Monthly Archives: August 2007

08.10.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Keren Flavell, SLCN.TV

The main theme of X|Media|Lab was virtual worlds, and one of the most well known is Second Life.

Keren Flavell is with SLCN – the Second Life Cable Network, which broadcasts programmes from Second Life or events in SL.

She is a strong believer in SL and talked about the empathy that people feel as an avatar. SLCN broadcast a presentation by an education consultant Intellagirl Tully about how distance learning attendance rates had increased to 100% since moving to SL because it was clear that you were there or you weren’t. Intellagirl Tully argued that SL provided a unique way to provide community and engagement for students.

Keren also showed how film companies were using SL to promote films and highlighted the launch events for Die Hard 4 and Transformers. Die Hard fans could jump into poses on virtual film sets based on the films, and Bruce Willis took questions from residents in SL.

SL residents feel a strong sense of involvement with the virtual world, and she showed town hall meetings in SL where residents were fighting for their rights. People are creating newspapers in SL. She also argued that virtual worlds were satisfying human needs that 2D social networks don’t.

They produce a programme called S’Life about goings on in SL and a talk show called Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe, satisfying a lifelong dream for her. They remove the obstacles to creation for residents in SL, she said. They also allow SL residents to play the role of sports broadcasters by calling hockey games or car races in game. “We feel we’re filling an important role in the burgeoning SL community,” Keren said. Marshall McLuhan was right when he said:

Instead of directly experiencing each other and nature, citizens of information societies share the world through media.

We all know that we’re operating in an attention economy. Google and YouTube are succeeding because they generate benefit for everyone who participates, and Keren said that was the model for SLCN.

08.10.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Tom Kennedy with Belong

Broadband is driving significant social change, said Tom, the director of digital at Belong. He rubbished the state of broadband in Australia, but he pointed to how his daughter and his wife were laughing in their living room as they watched video from YouTube.

• We are being saturated with new channels of information, and people are trying to adapt/shoehorn old media models into new realities.

• Consumers are now at the heart of the proposition. They are active not passive.

• The business of media is seeing rapid changing. TV still dominates, but it’s adapting. Newspapers and radios didn’t die as television started.

• People want to belong. They want to be part of something.

Mobile handsets now have 100% market penetration. Growth in the next five years will be from 3G services, and in the next few years 33% of users will be using 3G. The mobile phone is now a portable computing platform. It is more than a phone. You can browse the web, take pictures and shoot video. You can send e-mail and even do instant messaging.

Mobile is primed for personalised marketing, but permission-based marketing is key in mobile. You can’t interrupt people when they don’t want to be interrupted.

‘Intimacy’ of communication fuels communities. The devices are all interconnected.

It is not about the technology. It is what people are using the technology for.

Even though Big Brother’s audience in Australia went down 15%, voting went up.

The barriers to this is the high cost of data on handsets. It is killing each of our business models. He called data charges criminal. Consumer bill shock is real. The walled garden approach still dominates on mobile.

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08.09.07
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Google News, now with added comments

On Tuesday, Google quietly announced that they have added commenting functionality to Google News (US only), but with, as they put it, “a bit of a twist”:

We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as “comments” so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report.

[…] we’re hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that — whether they’re penguin researchers or presidential candidates– a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.

Google are starting off with the very old-school tactic of asking for comments to be emailed to them, along with:

– A link to the story you are commenting on
– Your contact details: your name, title, and organization
– How we can verify your email address.

Because:

It is important that we are able to verify your identity, so please include clear instructions with your comment. If further information is needed, we will follow-up over email.

You can see a (rather dull) example of the new comments in action on this Google News link, a listing for an Arizona Republic article (syndicated from Bloomberg News), Kids: Food in McDonald’s wrappers taste better. The article says that a Stanford University study found that McDonald’s packaging makes pre-school children think that chicken nuggets, hamburgers and fries taste better.

