Yearly Archives: 2006

05.02.06
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WeMedia

Both Kevin and I are going to be spending the next couple of days at the WeMedia conference examining citizen journalism, the media and trust. Organised by the BBC, Reuters and The Media Center, it hopes to shed some light on participatory media and help mainstream news companies understand what they need to do to thrive in this shifting news landscape.

OK, so that’s how I wish it was. Instead, look at the schedule and shout Bingo! When you see a real, honest to goodness blogger.

Quiet, isn’t it?

The thing I am worried about is that this is going to turn into a happy clappy back-slappy smugfest, with the Beeb and Reuters competing to see whose day (they each have one) has the biggest names, who can draw the biggest crowds, and who trusts who most. They already have a survey that they’ve completed, and which they’ll be promoting at the event, which shows people trust national TV news the most and bloggers very little. So much for ‘citizen journalism’ being a symbiosis of equals – this sounds more like ‘we Media, you Jane’.

But if you were one of the people who took one look at the $795 price tag and winced, you can still participate and, indeed, I would encourage you to do so. You can watch the video feed, listen to the audio feed, monitor the blogs (including the various official ones), an take part in the backchannel. Your IRC choices are going to be an in-browser client or #wemedia on irc.freenode.net.

I am participating on both days as an Online Curator, so will be on IRC, and in as many other places as possible online, looking out for comments to feed back into the mix. I think I get to sit on stage at times and ask difficult questions and quote people’s opinions, so I’m depending on you to give me something juicy to work with. Without you, I’ll just end up looking silly, so please do pop into IRC and let me know what you think of proceedings.

I’m also talking at the WeMedia Fringe, where all the cool kids are gonna be, on Wednesday night. The Fringe is fully sold out, so no real point coming if you don’t already have a ticket, but it’s cool that there should be so much interest. I’m going to be talking on the three things that media should be prepared to do before they even think about running any sort of participatory media project.

Right, time to go prepare. See you tomorrow.

05.01.06
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Your brand can’t save you now

Bleary-eyed and bleary-brained the other morning, I was jolted awake by a trailer on the BBC World Service for a programme on the damage done by US troops to the ancient city of Babylon.

Now, I have to admit that I find that BBC radio is frequently rather tedious. The World Service and Radio 4 both have a tendency to be oh so very worthy, so very full of the earth-shattering (self-)importance common to those who have the kind of tenure most in the media can only dream about. Indeed, the only reason we had the World Service on was because Kevin works for them and it’s his job to grok world news each morning. If it was up to me, we’d listen to the far easier on the brain XFM where the most complex thing I have to do deal with is figuring out to what degree Carl Barat‘s new band, Dirty Pretty Things, is better than Pete Doherty‘s trainwreck combo, Babyshambles. (Answer: very much; number of brain cells exercised: near to nil.)

Back to this trailer. I get really depressed when I think of all those wonderful antiquities destroyed by the stupidity of whomever is currently invading whichever country. I don’t care that it was US troops filling their sandbags with archaeological artefacts, I care that it happened at all. That wasn’t what got up my nose though. It was a phrase along the lines of “The BBC assesses the impact”. As soon as I heard that, I bristled.

The BBC? Assessing the impact of US Troops on the ruins at Babylon? Since when did the BBC employ experts in Babylonian archaeology? Last I looked, the BBC employed journalists, and I have a sneaking suspicion that journalists expert in Babylonian archaeology are few and far between, and unlikely to be on the BBC’s payroll.

This is not to say that this programme is not capable of providing an accurate portrayal and discussion of the problems at Babylon (I have no idea whether it did or not). It is to say that it will not be the BBC doing it, it will be the various doctors, professors, conservationists and researchers – the real experts – who will provide the story, the analysis, the conclusions. All the BBC can do is provide a conduit for the real experts to speak to a wider audience.

Yet the BBC, like so many other mainstream media outlets, seem to have forgotten this. They have slipped into a Cult of Brand, where asserting the primacy of their corporate brand is more important than the story they are reporting. This is an ugly development of the Cult of Personality that I first observed infiltrating music journalism back in the mid-90s.

I am a huge music fan. My life is dull and empty without music, and like many music fans my age, I grew up on the music inkies – the Melody Maker and the NME. Well, it was never an ‘and’, but always an ‘or’. You had to choose. Either/or. I chose the Melody Maker, because I thought that the writing was better. But as the 90s wore on, the writing deteriorated badly, with journalists trying so hard to be the next Nick Kent or Lester Bangs without ever having their talent.

Instead, two-bit hacks spent more time writing about themselves and their experiences than they did writing about the bands they were interviewing. It was a Cult of Personality, manifested too in the music industry itself, where lead singers became more important than their bands, where managers and A&R men became more important than their charges.

The problem with the Cult of Personality was that it was tedious and dull. I wanted to know what my favourite bands were up to, I wanted an insight into their lives, into their music. I didn’t want some talentless teenaged hack with all the experience of a brick – and journalistic chops to match – insinuating that they were the most important thing since sliced bread.

Not that the Cult of Personality was (or is) restricted to the music press, or to the Maker and the NME. Oh no. Kate Adie, anyone?

It is, you could say, a natural development to move from a Cult of Personality to a Cult of Brand, where the arrogance of the entrenched media can blossom forth in all it’s glory. Who needs to worry about rigorous journalistic standards, or those pesky ethic things when you have brand to paper over the cracks?

When the BBC World Service says “the BBC assesses the damage to Babylon” I bristle, because that statement unnecessarily inserts the BBC into the story, and asserts an unwarranted authority over it. By saying that the BBC is going to assess the impact, they make it sound as if the BBC are the only people who could, but in actual fact the story is really about the experts that the BBC has consulted, and what they think has happened to Babylon. The trailer ends up saying not “Here’s a story you might be interested in”, but “Oh look! This is a story you should be interested in because we, the BBC, know best.”

Believing in the power of brand is spectacularly dangerous for media companies. It makes them arrogant, sloppy and (almost worse than that) irritating. They then start to rely too much on so-called analysis, which really is just a platform for the face du jour to expound upon what they believe, and spend nowhere near enough time reporting the facts so that the audience can make up their own minds.

Indeed, this attitude is the very antithesis of Dan Gillmor‘s honest and humble assessment that “the audience knows more than I do.”

I don’t want to hear about what ‘The BBC’ has to say, I don’t want some brand message topping and tailing my news. I want to know what the experts know, and if the BBC can’t get the hell out of my face and just tell me, I’ll go elsewhere for my information.

