the students when they were at school and changed the terms in July when they are dispersed. They knew exactly what they were doing. This would have worked in 2005.

Increasingly, publishing is for acting. Once you put people in touch with each other, you create social value on top of that media value. Now customers have ability to leverage high organisation.

Everyone remembers flashmobs. It was the pole sitting of 2003. Toronto pillow fight. New York, go to Central Park, and join together and all make pigeon noises. Bill, the creator of flashmobs, was making a critique of hipster culture.

In 2006, a developer created a page on Live Journal in Belarus. Let’s all go to central square and eat ice cream. But black clad security appeared and grabbed them. It was illegal to carry out group action in October Square. They hit on flash mob as way to co-ordinate despite the govenment-stated goal of preventing this from happening. This is media leading to collective action. They didn’t just bring ice cream. They also brought their cameras. They documented.

Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream

In high-freedom environments, these things are deployed for frivollous reasons. Time-wasting. Twitter, this is mainly banal. Egyptian activisits experimented with Twitter to pass along information on who was in custody. Tools, (such as) flash-mobs as a hipster thing have a very differet flavour in Belarus.

One of most frustrating things about publishing, you deliver manuscript and it takes the company six months to hit print. There are s many stories he wanted to include. His last example was such a story. In Palermo in 2004, stuck up stickers that said (rough paraphrase) ‘an entire people who pay money to the mafia (pizzo) is a people without dignity’. People say what else can we do. The problem here isn’t just the mafia is pulling money out of the Palermo economy. Everyone knew that. The problem was the difficulty and danger in opposing the mafia.

They allowed business to stand up together. If you were a single business people standing up, it would be dangerous. When entire group stands up, then harder to target. Much better chance to stand up if they do it as a group. The people are really suffered. If you only want to patronise businesses, customers can anonymously check on businesses not doing business with mafia via a website. They took businesses and average people leverage against the mafia.

Small well organised core versus a large dispered population. The batttle before this has been very unequal. We’re at the beginning of experimenting with the imbalance of power. The ability to share with others is remaking the world. We know this. Collective action where the fate of the group affects the individuals as a whole.

This effort forms the experimental wing of political philosophy.

Is large action best taken on by the state? Communism is the extreme answer to that question. Is it best taken by individual action? Libertarianism is the extreme answer to that question. What is the best instituion? The answer is not instituion but platform. If people can co-ordinate themselves, then people can organise themselves.

Media is moving from a source of information to a site of action. In US Constitution, freedom of speech and freedom of gathering are separate freedoms.

All of these developments are not entirely good. This is not a revolution that will lead us entirely well off.

I used to be a cyber-utopian. I remember the moment I stopped thinking about that. A student of his came and talked to me. She was the community manger of YM, and she was managing the online bulletin boards. Shut down health and beauty boards. We couldn’t get pro-anorexic girls to shut up. If you find yourself feeling hungry, clean up. They shut down their boards, and the girls moved elsewhere.

This isn’t a side effect. This is the internet. This is a case where it’s not an improvement to society, it’s also a challenge. We will have new negatives as well as new positives. The internet lowers the cost of failure. We can fail more and learn more. How can we pull out the good stuff and learn to react to the bad stuff?

Nico: What are the historical parallels?

Clay: All of these examples, it is being used by people who want to stop happening as opposed to people who want new things to happen. The places where real social scale things happening are often short-term, ad hoc and single issue. Anyone who has been in a consumer society can feel this anger bubbling up when we’re given a chance to respond. This is a light-weight structure for people to decide that they want to be identified as a group.

Creative Commons dismantle the goals of copyright by using the tools of copyright. We need to do this with respect to corporations. If we allow people to come together in socially more stable ways that don’t require institutional models, then we’ll see longer term social engagement. We can get past the protest phase.

Nico: Are we trying to re-define political problems in terms of this social and IT tools?

Clay: I do agree with premise. When you find anything that works well, you want to apply it to everything. That is what our way of trying out things.