The first comment is from Walk Riker, VP, McDonalds’s corporate comms, and is the sort of predictable corporate whitewash that you’d expect from McDonald’s. The second comment is from Dr Vic Strasburger, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, University of New Mexico, who discusses the problem with allowing advertising to small children.

Google have said that they’re limiting comments initially to “actual participants in the story in question”, but they seem to mean “anyone quoted or referenced in any of the stories in a cluster”, because Dr Strasburger is not mentioned in the Arizona Republic article, but is mentioned in a related Time article. That’s potentially quite a tangle of “actual participants” to sort out, and it looks like comments that refer to a specific article will end up getting lumped in with all the other comments on all related articles. Hardly the clear, transparent, relevant use of comments that we’ve become used to with blogs.

But I think that rule is deeply flawed, anyway. One of the things that frustrates me most about the media is their propensity to publish industry press releases seemingly in toto, without any balancing views. In these cases, it’s important that people not quoted in the story be able to comment in order to balance out poor or biased journalism. By only allowing the previously quoted to comment, Google News are, as the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart once said about MSM blogs, “giving a voice to the already voiced”.

I also wonder about the feasibility of scaling up full comment moderation. Google News is tracking 4,500 sources and linking to thousands of articles, just one comment on each is going to create a massive workload for the moderators. Even normal moderation of comments on a medium-sized media website is highly onerous, so much so that many news sites prefer the “report abuse” approach, rather than have to moderate each comment as it comes through. The volume of comments can be just huge, and if you add in verification of the commenter’s identity, you open up a whole new can of worms.

For starters, what type of verification are they going to do? Validating that a commenter is actually a human being is the most common sort of verification, and it’s pretty easy. KittenAuth can help you with that. Validating that a person is who they say they are is slightly trickier – people do have this nasty habit of pretending to be other people, and they can be really quite good at it. How far is Google going to go to make people prove that they are who they say they are, just so that they can leave a comment on a news article?

Once your identity has been satisfactorily verified by Google, and they’ve ascertained that you were at some point mentioned by a journalist in one of the articles that’s been clustered together as related, then you get to comment. I can see the logic behind this – Google thinks that if you are commenting under your real name, you’ll somehow be more responsible and provide a higher quality of comments. Sorry Google, it doesn’t work like that. Businesses will simply spin their corporate line, just like McDonald’s did, and individuals will still be capable of showing horrible lapses of judgement over what they think is suitable for public consumption. Putting a name against a comment doesn’t guarantee that that comment will be high-quality, or even factually correct. It just means it’s got a name against it.

I wonder if they are going to moderate the content of the comments too? I should imagine they would have to. If comments are to be “published in full, without any edits”, then they will have to delete anything which could be seen as libellous, defamatory or obscene, because otherwise they are at risk of legal action. What about comments that are just a bit sweary? I guess they’ll go too.

However, I’d bet good money that factually inaccurate, ill-concieved or woo-woo-based comments will get published without a problem, along with all the whitewash, propaganda, hype, disinformation and spin. And because, of course, only “participants” are eligible to comment, no one else will be able to debunk the nonsense that gets published.

Overall, I can’t say that I’m impressed by this – it’s both too messy and too orderly. It’s too messy because comments on different articles will all be bundled up in one heap and attached to the news cluster, thwarting any attempt to understand the real context within which the comment was made. And too orderly because only the incumbents get to take part – they are given the opportunity to make and remake their points, but the wider community doesn’t. Will this breed a good debate? I doubt it very much indeed.

08.09.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Brian Gruber, Fora.tv

Brian Gruber is doing an overview of online video, and “as a Jew, I’ll do the 10 commandments of online video”.

He introduced Fora.TV. The site starts with a very simple premise: We aggregate the best public event content in the world whether business conferences, arts and culture events. The content started off with mostly US content but is increasingly international. They have some impressive content partners including C-Span, indy bookstores like Politics and Prose, publications like Foreign Policy magazine and think tanks.