04.30.06
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Exploding the limits of linear media

As I wrote in my last post, one of the things that we realise on the BBC World Service radio programme that I work on is that we’re joining a global conversation that is already going on in a million ways, virtual and real.

Of course, one of the ways we try to take part in that conversation is through weblogs. For instance, recently, we discussed Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the US. We asked whether the world had something to fear in China.

We invited Dan Harris of the China law blog on the programme. After it finished, he had this to say about the programme:

Just finished my show on the BBC and found it both interesting and frustrating.

Dan went on to explain his views in a way that he thought that he couldn’t on the programme. He’s not the first blogger that we’ve had on the programme who felt frustrated by the format. As a matter of fact, Fons Tuinstra, an internet entrepreneur and China consultant, who has been on the programme said this in a comment on Dan’s blog:

At least you have a weblog where you can make your point. I have been a few times in the program and I found it an interesting chaos. It tries to focus on easy to consume tidbits without trying to really make a point.

From this and other comments, I sense that the bloggers we have on the programme sometimes feel constrained. Many in the Mainstream Media fail to realise that some of our audience now live and communicate in a world where they control the terms the debate, not us in the MSM, so I think that bloggers find it a bit jarring when they are suddenly pulled back into the old world of broadcast media where they have to cede some of their new found freedom.

Secondly, blogging is nonlinear, like many things on the internet. On radio, we have an hour for the discussion. It’s linear. The world of broadcast is also one of scarcity. Scarcity of spectrum. Scarcity of time. That is not to say that the age of broadcast is over – the BBC radio signal reaches places far beyond the reach of the internet.

What happens when you wed the nonlinear, interactive, many-to-many networked power of the internet and mobile phone networks with the global reach of radio? I don’t know yet. We have a lot of work to do to bridge the worlds of the internet, the mobile phone and the radio – especially the internet. But the glimpses of what could be keep me going, keep me pushing those boundaries between media.

I believe that the limits, the constraints, the shortcomings of what bloggers feel when they come on the radio could be exploded if we break down some of these barriers between media. I’ve been trying to do that, to create a new media for 10 years now. I thought we would be further along than we are, but the dot.com bubble and crash came along: The bubble gave us a lot of hyperactive, hyper-funded ‘me-too-ism’; then came the Crash, which destroyed many people’s faith in the Internet. I used to think it was all bad, but from the ashes of the crash came a return to the Net’s grassroots: Social software and social media.

But now I’m straying into the territory of the next post: Social Media Me-too-ism. Suw and I will have a lot to say about that this week. Watch this space.

UPDATE: Dan left a comment and said he wasn’t frustrated by the being cut off by a higher authority. As an attorney, he said: “Please remember I am an attorney, so I am very much used to being cut off by a higher force: the Judge.”

That reminded me that was another more nuanced point I was going to make but forgot. For this, I’ll blame Suw. She was watching Doctor Who on here iBook while I was trying to write this.

The more nuanced point I was going to make was about nuance. There are limits to what we can pack into an hour, and I think Mike’s comment below about too many voices is spot on. It’s a fine balance. We want to include as many voices, as many points of view as possible, but too many voices becomes a cacophony of unexplored threads of thought. This is the limitation of linear media and where the internet can fill in the gaps.

Both in audio, video and text, we can explore more ideas in much richer depth than we ever could in one hour of radio. And as I’m seeing, the conversation that begins on air spins out in a million directions over weeks. We’re still receiving comments on discussions that we had in early April. Hopefully, as we plug into the online communities better, this conversation will deepen. And I’m enjoying the challenge of building bridges between the world of the internet and the world of radio.

And I’m also enjoying this conversation about this process. As a matter of fact, without this conversation, it would be a much more difficult and lonely job.

04.25.06
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NLab Seminar: Blogs, Communities and Social Software

I’m up at De Montfort University in Leicester at the Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries (NLab) seminar, Blogs, Communities and Social Software. I’m speaking later, but managed to get up here in time to catch the first panel discussion.

The Institute of Creative Technologies, who runs the NLab, has got a new building, and this is the first event to be held here. It’s half-finished, but already has a small kennel of Aibos and is apparently also going to be getting some flying insect robots too. Cool! I’ll have to come back when they’ve got them installed.

As to my own talk, that’s about blogging and writing, blogging writers, and Creative Commons. Thinking about the things that authors are doing with blogging in preparation for this talk got me really quite excited and, if I can find the time, I’ll write more about it.

The audience here is mixed, with some people knowing about blogs already, and some people being complete novices. That makes it a hard audience in some ways, because you either bore or baffle, so I’m very much focusing on showing what other people are doing, and am not really going to talk about concepts.

Right… to the first panel.

Speakers

Josie Fraser, Educational Technologist

Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media, De Montfort

Chair: Gavin Stewart

Sue Thomas – Why RSS is important, and why you should have it

What is RSS? The easiest way to find out what RSS is is to go to the BBC site and look at their explanation, via the ‘What is RSS?’ link.

[Goes on to provide very basic explanation of RSS.]

[Demos Bloglines, as aggregator, the clippings function, publishing your blogroll, seeing other people’s blogrolls via subscription to the same feed.]

Josie Fraser – Weblogs and Web 2.0 in eduation

Used to write for Engadget – gadget based movie reviews.

Interested in getting teachers up to speed on what’s happening in the rest of the world. Edublogs: blogs in or about education by learners, practitioners, researchers, policy makers etc. Blogs are individual, groups e.g. schools, universities, etc.

Misconception that schools in the UK are lagging behind in tech, but they’re not. there is a lot of exciting stuff going on. Warwick Uni, for example, offer blogs for all universities, and people are using Amazon-type models in their blogs, so looking at book reviews, film reviews, CDs, etc.

Walsall Schools have a large blog community, with subscribers across the UK. Marketed as easy way for teachers and learners to have a web presence. Traditional websites never get updated, and for schools that’s not useful, so with a blog they can put info up straight away. They can have headmasters posting info for parents, for example.

Notables:

Barbara Ganley

Gateshead Central Library

James Farmer’s edublogs.org, also learnerblogs and uniblogs, all hosted online. Problems that he has had are with firewalls in schools.

Edublog Frappr map.

Edublog Awards in third year.

Use of emerging tech reflects state of learning tech in all institutions in the UK – it’s patchy, it’s not embedded, and it’s not joined up. But bloggers are all about community, so there is a different agenda. Web 2.0 techs are sociable and community building, so fundamental shift now in how tech is being delivered in schools and university.

Many constructivist arguments for using blogs, not just in education, but generally. It’s an ideal platform for citizenship, participation, collaboration. Develop e-literacy which is fundamentally important. Formative value: Develop voice and provide ability to explore online, v. empowering.