Sourceforge. 75% of these projects are failures. Zero downloads. Success for most of the rest modest. Then far end, millions of downloads. This is the open source model.

You sprinkle failure on everything and see what works.

Wikitorial and LATimes. Editorial product of individual voice. You need to make sure that failure is public. Open source is very easy to see what doesn’t work. The paper doesn’t cover failure well.

Failure can be a benefit as long as we can all learn from them.

Anytime you lower the cost of doing something, you lower the cost of trying something and lowers the cost of the number of meetings you need to have. In a world where you don’t have to get permission of anyone to try new stuff.

Nico: Campaign is now Zucker-mail where in my day stood on a corner with CND badge and argued with people.

Question from audience: Facebook and HSBC, there are a lot of different tools. What are the next big tools?

Clay: Email. Boring-est answer. The thing to bet on. It’s not a revolution not when behaviour adopts new tools but new behaviors. It’s not about novelty but ubiquity. If you are looking for social scale change, it’s adoption.

What is going on in Flickr is crazy because now your mom is using it.

Dan McQuillan : Wael Abbas shut down account. Commercial inerest of current platforms. (Notes from me: The human rights activism community responded to this quite strongly, and YouTube restored his account. But he had to re-upload the videos.)

Clay: Certainly, worst collision, Yahoo betraying Chinese dissidents. French sued for selling Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo said it was a US company, but when Chinese gov’t came, they said we’re a Chinese company.

Berkman (Center for Internet and Society at Harvard) has done work on how to go to non-commercial platforms.

Roland from NESTA: Is pain in change and opportunity greatest in public or private space?

Clay: That’s such an interesting quesiton. You can see advantages of each. Public is already operating on subsidy model. Gov’ts and NGOs have historically defended themselves from public and constituents.

One of advantages of customer. Inaction. If stop going to store, the store cares. But if you stop voting, then the state doesn’t mind so much.

Native advantage is how public sector has taken to defend itself from the public.

Pat Kane: How is different from socialist philosophy? Leisure time facilitate this??

Clay: It’s about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Lots of these things are at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The social goal is to increase the amount of time people have to give over to things they care about.

Digital divide has focused on wires. But biggest part of digital divide is permission for participation. Give people a sense of permission to participate (actually a reason to participate).

Another question from a person at RSA: As users become more sophisticated, what does it take for critical mass on virtual platform?

Clay: Back when I was a cyber-utopian and thought we’d all be float-y video heads in a video world in the 1990s, all friends were virtual friends because there were so few people on internet. Now, I realise the big reward of online relationships is real world meet ups.

Travel and communication are complements. If you want to support a virtual institution, have a real world meetup. IT guys asked what social tools they could deploy to get people talking: Plane tickets and beer. Start by catalysing groups. It will fertilise virtual collaboration.

Another question from a guy working on reputation mgmt system (Clay says growth industry). He set up a blog to complain about his botched kitchen install and got thousands of pounds in a refund, he says to the cheers in the audience. Are we in a world where everyone is single issue driven?

Clay: Single issue leverage. People are fantastically good at committing identity to groups. At high school, it became a group when you gave a name. It’s like with a girlfriend when you talk about relationship as if third person. Some structural need to support that kind of density and social leverage. Don’t think get out of special interest an single-issue motivation. Bring as many groups into conversation as possible and you will see larger and longer lived groups. interesting to see if see consumer group rising out of the HSBC student Facebook group.

Some of this is time and new institutional frameworks that reward long-term commitment.

Question from audience: Social exclusion. To the few much has been given. (Basically, it was a question on whether and how these tools can be used to counter social exclusion.)

JP who works for BT and writes the blog Confused of Calcutta : I was thinking about a mash up between what you are saying and what Kevin Kelly said in his answer to the Edge question: What have you changed your mind about? If you kept cost of repair as low as cost of dev then you avoid tragedy of commons. Wikipedia. Cost of repair to damage low. Before cost to repair high, Cost to damage low.

Clay: Tragedy of commons, sheep on commons. Everyone motivated to feed their sheep as much grass as possible and it destroyed the commons.