10 rules for online video:

  1. Banality will win out – Paris Hilton, YouTube, 50 years of LCD. There are 4000 videos of YouTube of men lighting their farts. We have 50 years of building our schedule around the idea of scarcity.
  2. Filters make the good stuff easier to find. Search engines. Forwarded (or recommended) content. Content aggregator sites. “Infinite Choice=Overwhelming Confusion
  3. Shift in value to aggregators. Declining production costs has led to a vast increase in content sources. Need for new filters.
  4. Technology drives down costs. The cost of shooting, posting and delivery are in decline.
  5. From destination to hyper-syndication. There is a shift from ‘my site’ to being an open presence. We’re going from control of the user to a viral network. Fora.tv have developed a range of content partners.
  6. My competitors are my collaborators. We were worried about YouTube. They put a three-minute clip of their longer form content on YouTube. Take a bit, put it on YouTube. They do ad revenue sharing with YouTube. C-SPAN (the US cable industry’s public affairs network). TED distributes their content on Fora. Media sites, such as Salon, give them free promotion.
  7. Go Global. We don’t want to be a US-centric site. We want global audiences because we’re going after global ad brands. On Christmas week, their highest sources of traffic was Teheran and Riyadh. They are looking to global sources and ‘ideas that transcend borders’.
  8. Media consumption is not only about viewing but also about participating. They show you related content so if you find content that appeals to you. They also chapterise the content. He showed a presentation of a conversation between Brian Eno and Will Wright about Spore. (Suw wants to know what’s happening with Spore. Anybody know?)

    They also have a transcript search. Click on the search results and the video jumps to that spot. Wow. You can download video formats such as mp4 for iPod or PSP or a PDF transcript. You can also, of course, link or embed the player. Even the embedded player has the chapter, search and transcript features.
  9. The FORA Ecosystem. Brilliant ideas. Content partners and tools for participating and navigating.
  10. It’s a wonderful life. He studied interactive media years ago but only now is the reality that his professors promised becoming real.

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08.09.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Jason Roks, the Real News

Real News is a non-corporate, non-government funded news organisation. They rely on a $10 a month donation. I’m just going to link the video on YouTube. There are some pretty heavy hitters behind this project: Gore Vidal, Tom Fenton and Robert McChesney, just to name a few.

Jason is a technical advisor, and instead of talking about the editorial proejct, he wanted to show the technology that makes this possible. RealNews is done by print journalists with video elements added to the stories. Distribution is an important part of the equation. Jason mentioned about the network caps, and there was a knowing laugh from the audience. It sounds as if the models in Australia is similar to the UK in that you can have fast broadband, but many accounts are capped at only a few gigabytes per month.

Flash 9 video and peering help RealNews, and MPEG-4 has become the standard.

He then touched on User-Generated Distribution. The next step beyond user-generated content will be recommenders or as Malcolm Gladwell called them, the connectors. He demonstrated an XML feeds and a service called OnYa. (Jason e-mailed me to let me know that Onya was just an internal code name. A similar service is set to launch soon.) They have built scrapers that go through 200 video sites online. People can search those sites and create a custom channels via XML. They can publish the XML files to Apple TV or Windows Media Player.

He finished with a video about Net Neutrality. SaveTheInternet.com

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08.09.07
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X|Media|Lab: Kim Dalton, head of TV with Australian Broadcast

There is a tectonic shift, said Kim Dalton, head of TV with the Australian Broadcast Company. At ABC, we are in the business engaging audiences of creating communities. Audiences come together around content, and communities come together around ideas. (The ABC press office has the full speech online.)

In the analogue world, Australians saw Australian content. In the digital world, the analogue model is under threat. He returned to this threat not only to the analogue model but also the public policy that had supported it and Australian content.

We have three ideas around TV. There is the TV as a device. The device is the centre of battle between broadcasters and telcos. Alternative devices are proliferating with PCs, PVRs and DVDs, but the TV still holds place.

The second idea is TV as content from documentaries and drama and new forms like reality-based shows. The third idea is TV as a revenue model. Australian public policy has created and maintained a specific revenue model, a model that is under threat.