Positivist concerns: retention, achievement, progression; evidence and supporting the curriculum. Very specific aims, don’t always sit well with blogging.

Issues that need addressing re: staff skills and current practice

– e-literacy and legitimacy of new tech (still in question, lots of suspicion)

– small pieces loosely joined vs. one size fits all

– training and support (some teachers are still struggling with email, so how do they go from that to engaging with blogging and social software?)

Duty of care, re: child protection

– literacy and resilience vs. moral panic (over sites about anorexia, etc.)

– online identity. what happens if you’re blogging through university, become completely googleable, and what you did ten years ago affecting how you are perceived now; lots of employers Google

Systems, re: network management:

– privacy, spam, filtering. these systems are often imposed on schools, and they have no control over them.

– hosting, ownership, data protection

Debate

Q: What makes certain software social?

Josie: The difference is, people talk about Web 2.0 in terms of social software, but the truth is that socialability has being going on on the web for years, chat, user groups, discussion boards, these are all sociable. The difference is that social software is more geared up to making friends online, although that’s been possible online for a long time. More online dating sites, which is a huge market and is becoming acceptable in a way that it wasn’t two years ago. But you can interact with it easily, use it easily, and interact with the writer.

Sue: I’d add to that the fact that social software society is a different kind of society and it has its own rules and behaviours, so the other side is the society that is produced by the software. It affects the way we regard each other, what we know about each other, what we make public. The idea of social software enabling your data to be added to the mix. E.g. MySpace, the engagement that people make involves a trade-off – their clicks, prefs, data is being logged. Same as your loyalty card logs your shopping data. That’s the hidden trade-off.

Was asked, Don’t young people worry about privacy? What is going to happen when they realise there’s so much data being held? Young people know they are making their trade-off.

Josie: But it’s not being talked about in those terms. General practice for blogs is that you are being very honest, very earnest. In a way that’s sad because it’s played off against going online and creating a fake life, and playing with identity.

I am on a crusade against the word virtual, because it’s not virtual. there is no distinction anymore. It is real. The number of people who have fallen in love online… there is no separation. It is as real. And if we pretend there is a distinction we are kidding ourselves.

Q: People develop new coping mechanisms for making sense of what is happening online, because it is different from everyday life. That’s a difficult aspect of social software, because the making sense mechanisms that we have are different from the ones that we need to develop.

Sue: You have to use it to be able to critique it, because often looking from the outside it really doesn’t make sense. It’s the difference between being a passenger in a car, and driving a car.

Josie: This comes back to digital literacy. How do we talk about this stuff to people who don’t even like using email. There are techs emerging at the moment that are characterised by the fact they are very user friendly. So a blog is where you go online and fill in some forms. It’s easy. So the way that I get people into it is to get them to go into eBay, and they manage that ok when they see something they want to buy.

There is reticence amongst a lot of teachers to engage in this, but Web 2.0 makes it easier for them. I’ve tried to teach teachers how to use Dreamweaver and it’s a nightmare, and it’s not what they need to know. But show them Blogger and you can get them up and running in half an hour.

Q: Quite often people know how to do the digital side, how to create the blog, but they are becoming aware now that they are creating an identity. People don’t always want their world online. They have something against the social side of it, rather than the technical side of it.

Sue: The problem is that blogs have got a name for being boring and petty. So when you say ‘you should start a blog’ people think that you are saying ‘you should write about what you had for breakfast’. I even thought that myself. I thought I’d be in a constant state of panic about what I’d written.

I got into it when my book Hello World came out, and I needed a website, and a blog was easiest. I just used it as a content management system.

But I think people do, because they don’t know what else they want

Gavin: I got interested in people using blogs, playing with cultural identity, e.g. hamster blogs, dog blogs, etc., and this is a sort of creative writing class blog. These blogs have minute readership.

Q: People think they have to write for an audience. My blog is writing for myself, and it was portable – could access it from anywhere. So part of the problem is that you’re immediately faced by this audience issues. Took me a long time to send a link out to people about my blog.

Sue: You’re interested in vlogging. Do you want to tell us about it?

??: It’s video blogging, but with hypertext. A true blog can’t be a book because you can’t print the links that make sense of it. So a vlog has hyperlinks, and links in the footage itself that bring other content in, people are working on video commenting etc. People are basing it around traditional, old media, in terms of it being news content. It lends itself to that, but it’s more than that. In the way that people are doing blogging as creative writing, vlogging is creative film work.

Kate Pullinger: There’s a ticking bomb, which is the business of privacy, and what it means for everyone to be publicising their lives, such as the undergraduate. For example, Heather Armstrong (Dooce). It’s a huge issue.

Me: No one got fired for blogging, they got fired for doing or saying something stupid. And with privacy, maybe we will have to learn to be more forgiving in future.

Josie: Digital literacy in terms of children and learners understanding the implications of what they are doing is important, but we need teachers and parents to understand this.

And we can bury stuff. We can blog solidly for three years and bury the older stuff. Employers don’t spend hours on this. Stalkers do, but employers don’t.

Sue: We are growing up on the web, we are learning how to do all this stuff. When you learn to write, you gradually learn that there are certain things you don’t write, or don’t show people. Now we need to become literate with the web. Someone I knew a couple of years ago, who is very literate and started teaching, and started blogging about his class as you would tell your friend. And you think ‘Don’t you realise that the students who made your life difficult today will read your comments tonight?’. And people don’t grasp it, it’s naivety.

Q: It’s part of the growth process. And the important thing is often not the host blog (e.g. Slugger O’Toole), but the conversations that they are hosting.

Josie: The use of blogging in the US elections was something that highlighted the fact that blogs weren’t all about personal diaries, and that it could be a professional tool that’s very powerful.

Some of the meetings I go to, if you say a blog is a diary they will shout at you and throw things at your head, because it’s not. It’s a website. The difference is that it’s easy to use. You don’t need to know HTML.

04.17.06
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The challenge of fostering community

I’ve been away for a while, doing some real heavy lifting launching a blog at work. The programme I work on at the BBC, World Have Your Say, launched its blog now just about a month ago.

It’s been a real challenge. The technical stuff is easy, and we’re blessed with great geeks (and I say that as one of them) at the BBC.

The struggle has been two-fold. I’m going to be diplomatic here when I say the first challenge is developing a sense of ownership of this blog, this new media thing, amongst a radio team. Suw would call it adoption.

How is it core to what we do? How does it help us put out two hours of radio everyday? It’s part of my job to sell it to them.