Openness creates value. Value creates incentive. Incentive has nothing to do with value. That encourages spammers.

Social software is the stuff that get spammed.

Bottom up is never enough in the long haul. Eventually, you run into the governance problem. You immediately run into the problem, who gets to guard the guardians. The tools are good enough that we’re not running into problems of technology but age old problems. Such as: Who guards the guardians?

You have to deal with constitutional crises. Almost no one is good at designing for groups.

Social exclusion question. That is the most depressing thread of social research. Duncan Watts and Robert Putnam are finding that social density gives access to social capital. It has so much to do with like-to-like cluster. Only a handful of individuals who bridge those gaps. If I address social exclusion, I wouldn’t address the bulk of groups. I would find people who are bridging. I would find people who know people who ive in council housing but also know someone who lives in Belgravia.

Every social system has imbalance in use of tools. Find natural bridges and strengthen them rather than building new bridges.

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03.07.08
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Media08: China’s emerging digital culture

Kaiser Kuo, Group Director, Digital Strategy Ogilvy China (also a rock star)

China’s digital culture shares a lot of features with anglo cultures but also eastern neighbours – mobile culture of Japan and Korea. He is going to take some time to “bust some persistent myths”.

I was born in the States. He has lived in China continuously for 12 years. He is most famous for starting China’s first heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty. He plays guitar in Chunqiu. They think of CDs as name cards. You can’t possibly make money on the sales of physical units. He worked for tech mags including Red Herring. He was bureau chief for China. He is director of digital strategy for China for Ogilvy. He writes the Ogilvy China Digital Watch.

China’s wild, wild web. There are lots of caveats for foreign companies entering the Chinese markets. It is ferociously competitive. Any day now, China will pass the US as the country in terms of internet users. There 210 million internet users, and growth is accelerating. Growth has accelerated to more than 50% on an annualised basis. About half of those people are using broadband. Overall, internet penetration is extremely low: 15% as opposed to 60% in the US. It will not approach the level of the US for another decade.

  • The average age is 32. In the US, that average age is 42. Roughly half are 24 years or younger. 40% of internet use amongst that age group.
  • Predominantly urban, though growth is faster in rural China
  • Relative neophytes: Half of current users not even online two years ago
  • Focused on entertainment, not information
  • Used to be overwhelmingly male, now relatively gender balanced

Instant messaging culture is massively important. Only 14% of internet users do not use IM. In the US, 61% of internet users do not use IM. QQ users send 40 messages a day, as opposed to 15 messages a day for AIM, one of the most popular IM clients in the US.

Chinese use IM as a primary internal and external business communications tool. Do not assume that Chinese staff on IM are not doing their jobs. The IM client QQ is so popular that they named a car after it. You must understand QQ to understand the market. It captures the zeitgeist. QQ facts

  • 86.19% market share in IM
  • 715 m registered accounts
  • 288 m active users
  • 36.2 m peak concurrent users

Internet cafes are extremely important, second only to home use. People go to cafes to play online games. The larger chains have 120 machines per cafe. High end gaming rigs.

Not a lot of UGC use. Newbies on the web are not jumping on many YouTube clones or blogging. It’s undeniable where trend is going.

Chinese BBS culture. There are 3 billion registered BBS users.

Number of mobile subscribers in China: 550 million. That’s 2.5 times the number of internet usres. It is growing at a rate of 7.5 m mobile subscribers per month.

More than Europe or the US, about 35% of mobile users are listening to mobile music.

Problems with mobile marketing:

  • SMS spam has turned off consumers.
  • WAP use rates remain low.
  • Lack of meaningful competition for China Mobile provides little incentive to push WAP adoption.
  • New subscribers are overwhelmingly prepaid with limited use.
  • Fast 3G is slow in coming
  • Mobile ads dominated by content with little brand advertising.
  • There are few cases of compelling ad projects

Without a viable advertising market, development of the mobile internet will be badly hobbled.