Time and place shifting is tipping the balance to deliver a very personalised TV experience. A significant part of networked content will be delivered online. There are those who question the place and role of a public broadcaster in the new digital world.

He rigorously defended the public broadcasting model and the ABC as part of the national conversation. He said it was part of the social glue. Public broadcasting provided a place for Australian voices and stories across platforms. The ABC played the role of the trusted guide and voice and also an innovator. He said that there have have been 5.3m downloads of ABC content this year. Online was especially good for children’s programming.

They are moving to multiplaftorm content and communities. And he returned to this idea of Australian content. Australia is a small, English-speaking country that might not support domestically-created content without public policy support. The media debate is dominated by commercial interests, he said.

And he seemed to be arguing for an extension of that public policy model into the digital world to maintain the availability of Australian content on digital platforms.

He presented some interesting statistics that showed that TV viewing was up with the over-40 audience (zTam figures). With youth, they were doing a lot of activities concurrently such as listening to music (their number one leisure time activity) and going online (the fifth most popular activity). Their second most favourite activity was watching TV and hanging out with friends.

He argued for a continued role of the ABC as a provider of free, national content, but he said that ABC needed to change how it measured success. Their content was available on a number of platforms including airports, airplanes, DVDs and on demand. Silos had to be broken down in the organisation. People had to think and cooperate differently. Where do they need to save money, where can they make money and where can they allocate resources.

Quoting publicity material for the X|Media|Lab, he said, of content is king, the king is dead, and the audience is a new sovereign, but he said that this was an over-simplication. The analogue public policy model that ensured Australian content had to move forward and keep the same assurances in the digital era.

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08.09.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Shekhar Kapur, film director

Some very interesting comments coming out of this discussion with film director Shekhar Kapur. He was asked what would happen in the near future when 15% of the world’s teenagers will be in India. He predicted that in the near future, 75% of new media revenues will come from Asia. He said that a future installation of the Spiderman series would gross a billion dollars in its first weekend with $750m of that from Asia, and when Spiderman takes off his mask, he would probably be Chinese. The future YouTube’s of Asia would have one billion users.

He is putting together a major media fund to take advantage of the huge opportunity he sees in Asia. He says that the fund will invest in a cross-Asian media eco-system. He wants to unlock working capital to go into research and development. The West sees Asia as a market and a cheap labour market, but he was talking about using this billion dollar fund to create a value-added economic engine.

Virgin Comic and Animation, which he co-founded, is now working to develop comics based on Asian heroes and stories. Once they develop successful comics, just as Marvel has done, these comics can be spun off into movies and games.

He is advising the government of Singapore, and he asked: Can Singapore become a hub of entertainment of the East? He can’t see an Indian director feeling comfortable in Shanghai or a Chinese director comfortable in Mumbai, but with the multi-cultural nature of Singapore, he can see directors from across Asia coming to Singapore.

To predict the future, he said that the question is not to worry about the direction of technologies but the future of social behaviour. The world is flowing, and the business models need to adapt to this.

You can’t be outside the community and form businesses.

Closing note from me: I had never travelled in Asia until recently, but in my two trips here in the last month or so, Asia sees itself as the future.

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08.09.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Dale Herigstad and new television

There was no WiFi in the hall at X|Media|Lab so I’m going to tidy up these posts and publish them over the next few days. The day started with Dale Herigstad with Schematic.

Dale Herigstad, the Chief Creative Officer with Schematic, has done with work with the BBC and iTV, and he wanted to talk about the ‘new television’.

Rich digital content on any screen, any where.

He talks about distance in terms of different types of video experiences, from the 3-10 foot traditional experience to the 2-foot experience on computers, iPhones or personal video players. He also talked about the 200 foot experience on large screens – either movie screens or large public spaces.

He moved through different types of paradigms from print, photography, television and film and now interactive media. Schematic works with EA Sports in Vancouver. He talked about pre-game space – the things that happen before the game actually loads. They are bringing in live feeds from ESPN ticker and video streams on an internet connected XBox 360. Broadband content is always in the game space. On the left hand of the basketball game is the interface for the game itself, but on the right hand is broadband-delivered, real-time ESPN sports content. The line between the game and traditional video content is blurred.

