-
Suw: “Insecurity is the norm. If any system — whether a voting machine, operating system, database, badge-entry system, RFID passport system, etc. — is ever built completely vulnerability-free, it’ll be the first time in the history of mankind.”
Yearly Archives: 2007
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
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.
Technorati Tags: Australia, Melbourne, publicbroadcasting, XMediaLab
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.
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.
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)
Let’s get ready to rumble
“Religion causes all wars.” Not my words, but only one of a number of provocative statements in a new series of ads Sky News is running to promote its online discussions. After these ‘fighting words‘, they ask: “Looking for an argument?”
My question to Sky News or any news organisation for that matter: Do you want an online community or fight club? Many online community experts use the pub as a metaphor. In this case, if Sky News was a pub, would they advertise: Come to Pub Sky. It’s a great place to fight.
But this seems to the be the strategy of a number of news organisations. They shout fire in a theatre, and then are strangely surprised and shocked as the audience turns into a mob. As news organisations, we bear some responsibility for the conversations we create. We cannot lay the blame solely at the feet of commenters on our sites when the conversation devolves into a shouting match, when we started the argument in the first place.
I’ve spoken with too many editors and online managers asking for technical solutions for crowd control while they never consider modifying their editorial approach. As I’ve said before, shiny tools won’t save you from the trolls, and they won’t save you from chatroom brawls of your own making.
Now, in the binary world of journalistic arguments, I can hear editors saying that I’m advocating bland conversations. No, no my black-and-white-world friends, there is a huge range of possibility between blandness and the type of simplistic provocation that I see in these adverts and in so many shout-y headlines.
Just think of how you would respond if someone came and shouted in your face. What would your likely response be? Most likely it won’t be a pleasant conversation or interesting debate.
Where’s your innovation?
This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages, but Neil McIntosh’s post about the closure of The Economist‘s skunk works, Project Red Stripe, has finally prodded me into action.
Project Red Stripe was a small team of six Economist employees who were given £100,000 and asked to “develop something that is innovative and web-based and bring it to market” within six months. They brought in outside experts to talk to the group and solicited ideas, from Economist readers and the wider blogosphere, which they then “evaluate[d …] against a set of criteria that the Project Red Stripe team have predetermined”.
Unfortunately, the idea that they came up with wasn’t really one that The Economist could see a way to earn any money out of. Project Lughenjo was described as:
[A] web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.
It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.
Announced only four weeks ago, it has now had the plug pulled.
Neil, in his response to this turn of events, rightly questions whether ‘profitable’ is the only definition of success, and points out that innovation isn’t always radical and that a single innovation’s success can be, instead of based on it’s own performance in isolation, a result of its position within a group of innovative components that are profitable only in the aggregate. He says:
The lessons for news organisations? We needn’t make innovation hard by insisting the end product is always huge and/or high-profile. We shouldn’t think that innovation is something that can be outsourced, either to a small team or to a software vendor (the latter being a surprisingly popular choice for many newspaper publishers).
And we needn’t necessarily worry that we’re not having enough ideas. If you ask around, you’ll probably find it’s not ideas we’re lacking. What’s tricky (I know – this is my job) is capturing the best ideas, mapping them to strategic goals, and delivering them in a way that makes them successful.
To do that, you need innovators who understand the importance of baby steps and can deliver them, one after the other, regular as clockwork. And, unlike Red Stripe, you can make their life easier by making sure they’re not locked away from the rest of the business, worrying about a blank sheet of paper and a mighty expectation from the mother ship that, somehow, they’ll be able to see the future from there.
Neil also links to Jeff Jarvis, who says:
[T]hey ended up, I think, not so much with a business but with a way to improve the world. Their idea, “Lughenjo,” was described in PaidContent as “a community connecting Economist with non-governmental organizations needing help – ‘a Facebook for the Economist Group’s audience.’ ” It wasn’t intended to be fully altruistic; they thought there was a business here in advertising to these people, maybe. But still, it was about helping the world. And therein lies the danger.
I saw this same phenomenon in action when, as a dry run for my entrepreneurial course, I asked my students at the end of last term what they would do with a few million dollars to create something new in journalism. Many of them came up with ways to improve the world: giving away PCs to the other side of the digital divide, for example. Fine. But then the money’s gone and there’s not a new journalist product to carry on.
This gives me hope for the essential character of mankind: Give smart people play money and they’ll use it to improve the lots of others. Mind you, I’m all for improving the world. We all should give it a try.
But we also need to improve the lot of journalism. And one crucial way we’re going to do that is to create new, successful, ongoing businesses that maintain and grow journalism. We need profit to do that.
A very good point. Altruism isn’t really what’s needed, and it doesn’t necessarily equate to innovation (although in rare cases, it does – think of the $100 laptop project).
It’s not just newspapers
One thing that’s really important is to remember that the problems that The Economist have with innovation also face many other businesses in many different sectors. I see, for example, the PR industry just storing up trouble, the way that they have segmented themselves in to different agency types such as creative, print, TV, or online. I don’t think that any company can afford to segment its PR and marketing like that, let alone an entire industry. How can the situation where your creative team is separate from your online team – and those teams are run by different companies – be a good way to keep abreast of technology, to understand and grasp the opportunities? If a creative agency has an idea for online, how will they be able to implement it if online is run by someone else who is actually in competition. Now, maybe I’m misunderstanding the way that the PR world works, but that’s how it looks to me on the outside: like built-in failure.
(More…)
links for 2007-08-04
-
Suw: Facebook’s been having a bit of a bumpy ride lately, what with the inbox mixup and the court case.
-
Suw: Sometimes I think that Second Life has more in common with IRC than anything else. One day, I’ll blog that thought and explain why.
Instant visualisation for bridge data in the US
I was looking for a way to map the connections to Strange Attractor, and I stumbled upon this visualisation tool from IBM called Many Eyes. A couple of clicks later, and I found this amazing visualisation looking at the status of bridges in the US, an interesting and dynamic way to look at data in the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse. I’ve often thought that news organisations are missing a trick by not making greater use of data visualisation and rich information graphics. Give it a click. The graph dynamically changes as you roll over it. I also think it’s an interesting way to have people look for patterns in large sets of information, and I think graphics like this could be a great launching point for discussions. (Only one thing I might suggest to the folks at IBM, another go at their Blog This button. Maybe it’s just Ecto being a bit weird, but the formatting could be a little more straightforward.)