The other challenge is selling it to our listeners. They listen to radio. What does the blog give to them? How does it enhance radio and the global conversation that we’re trying to foster?

If you would have asked me in the middle of last week, I would have said I wasn’t doing a very good job of selling it either to my team or to our listeners. I was learning the hard lesson that Dan Gillmor learned at Bayosphere: Community building is hard.

As Dan said:

Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)

How do I help foster a sense of community using this blog wed to a radio programme with millions of listeners around the world?

Well, it doesn’t happen overnight, and a month is really a short amount of time. And the BBC blogs are being launched rather quietly and are pretty well hidden in the vast digital thicket that is BBC.co.uk. At one time, we had 1800 subsites under that domain.

And we’ve only got so much online billboard space to promote all of the things that are behind our front door.

But the last few weeks have only reinforced my fundamental view that Big Media blogs have to remember they are taking their place in a pretty well established community: The Blogosphere. We’re not top dogs here. We’re in many senses johnny-come-latelys. And my view is that we must participate as equals not arrogant superiors.

I am a blogger just the like millions of other blog writers out there, and I play by the rules of the blogosphere, not the rules of Big Media. My team is joining a global community, and we have to do it with a little bit of humility.

Obey community rules, and the gift economy of linking and quoting will pay you back for good behaviour. It’s starting to work. We’re getting comments pretty regularly now live while we’re on air. Last week, we even had a contributor from Australia send in a phone number while we were on air, wanting to take part in the programme. That’s exciting, and it helps me sell the blog to my team.

We’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m glad to be back blogging. I always say that blogging keeps me closer to my audience than the broadcast model of Old Media. That’s where I want to be. I find having a conversation with my audience much more personally satisfying than talking at them.

04.07.06
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What would audience-driven journalism look like?

There has been an interesting discussion, both online and offline, about audience-driven journalism over the last few weeks. It’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about for my journalism X-project.

Leonard Witt had some ideas about how the open-source movement could inspire a reinvention of journalism (podcast here – audio 4.7MB download). And Jay Rosen of PressThink wanted to kick-start some ideas at BloggerCon IV about what he called, the ‘users know more than we do‘ journalism.

I really liked Jay’s practical approach to it. He’s asking some of the right questions.

  • What kinds of stories can be usefully investigated using open source and collaborative methods?
  • Which user communities are good bets to be interested enough to make it happen?
  • What will it take to start running more trials that could yield compelling and publishable work?
  • What needs to be invented for this kind of journalism to flourish?

Like I said in my previous post, there are some projects and audiences for which this approach is best suited, and there are other stories where quite honestly, traditional methods of journalism and storytelling work just fine. Jay set up his post by having Ken Sands of the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane Washington guest blog.

We know there are local knowledge networks. Should we try to “tap into” them, or is it better to leave them alone until something happens to make partnership possible? Correspondents— we’re familiar with them. But we don’t know how to operate a vast and dispersed network of correspondents, linking hundreds or even thousands. Does anyone?

He has a few ideas: Local sports, transportation watch, weather watch. It’s all local. It’s about things people are passionate about in their own communities.

And I couldn’t agree with Ken more when he says that there’s no traction in the citizen journalism out of mainstream media outlets. Yes, as we’re about to look back a year after the July 7 bombings here in London, everyone remembers the iconic cameraphone pictures. But I think Ken is talking more about community around content rather than the flood of pictures we now get at the BBC during large news events in the UK. Is there a sense of community, a sense of participation in sending off cameraphone pics to large news organisations? I’m with Ken who points to Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.

Those sites work; the mainstream media versions—the industry calls it user-generated content—do not. Why?

I’m going to be doing some thinking out loud about these questions over the next couple of days. But one last thought before Suw and I shut the computers off for the night. We used to talk about broadcast networks, but the future is obviously in social networks. What is the role of the journalist in the age of social networks?

03.27.06
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Changing Media: Final keynote and closing remarks

The distribution of the future

Tamar Kasriel, Henley Centre Headlight Vision.

I’m not a media expert. I did have a stint at the Guardian, but I’ve been at the Henley Centre for nine years, and we try to understand consumer trends.

Was some talk about asking consumers what they want and they ask for faster horses. You can’t ask consumers straight what they want but you can identify trends.

One useful way to think about the future is to see what the trends are now, and then push them, look for the extremes. And what can our response be to those? Try and rehearse what we can do in that scenario so that when the future happens we’ve thought things through and can respond better.

Consumer change and technology are chicken and egg. But any technology has to have a clear benefit in order to take it up. People in this room are not typical – more media savvy, interested in change and complexity, but for the vast majority, if it’s not easy and I can’t see why, I’m not going to do it.

The issues we are trying to grapple with are not new. E.g. 17th C debate on whether Catholic Mass seen by telescope counts. Is that participation?

Era of blind faith, collectivism, command. That has waned, towards individualism. Now moving to reasoned faith, elective, collectivism, contract. Rise of the personal network to navigate these things. Net has been very important in this.

Way we build identity is very complex, and the urge is to simplify. Global homogeneity, diverse locality, cultural boomerangs (stuff that goes away and comes back in a new version), hybrid identity.

World is changing, but every era says that.

Paradox. Time lords vs time slaves. Powerful, in control of out time… but we also end up a slave to time. Money-time trade-off. People willing to spend money to save time. Considering other consumer currencies, info, time, energy, money, space. Not perfectly comparable, but can get a view of how people feel about these resources. People think about money more often, but value time and energy more often.

Always on culture. Pizzled – how you feel when you are talking to someone and they just inexplicably take out their Blackberry and look at it. Pi(ssed off and pu)zzled.

Don’t have weekends anymore in the same way. Great to do chores on the weekend, but our weekends are lost now because we do all the weekday stuff during the weekend. Can be a burn on people.

Impact on news – tyranny of immediacy. Dominance of image culture changes the nature of news.

Going through a revolution in time, comparable to industrial revolution. Prior to the revolution it was about seasonal time, but with a rail network precise time became important, and this was when industrial time happened. now we have a flexible, Dali-esque view of what time can be. Being able to tell the difference between a live event and a time shifted-event becomes difficult.

What happens when time becomes this flexible? Talk about end of prime-time, and it being whenever you want it to be. Already major social changes, such as around the mobile phone, e.g. ‘approximeeting’, where you arrange the meeting on the fly using the mobile phone.

Another paradox. Infinite information vs. simplicity. Infinite amount of information, which is empowering. You can never have too much information, but if you have too much you go insane. The same amount of people say you can’t have too much information, but also they don’t have enough time to process it.

Consumers put up shields and barriers. Consumers don’t want junk mail any more, doesn’t get looked at.