Dale talked about ‘new time’, about navigating not only by channel but also the line between now and next, between programming that is on air at the moment and ‘catch up watching’. Further back there is the archive, and further in the future, there is the promotional material.

He showed the blending of programmed content on discs – whether that is games or HD-DVDs – with dynamic IP content coming in over a broadband connection. He showed off the Miami Vice HD-DVD, which featured a live interface to Google Earth embedded in the player so that you could track the characters as they moved through the real world of Miami. But he emphasised that this was not simply embedding a web browser or web application into the DVD or cable TV experience. This was elegantly placing live, real-time information objects in the interface.

The content can also be advertorial content, and he showed off Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. You could ‘click’ on the phone that he was using in the film and see ordering information. At the end of the film, you could see your shopping cart or bookmarks in the film.

Schematic also did work with Microsoft Surfaces and a connected XBox 360 to navigate programming. The programmes all had additional information such as who had been ‘fired’ from the Apprentice. He showed off some prototypes for ABCs on demand player. They not only had the programmes, but they also had interactive ads embedded in streams, understanding that people using on-demand video also would expect interactive ads.

In closing, Dale said: New time. New space and new opportunities.

Postscript: Dale works with Ball State University on design for new television interfaces. He says that he also has a lot of ideas about news projects and presentation. I’m going to try to catch up with him over coffee and brainstorm.

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08.08.07
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Speaking at X|Media|Lab Melbourne

Ideally, I should have blogged about this earlier, but I wanted to mention that I’ll be speaking at X|Media|Lab in Melbourne Australia this Friday. The theme is Digital Worlds: Social, Mobile, Virtual. Good news if you are able to make it, they have changed venue and have some more tickets available. I’ll be speaking about how what mass media companies need to do to become social media companies. I’ll be blogging the conference here and also on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder media blog. The rough schedule on Friday is:

9.30am Session One: Digital Worlds

Kevin Anderson

Head of Blogging and Interaction, The Guardian

(London)

Kim Dalton

Director of Television, Australian Broadcasting

Corporation (Sydney)

Dale Herigstad

Four times Emmy Award Winner, and Winner of the

inaugural Interactive Emmy Award (Los Angeles)

Shekhar Kapur

Film Director, Co-Founder Virgin Comics and Virgin

Animation (London/Mumbai)

11.30am Session Two: Online Video

Liz Heller

CEO and Co-founder Buzztone Inc (Los Angeles)

Marcelino Ford-Livene

General Manager, Interactive Content, Services

and Advertising Development, Intel Digital Home

Group; Governor of Interactive Media, Academy of

Television, Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles)

Brian Gruber

Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer,

FORA.tv (San Francisco)

Jason Roks

Advisory Board Member, The Real News

(www.therealnews.com) (Ontario)

1.30pm Session Three: Mobile Communities

Francisco Cordero

General Manager Australia/NZ, Bebo

(London, Sydney)

Jennifer Lewis

Editor, STOMP (Singapore)

Martha Ladly

Director, Mobile Experience Design, Mobile

Experience Lab (Toronto)

Tom Kennedy

Director, Digital, Belong Group, Australia’s Leading

Digital Interactive Communications Company; Chair

of the Digital Content Action Agenda Experts Group

and Australian Film Commissioner (Australia)

Martin Hoffman

CEO, Loop Mobile (Sydney)

3.30pm Session Four: Virtual Worlds

Dr David Liu

Founder and President, Cyber Recreation District

(Beijing)

Jason Romney

General Manager, Innovation, Telstra BigPond

(Sydney)

Lizbeth Goodman

Director, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, University

of East London (London)

Keren Flavell

Executive Producer, SLCN.TV (Melbourne)

Bruce Joy

Founder, VASTPARK, Australia’s own virtual worlds

platform (Melbourne)