Will China’s digital culture look more like Japan or Korea’s or America’s? Probably more like the US.

People say that China copies but doesn’t innovate. He joked about C2C not being consumer to consumer but copy to China. He says that China will become a net IP exporter. Blame the VCs? Venture capitalists are not an adventurous lot. If you are a Chinese entrepreneur, and you want to grab some of the billions.

He highlighted the Maxthon browser. First tabbed broswer. Only Chinese internet company with global footprint. He also pointed to high level of P2P users. Software and digital magazines are being distributed . ZCom, Poco, Vika. 60m users.

He was going to challenge some of the myths about the ‘Great Firewall’ and talk about western media’s obsession with net censorship there, but he ran out of time.

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03.07.08
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Media08: Al Jazeera and new media

Mohamed Nanabhay, head of new media Al Jazeera Network. I missed the first part of Mohamed’s presentation because I was doing an interview. I came in as he was talking Al Jazeera’s focus on newsgathering. He said that while CNN showed the missiles taking off, Al Jazeera showed where the missiles landed.

It’s not about mobile TV. It’s about shift in media.

  1. The ability for anyone to create and share media. This is a cultural shift. People try to ignore, and we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with this shift. Public and private lives blurred Incredible choice. Shift in trust.
  2. We have a shift in how we deal with technology and media consumption. He tells his 4-year-old daughter to ask Uncle Google if he doesn’t know. What they of TV and media has shifted. We consume media totally different.

How do we deal with new engaged audience? We used to talk about coffee shop culture. Kids are now sitting forward.

Industry issues

  • TV and newspaper are losing audience to new platforms
  • Content is going online whether we like it or not
  • internal resistance to change
  • undefined business models

Al Jazeera’s response

  • Don’t fret over new platforms. Engage people wherever they are.
  • Content is going online. Al Jazeera is making our content online while everyone is taking it down.
  • Intternal resistance. Evangelise, experiment and empower. Win over people, and they will evangelise for you.
  • Undefined business models. Quick, low cost, experimental projects and see what works.

He talked about a distributed distributed model. It doesn’t mean that TV is broken or throw out your TV.

They added an Al Jazeera English channel. 1.6 million people were introduced to Aljazeera English. People have put up 4700 videos online, and there have been 20 million views of those video.

They put up five of their most popular programmes. They are full 40 minute episodes. They allow people to embed the videos on their sites and blogs.

We have been talking about empowering people in Gaza to do video. People took out their phones into Gaza to provide video. People took the initiative.

Benefits of these models. People are discovering their content. They compliment the programming with new voices and new context. We create a sense of community around our content and are trying to be a part of the conversation.

He told the tragic story of an Al Jazeera correspondent being killed, but it was great to hear him talk about the channel’s commitment to journalism even under difficult situations.

As Ammar, in the comments below, and Mohamed, on his blog, point out, his presentation has been posted at Slideshare.

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03.07.08
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Media08: Digital Media Innovation Conference

As I blogged about before I caught the flight to Sydney, I’m at Media08 in Sydney. I’ll be blogging about some of the sessions. I probably will backfill some of these posts because I’m juggling a lot today.

Jack Matthews, CEO of Fairfax Digital, kicked off the day of presentations. He said, that Fairfax did not the luxury of multimillion R&D departments. We need to be lean to innovate. And originally, we thought about doing this. We thought it was going to be an internal staff as part of our professional development plans to bring together this elite team of ‘thought leaders.

This is the conference equivalent of speed dating. RSVP, their dating site, set Guiness Book of World Records for largest speed dating event.

David Kirk, (former captain of the All Blacks and) CEO of Fairfax Media. The issues you will discuss are on my mind everyday. How we rise to the challenges of today and manage them. They are difference between achievement and growth and mediocrity and decline.

Innovation is often thought of as the new new. It is not often that innovation is thought of in the context of the old: Publishing, automotive and mining (for instance). The Sydney Moring Herald reaches more people than ever. Moving from print publisher to multimedia company. They are focusing on integration and collaboration.