Paradox. Closer to brands vs. distanced from brands. Is this a fantastic opportunity to brands, or are brands just desperately running after consumers who are hiding behind their PVR shield.

Idea that buying a famous brands is good because it ensures quality has declined. Consumers don’t believe that anymore. Not to say that people reject brands, but there is a long-term decline.

We have the tech to move closer to the consumer, brands are saying ‘we’re open’, and when you get up close you find an awful things. Can be dangerous to invite scrutiny.

American Apparel invited a journalist in, but she found out about some malpractice (of a sexual nature).

Some brands might prefer translucent rather than transparent.

Co-creation. Smart, savvy consumer who understands brands. Trust and genuine co-creation hard to create and maintain.

Copernican media revolution vs. commercial redistribution. Is the consumer now sitting in the centre now, or is this just another cycle? Exponential power of consumers, people are increasingly recommending and acting on others’ recommendations.

Democratisation of images. Can create, capture, take pictures. Charged visual culture. More disposable. Important to say you were there, and take a picture. Consumers have a love-hate paradox because we know images can be manipulated but we still value them.

So who’s really running the show? In some ways it feels like just a reorganisation of the big media. You have someone who is able to experiment, create something with an independent DNA, but they get bought by the big media.

In ten years time, the heavyweights will be pretty much the same.

Is this an expanding world? Or shrinking? Diffusion of hubs, wonderful things from round the world. Strong sense of serendipity, following leads, and finding people you’d never otherwise meet. But can create a self-imposed ghetto of taste, that you just find more people like you.

Geography is history vs. local revitalised. Communities of interest, and communities of geography. Location-based services, e.g. bluetooth messages tied to a location. Deepen relationship with physical spaces. Talk to people in shops, at point of decision (i.e. the til). Apartments having their own intranet.

Enhancing human touch vs. eliminating human touch. Older consumers find a lot of digital media very alienating. If your’e less used to it you only use it if you have to. Then others find it a brilliant substitute. But in younger people, it’s not a substitute at all, it is a real relationship.

Real and online worlds blur. People mourning online for victims of Hurricane Katrina was the best way for those people to share their grief. Games are real life, it’s not some sad thing they are doing in their spare time. People raised real money online.

What will humanity feel like? What will it look like? How will you be able to touch your consumers and your customers?

Haptic technology that sends touch over the internet, e.g. lover’s cups – glasses that have coloured LEDs, so when you pick up your glass, their glass will glow and you’ll know when you are both drinking. Or pillows that display the imprint of your partner at a distance as they sleep.

Lots of possibilities. Tendency to pick your favourite scenarios, but it’s worth stretching in all directions including the uncomfortable ones. Not about being right, but it is about being ready.

03.27.06
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Changing Media: Podcasting

Will generation iPod change broadcast forever?

Chair: Neil McIntosh

Adam Curry, PodShow

James Cridland, Virgin Radio

Chris Kimber, BBC

Neil: Been described as the podfather. Tell us about the origins.

Adam: It’s a lucky convergence of portable media devices, protocols such as RSS so you can load stuff on to your device, bandwidth, and tools on the user end to create stuff. Tools have been a round for a while. Stuff people are creating eventually wants to get out beyond the DVD or CD that you can burn. So the network connects it, and I think that we had the sexy name, podcasting.

Not as big in the UK as the US, but I think that’s because radio in the US just sucks that much more. Still listen to the radio here. More cultural importance.

Podcasting clearly user-generated medium. My five-fifty rule – within 5 years, 50% of media will be created by the people consuming it.

Neil: The BBC are launching lots and lots of podcasts.

Chris: I think you’re talking about our tightly controlled trial. Have had the BC radio player for four years, and the problem with that is you need to be connected to the internet to listen on demand. the holy grail is to get them portable. In 2004 offered programmes for download, just single-file download. Then podcasting automates that and in those days there weren’t many people doing it, got good feedback. Then strategy – is this a threat or an opportunity. Clearly it’s both. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you’re listening to Adam you’re not listening to the BBC. But we also saw it as an opportunity to make radio on demand portable. Can also reach new audiences, people who think they don’t actually ;like radio, perhaps we can intorduce people to programmes they wouldn’t have otherwise have heard.

Early success is In Our Time, but we reached people who would never have listened on a Thu8rsday morning to that, so we’ve been ableto reach new auidences.

The main thing, as I’m sure we’ll come on to later, is that this is a way of introducing speach radio to people who thought they might not like it. E.g. Chris Moyles’ is obviously a speech radio, although you wouldn’t have sell it like that.

Possibly a way to discover new talent in the future. 20 or 30 years ago it was local or hospital radio. In the future it will be more about formats and ideas and talent.

Neil: Will the BBC do straight-to-pod shows? Or using others’ shows?

Chris: No one’s done it yet but it will be used. E.g. Radio Five Live use it for people to file reports from people abroad.

James; |the ;rationale for Virgin is similar. We should be out there, but more than that we should be making sure that people can hear our main shows, and put our main shows in front of people who might not actually otherwise hear them.

We did 113,000 downloads in January, so there is quite an appetite. I think it’s interesting that the session is ‘personalised radio’, and podcasting is half that. But where podcasting is ubiquitous, wifi is leading to even more personalised radio – listen to Today Programme without Thought of the Day, Virgin with no James Blunt, or Radio 2 with no Steve Wright. Personalised radio would provide customers with what they want to hear – less ‘the music we love’ and more ‘the music I love’. It’s more than just time-shifted and play-shifted radio.

Neil: Licencing stops you putting much music at all on. Are we closer to a solution?

James: My rather trite answer to journalists that ask that question, my answer is I’m not sure why we’d want to. Virgin Radio by and large is very mainstream. Hear the same type of music in the morning as in the afternoon, so there’s not much to be gained by downloading that. Why compete with someone’s iPod which already has their favourite music on it. Perhaps the trick is to give them slices of content to play alongside the music they really like.

Issues with DRM, the iPod issue, is one that will run and run.

Saw great video from ZDNet which called DRM ‘content restriction, anullment and protection’ – the iPod crap is different to the MS crap.

Chris: We have a commitment to specialist programmes, and so those fans would appreciate having more of their specialist music available.

Neil: Podcast-safe music.

Adam: Podcast is liberating – there are no rules apart form copyright. You can say what you want, do it as long as you want. Early on advocated that podcasters not play mainstream music. Don’t want the RIAA to come in and call us pirates and thieves, which all consumers are to them.

People in podcasting want to be the next Chris Moyles, they have something to say. They want to be the next James Blunt, because they want to make music. And they own the copyright.

So created the podsafe music initiative. Band heard in NY, good music, played on podcast, got picked up, and people started buying the band’s CDs through CD Baby. Good opportunity to pair up with bands.

US radio is so dead. No social recommendation ‘I fucking love this record and I’m going to play this every day til you do to’.

If you take 1000 podcasts, with an ave. of 1000 listeners, and you take one song and you have a million audio impressions of that song. We’re selling them now as MP3s, and we purchased the music because we wanted to support the artist. There are now artists selling 150,000 copies independently which is worth more than 250,000 copies through a label.

Social media networks now surpassing all the problems. I’d love to play older stuff, and I turn to BBC and Virgin for that. But the licensing issues aren’t getting solved.

Radio is on the decline and audience is moving away, and everyone will move in that direction too.

Chris: In the UK, I’m not sure that it is on the decline.

Adam: Listenership is up?

Chris: It’s certainly not down.

Q: Isn’t there a move by AIM to be licensing independent music?

Neil: We were unable to buy one of those licenses.

Adam: They want 12% of gross revenue, which is too much.

Neil: And they can’t tell who you are, so they can’t sell you the licence.

Adam: The artists are licensing it themselves under CC, they are getting it out there.

Q: But most musicians don’t knwo what CC is, they already have a deal.

Adam: Well hopefully conferences like this will help them find out.

Q: I imagine you share our frustrations that US podcasting is so weak. But the kind of rants and personalisation… podcasting could be more aspiration.

Adam: I agree that 98% is crap, by my standards, possibly a different 98% to you. All we do is take user generated content and turn it into a media property. We take that relationship between the producer and the audience and monetise it through advertising. And this is the beauty of it. We don’t stand for ‘this is the good stuff’, it’s more ‘1000 people like this, and it’s not for me to judge if it’s good’.

If I want news I can trust, I go to the BBC for the number of reasons. But it’s hard to build that kind of brand in this space. There are 30k podcasts, and I haven’t listened to all of them, but I know ther are some I like.

James: There’s a role for a trusted guide. If you look at what people are listening to – not iTunes because that’s crap – you’ll see all sorts of stuff, Virgin, BBC, Curry. These are all brands, people already trust these brands for quality. But a podcast where someone introduces you to new and exciting podcasts is valuable, that trusted guide.

We’ve had that in radio for years telling you what new songs to buy.

Chris: I’m not sure about trusted guides. The good stuff will rise to the top. There are some that are good, and a lot that are bad, but what you think is poor quality might be the best one for me. I don’t mind the fact that a lot are rubbish, because someone else might think they are good.

It’s a fantastic thing for radio. Podcasts are a huge attention for what is essentially speech radio. Getting 14 year olds to engage with speech radio is great, and if they call it a podcast that’s fine.

Q: Isn’t the BBC spending public money on an open-ended podcast trial, what is the accountability. And for Virgin, is that an issue?

Chris: Depends where you’re coming from really. We’re not creating new programmes, we’re offering ones we’ve already created so in some ways this is just distribution. It’s going out on FM, Sky, internet… so this is just distribution. We’re not going off and creating a whole new radio stations unapproved.

Q: But you’re doing a news blog.

Chris: Which is great value for money for the tax payer.

Q: But what about Little Britain. You don’t podcast that.

Chris: But there are all sorts of rights issues.

In terms of open-ended, it is a very strictly controlled trial. We’re offering 50 programmes and there is a start and an end point, and if you look at the impact on the market, look at iTunes, we are not dominating. We are doing pretty well, because we have an audience. But there’s great chance for education too. If you have Terry Wogan talking about podcasting, then that encourages people to get into it.

James: The web wouldn’t be the place it is today if the BBC weren’t involved. All of the broadcasters have to play together and pull in the same direction. That’s why all of us are on Sky, all of us are on DAB, on the internet. We all recognise the benefit of moving together.

I would also love to be in the position of having a guaranteed revenue, and to have a lot of lawyers, which the BBC has. But in terms of education they do a great job.

But how we earn money called, and sorry for this, called podverts. There are ads from large brands, some of them are doing it very interestingly, e.g. Bose selling speakers, bands selling music, and then the Special Constables advertising to people with a bit of spare time on their hands. Relevant media use. The money we’re earning out of podvertising is better than the pay-for route.

Q: How closely should a podcast resemble a radio show? Should it be as live?

Adam: There is something fundamental about this conversation which is the distribution. Trad broadcast have to pay for the spectrum, so these layers have been built up to create unwieldy organisational structures, and that’s reflected by the programmes you hear. It’ sin the DNA of the organisation. When you have unlimited space, you’re going to get art, and art creates all kinds of groups of people who like that particular art. So I don’t think there’s a good or a bad way to do it. I do my shows the way I want to do it. But there are at least 135 definable categories of formats in podcasting, and you may not want to listen to it all, but that’s beside the point.

Regarding podverts, we want content. And our audience wants content. I don’t sell ads on time. What if ads just became content? What does my audience want to hear? That’s where you create value for business models.

James: If you are trying to make a podcast that’s serious, but you sound like a poor version of Radio 4 that sounds like it’s been recorded in a cupboard, then that’s not going your brand any good. So how it should sound depends on what you are trying to do.

03.27.06
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Changing Media: Blogging

Understanding the commercial impact of blogging

Chair: Neil McIntosh

Hugh McLeod, EnglishCut.com

Guy Phillipson, Internet Advertising Bureau

Chris Price, Shiny Media

Simon Waldman, Guardian Unlimited

Simon: Blogs are have two sides, they are an R&D lab for things that come in the future. Blogs are a completely different way of publishing. Stuff starts as a blog then develops. the other strand is looking at how our reputation spreads across the web through bloggers. Our health online is dictated by the volume and state of conversation around our content.

Guy: Reputation management for brands. Net has empowered us all, and there are communities of people out there, and blogging embodies this new behaviour and if you play that to the end game you have to stay to what extent do you still own the brand? In the old days you put your messages up, and now consumers have their own voice to put their own views across. Should we take notice of bloggers? Yes, because they are a core audience.

Hugh: About a year ago I was kind of under-employed, and a friend of mine was one of the best tailors in Britain, but he decided to move to Cumbria where I live and he wasn’t getting work because his customers were all keeping him secret. So over a beer he told me about Saville Row, and I said he should blog it.

We build a blog called EnglishCut.com, where we talked about Saville Row suits and why you should want to pay £2500 for a suit. It did very well because suddenly we didn’t have to have a third party to tell our story. If you’ve got a blog relevant, and your market is a few thousand people, and you reach 100 a day, six weeks later you’ve reached them.