Three cornerstones of our strategy:

  1. Defend and grow our newspapers. Involves innovation and change. Key to culture. Have to hang on to core of our values and history.
    “Our newspapers have to be connected to our audience and our readers. It remains the core of our success.” In US, see only decline. But the market is not the same here.
  2. We need aggressive growth online. Three years ago, less than 2% of revenues. It will grow to 20% in a couple of years. It is the high growth part of our business.
  3. We need to be a leading digital media company for media markets of 21st Century. The strategy has to be robust. Consumer behaviour is changing rapidly.

Discussing this to our staff has been the most difficult thing for me as a CEO. Rapid changes make it difficult to communicate a sense of certainty. We learn along the way to describe what we talk about.

Focus on transition from publisher to leading multimedia company. We have to the best at originating content. It is our fundamental history and heritage. I often say digital content, but everything that we do is digital these days. No one has the people on the ground in communities as Fairfax.

Building ability to deliver audio and video content. A year ago 800,000 downloads a month, now 4 million a month.

To be successful, we have to own and leverage cross media brands to drive extension of audience reach.

He then talked about building multimedia brands. As a social media guy, I talk about building connections not brands. Certainly now those connections are part off that brand. I am wary of the obsession around brand. The menu is not the meal, and sometimes abstract discussions of brand misplaces a focus.

I agree with him a lot more when he is talking about multi-platform.

Where the audience goes, we have to go. The only way to aggregate audiences is to chase them.

New media is littered with companies without business models. You need proven revenue models. The revenue models turn audience and brand participation into money. We are focused on classified and display ads and transaction market. We have stuck to our subscription model. WSJ and FT see as sensible way to go.

I don’t necessarily agree 100% with him. Comparing a general media company to the FT and WSJ misses a point. We used to joke that the only content you can sell online is sport, business and porn. General content is commodity.

We have to build innovation into the DNA of the company.

We believe that we can hold our own. We still need to focus on the basics of good business everyday whatever the medium.

Fundamental drivers:

  • compelling content, every minute, every hour, every day
  • innovative, creative advertising and content sales
  • reader, viewer, listener community – audience -connection and management
  • production and distribution excellence
  • every day need to be managing, developing and training people.

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03.05.08
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Media08: Making the change from mass media to social media

Suw and I just got back from our honeymoon on Sunday, and I’m at the airport again. I’m heading to Sydney to speak at Media08.

I’m going to be speaking about making the transition from mass media to social media. Trends in audience fragmentation continue, and mass media are increasingly challenged to deliver the size of audiences they once did, which threatens their underlying business model of mass audiences delivered to advertisers. Journalists have been particularly poor in adapting to these changes as the positive sense of public service that many journalists have has soured into a false sense of entitlement. Yes, journalism is important to the functioning of a democracy, but just because we believe what we do is important, doesn’t mean that people must pay attention to us. We’re competing for people’s valuable disposable time and income against not only other news outlets but also against other forms of information and entertainment. We’re competing against not only CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Post and the Economist but also against iPods, YouTube, Digg, the Wii, Facebook, real books, instant messaging, text messaging and MySpace messaging. Time and attention is the scarce resource that we’re fighting for, and as I’ve said before, most journalists really don’t grok this.

As journalists, we should focus on quality content, but our audiences have moved on, too often quite literally. They expect not only quality content but real, social interaction around that content. Wrap your content in a community. In 2008, that can still be a unique selling point. But this isn’t rocket science, and while journalists have been fighting over fundamentalist definitions of what is and isn’t journalism, innovators not beholden to dogmatic definitions of journalism have been creating social experiences around media. See Newsvine, which iterated and innovated enough to get the attention of a small company up the road in Seattle (well MSNBC – part owned by NBC and Microsoft) who came knocking with a cheque. But the time to gain the first adopter edge is coming to a close. By the end of 2008, savvy media and technology companies will have already moved and social media won’t be such a differentiating competitive advantage.

I’ll blog more about this over the next few days as well as blogging about conference itself.