An editor of a newspaper promised to do an article, and the article never materialised, and if you have a bespoke product, and you’ve been reliant on the media to getting your word out, it’s interesting to me that that no longer needs to happen. Our market is 7000 people, and we get 200 new readers a day. What we’ve been able to do is have the conversation we want to have with the people we want to have it with, at a level far higher than any of the mainstream media can manage.

Neil: Self-promotion is genuine marketing. Can you attribute sales to the blog?

Hugh: I can attribute a 300% rise in sales in 6 months to the blog.

Neil: Chris?

Chris: There was a fear amongst some companies that blogs would damage their brand, but that’s not happening. We’ve done well on the tech, we bring traditional journalism values to blogging. We’ve had deals with Sony and Dyson, and we have someone full time who is talking to ad agencies.

Hugh: How long have they been receptive? They’ve been slow.

Chris: It’s a very recent thing. But it’s easier now we have someone to go and see them and talk about what we’re doing, and talk about us, say that we are about bringing editorial integrity to the brand.

Hugh: Is it hard to find new writers?

Chris: Not at all. There are people who want to express their feelings on stuff. There’s no shortage of great writers out there. They’re not necessarily journalists – this is a new skill.

Neil: Simon, what’s the benefit for big publishers?

Simon: There’s something about advertising in blogging. People are starting to think not so much of impressions, but of context. This is old-school media planning but it got lost in a blizzard of click-throughs. People are placing more value on targeted advertising. Fine to have great content, but need to have a level of engagement with your audience, and this is the new ecosystem, and understanding it is our challenge. We know how to publish a fixed and closed entity, and that’s where we started from, but things are moving to something which is more open, decentralised, but more challenging?

Guy: Yes, the engagement factor is the one that most people are trying to find out. Yes, the older model was ‘who can we reach online? where are they all?’, whereas now we need tighter, more targeted groups. Same with podcasting, so if someone’s doing a podcast on travel, then that’s a focused topic.

Chris: This is a key, it’s the level of interaction that you see on blogs. People want to interact with other readers, talk about their favourite shoes, that sort of thing. This is very attractive to advertisers.

Q: How do the panel feel about paying bloggers to blog? Is that a good relationship?

Hugh: I think it’s great. The more bloggers get paid the better.

Simon: We have an element of that with Comment is Free, where some of the content is paid. It’s the people we choose as contributers who get paid, same as we do with normal contributors.

Chris: Shiny Media, we have a policy of paying all our writers. It may not be NUJ rates, it’s certainly not paying by the 1000 words, but we are paying them a monthly wage in some cases, and we’ve steadily seen the amount we can pay go up. We’re obviously not paying commenters, but we are paying bloggers.

Guy: Big lesson in the States was Ain’t It Cool, who was a film blog, and it became so popular it affected sales of films, so they started wining and dining him to try to improve the comments he’d make. Should you employ a blogger to make good comments? Well, be very careful. If you fake it, you will be found out. But a good balanced blog, where the blogger can put over their own point of view, could be a good thing.

Q: Like most bloggers I have no idea how to measure my success, but I get more visitors than Steve Bowbrick. I’m a fanatical Guardian reader, but I can’t link to Media Guardian because I need to register.

Simon: Because we’re a business, we register. You can link to it but people need to register to read. It’s only one sliver so I think it’s reasonable. We understand these issues, and we have to balance these things, but this is enabling us to grow as a business.

Chris: This is a dilemma that most trad publishers face. Do they risk cannibalising their own readership by making content free? I think the do, but this is not something we’ve had to deal with.

Q: What do the panel think about niche brands being better placed to blog than big business? Is the ‘pay for blogging’ issue really about transparency?

Guy: Big brands vs. new brands. Online is such a democratic medium that we can all enjoy the benefits. Niche brands, when someone has no visibility, so a small brand can sit next to a big brand on the same page, so there’s a bit opportunity. Low cost. Don’t have to do pay-per-click trick. But corporates really absolutely have to look at it, need to manage brands online. Can’t control it. But need to be aware of what’s being said.

Simon: Blogs are one of the few ways that large brands have of seeming at all human. Done correctly. You see some corp blogging and it’s just cringeworthy. Some, e.g. Sun, is done really well.

Neil: Hugh, blogging for big business, or secret blogging, astroturfing is risky business. What makes one set of blogs ok, and the others dangerous.

Hugh: Our model at English Cut is that we tell the truth. We just say this is what we’re trying to do, let’s have some fun with it. If you’re up front with what your intentions are, then I don’t think anyone has any

Chris: It’s about honesty and transparency.

Q: People are turning to RSS. What impact will that have on the commercial opportunities for blogging?

Simon: Blogging is about R&D. And decentralising through RSS, I can’t make up my mind about whether it’s great or a disaster. It fundamentally shifts our model. There’s no working example of how to deal with that. Some publishers,and agreggators are going to ahve to find a way to make that work. Great way to push content, but no one knows what impact it has on your audience. For everyone person it might brting in, it might stop someone else because they’ve scanned the headlines and don’t need to visit the site. Tricky. Not going to go away. Need to understand that model.

The interesting bit is whether, RSS will go two ways – either 1000 flowers will bloom, or you’ll get a default culture where a handful of feeds are put in to aggregators by default.

Q: Costs a lot to be a member of the IAB. When will you open that up to smaller people?

A: Do have a lot of small members, and we welcome more. But importantly we help advertisers make sense of the internet, and we are format agnostic, doesn’t matter if they are cars or retail or who they are.

Q: Do you talk more about your big members?

A: We talk more about formats, not about advertising on MSN or anything.

Q: People trying to own space.

Hugh: Practice. People will fail and will learn from that.

Chris: It’s neither possible nor desirable really. For big companies it’s about embracing the new technologies. So in the case of Scoble, they have to trust him not to slag off MS too much. Guardian is the same principle. The brands who buy advertising space can’t control the media, and they will try to manipulate it through PR

Simon: Owning a community is like owning a cat. You have to understand that it can leave at any moment. You have to show it a lot of love and affection and forgive it if it shits in your kitchen.

You have to work very hard with communities. When you are working hard, you know you are starting to get there.

03.27.06
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Changing Media: Digital Rights Managment

Can digital rights management achieve its security goals?

Chair: Nick Higham

Dr Ian Brown, UCL (and also ORG)

Nick Higham

ONe of the things that alarms content owners is what this new technology means for their copyright, their intellectual property, their security. Dr Ian Brown is a computer security researcher at UCL.

Ian Brown, UCL

I want to limit myself today to “will DRM do everything that they are sold as doing?”. There are much wider issues to do with DRM, but I want to focus on this specific area.

DRM is an umbrella term for quite a wide range of technologies that give content owners some control over their content. Some control, not full control – you certainly can’t expect to put your new Britney Spears CD out and not see it online within five minutes.

DRM is also not about copyright, because it goes further than copyright law. Copyright law also varies from area to area, for example there is no right to private copy in the UK, but yet people do it anyway. DRM goes further than trying to prevent this, but can control the way people access, print, and copy ebooks, for example.

DRM is present in Windows Media Player, Adobe e-books, RealPlayer, iTunes, etc.

French law which is saying that DRM has to be interoperable between platforms, e.g. can’t put iTunes music on a third party media player.

The basic tech behind DRM is simple – you encrypt the data in a way that is impossible to unscramble directly, even people with the computing power of major western governments. You give the encryption keys to the user via the medium of the media player, e.g. your DVD player has decryption keys so that it can decrypt DVDs. This controls access to the data of the files.

The other type of tech is digital watermarking, which allows people to embed information in audio and video files in a way that is invisible to the user, and hard to remove. Can embed information that controls when the media can be used, e.g. can only be played on computer with xyz ID. Also allows the media owners to track who copies stuff.

DRM is actually very difficult to do. Making it work overall as a system in the way that content owners would like, is a very difficult problem. Some of the underlying reasons for that:

– data is encrypted, but has to be decrypted at some point so you can use it. So at some point your tech has to decrypt it and create an unprotected version of that content.

– watermarks can be removed. All of the watermarks that have been created are fairly primitive and have been a failure. People trying to break these technologies find it easy, and there are fundamental reasons why this is easy – if you distribute a file which is on the one hand the same – all Britney Spears CDs that are the same – but have individual bits that are different, can compare and find the watermark.

– DRM tries to reduce the functionality of your computer as regards specific streams of data, but old equipment doesn’t have the DRM on it, so legacy computers are going to be more functional than new ones.

Previous DRM solutions:

– secure digital music initiative: was tested against world’s hackers, and the hackers won. One research team in Princeton broke all of the proposed technologies. Most sensible companies would have rethought it, but instead STMI tried to sue the academics that had done this work, the conference organisers, etc. The researchers gave a press conference saying that they weren’t going to publish the research because their houses are at risk. STMI said they had broken the DMCA. Researchers got support and published the research anyway.

– CD protection: several record labels have released CDs that play on your hifi but not your computer. Most of these techs are trivially circumvented – one you hold down the shift key as you put the CD in, or draw a black line round your CD. Would have been illegal to tell you this 2 years ago – now it’s only illegal to tell you how to break software DRM.

– CSS: broken by a Norwegian teenager who was arrested under trespass law, so the courts threw it out.

– Sony BMG (XCP and MediaMax): big news over last few months. Sony BMG installed two DRM technologies, XCP from a UK company and used virus-like technology to embed itself deep in Windows. Very difficult to remove. After a lot of consumer protest, they released an uninstaller, which made things worse, and eventually they released something that did allow you to remove it. MediaMax installed even if you said no you didn’t want to install it, and reported back to MediaMax what audio files you use. Sony have had to settle a number of class action cases already. The US govt’s said don’t install it. Lots of gov’t computers infected, so the US gov’t not impressed.

So DRM is crap. But supposedly it will improve soon. Intel, IBM, HP etc. want to put this stuff into hardware. Trusted Computing.

Thinking about all sort of problems of getting round. MS want it everywhere – your computer, phone, PDA, even your watch.

– The analog hole is a big problem: No way not to turn digital bits into an analogue version for human consumption. Lots of ‘anti-piracy’ ads in cinemas because they can’t do anything about it.

– Break One Play Anywhere: Even if only one person in the world can break it, they’ll share it and you really can’t stop P2P. Napster originally weren’t designed with lawsuits in mind, but now they are and they are very difficult to shut down. Lots of networking technology that will stop this.

Some business models that DRM could support:

– Live events: you don’t care if it’s shared the next day, it’s live that counts.

– Highly select, time-sensitivie audiences, customised information provided to individual recipients, e.g. Oscar judges. Last year for the first time it was found that an Oscar screener was leaked, and the judge who leaked it was fined. Customised data that only needs protecting for a short time.

– Highly interactive systems, such as games. Even if someone breaks it, it doesn’t matter, because they can’t keep breaking it.

Very polarised debate.

Nick: So DRM is not workable?

Ian: Content companies have been mis-sold on this. Software companies have sold DRM as solving problems it can’t solve. As people come to understand the technology they see that it’s the business models that need to change.

Q: I agree that DRM is not unbreakable. But we don’t need it to be unbreakable. Can DRM be useful? I would say yes.

Ian: Yes, I think your good point is moot, because no one has produced a system that prevents low-quality copies. But it’s an anti-consumer technology. There aren’t many consumers who have an understanding of UK copyright law.

Nick: Consumers are happy to buy low quality. It’s not a disincentive.

Ian: Early Napster files were very low quality but they didn’t put people off.

Q: An observations, it’s a bit like the war against drugs. Entrenched position. What is stopping people exploring the possibility of radically new business models, and what might thos be?

Ian: The problem is that the big rights holders have expended a lot of energy in lobbying to get the law changed, global copyright law has changed, treaties have changed. They got the DMCA passed. The EUCD. US didn’t need to pass those laws to fit the treaties, but the copyright holders lobbied for it.

There are alternatives, there are indie labels that use non-DRM materials, and the market should be able to decide.

Nick: But the trouble is that sometimes the market can’t decide.

Ian: Well, that’s

Q: Consumer associations have expressed concerns about the rights of the citizens. Do you think their concerns are misplaced?

Ian: No. It doesn’t stop at deterring copyright infringers, it also makes life difficult for say, visually impaired people. RNIB gave evidence at APIG and said they have problems with ebooks.

Q (me): DRM lobbiests more into supporting vertical niche markets than protecting copyright.

Ian: Damaging to copyright law and public’s respect for it, this ‘newspeak’ that goes on around DRM. Industry make blood-curdling pronouncements, conflating opening up standards with protecting copyright which is very damaging.

I believe in copyright, but I don’t think DRM is the way to enforce it.

Q: What about revenue sharing?

Ian: I can’t talk about it in detail, but it’s a positive move. If you have legitimate P2P services, then yes, that might work.

This has always been the flip side to DRM – how do you make a business model not from scarce goods, but from abundance. Grateful Dead, for e.g., or U2 find their music is a loss-leader, and they make their money from merchandise.