Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

08.28.07
by

Trying to fit a square ‘news peg’ into a round hole

Today, l received a call from a BBC producer – I’ll leave out which BBC outlet – who wanted to discuss a story on the next generation internet. It was loosely based on an Associated Press story that Japan was going to fund research for new network technology to “replace the Internet to tackle growing quality and security problems”. The producer said that the US Congress had so far not funded such research, and that Japan was the first government to fund the research for what she initially called ‘Internet 2’.

I said, no it isn’t. The Internet 2 project in the United States has been up and running since the mid-90s. She countered that Japan was the first government to fund such a project. No, it isn’t. The NSF in the US and CERN in Europe have been funding similar work for years. And last I looked, the NSF was a US government agency so to say that the US Congress hadn’t allocated specific funding might be true, but to say that no such government funding exists in the US is false.

The AP article itself – at least the one that I found on the International Herald Tribune site – was really poorly written with some basic factual errors, but all it would have taken was a quick Google on ‘internet 2’ or ‘next generation internet’ to uncover a number of such projects, either proposed or already in place. CERN built the first intercontinental 10-Gigabet ethernet WAN in 2005. And really, some would say that the next generation internet is already being deployed in the form of IPv6. The Chinese CERN has been touting their IPv6 project since 2004. And the project that Japan is talking about sounds eerily familiar to the Global Environment for Networking Investigations initiative announced in 2005 and again funded by the NSF.

After a while, the producer admitted that she didn’t know about all of these things and didn’t know much about the story, but just wanted to have a discussion about what the next generation internet might look like for consumers.

This happens in tech news all the time: A story comes up which is not news to anyone in the industry, but is news to a producer with no background in tech. That’s fair enough. It’s a specialist subject and it can take time for stories to acquire interest to the non-tech literate, but what really put me off taking part is that the producer had done so little preparation apart from reading a really brief AP story.

The problem is that this isn’t isolated to technology coverage. I know that as a journalist, we’re mostly generalists and are called on to report on a wide range of topics. But a quick internet search and some basic research can give most journalists what they need, and it would have most likely made this producer aware that there was ‘no there, there’. It was a flimsy ‘news peg’ based on a lot of inaccurate information.

In the end, I declined to take part in the dicussion. It made me really uncomfortable that although her facts were wrong, that she still wanted to run with the segment. I know she’s got 24 hours to fill, but this is a point of ethics. No journalist should be setting up a piece based on a flimsy premise or, worse, false information.

These kind of false discussions happen quite often. As a matter of fact, I am tired of the media being a controversy-creation industry. Suw and I have written about it in terms of technology or science coverage, but this also happens in social and current affairs journalism. But hey, why let the facts stand in the way of a good story?

08.27.07
by

TV is from Mars, the Internet is from Venus

After a day at Un-festival, attendees reported back to the main festival about the discussions and demonstrations. Suw moderated the panel.

Paul Cleghorn: Tape it off the Internet (TIOTI)

Chris Jackson: freelance broadcast tech and strategy consultant, Simsocast.com

Rosie Brown: TV producer (didn’t quite catch all that Rosie does)

Hannu Rajaniemi, with ThinkTank Mathematics

Ian Forrester: BBC Backstage

Suw kicked off the discuss by asking Paul about Tape it off the Internet.

Paul Cleghorn: TIOTI uses a traditional EPG feed for core meta-data (from Tribune), but they cross reference this information with places where people can download these shows. They are looking to make this (information about the programmes) extendable by allowing users to edit it. People can add to the limited programme listings.

Suw: You are pulling in a lot of sources of data. This isn’t just licenced data.

Paul: We’re going into various commercial services and TV websites. We connect that up with general information about the TV show. We’re hoping that to structure that into an open data source.

Paul talked yesterday about creating their own micro-format for television data.

Chris Jackson: You can turn it on or you can choose actively to see a show. You had to do quite a lot of searching. Now we have many other opportunities. Who should own the data? The broadcasters? The broadcaster or the content creator should put this out. The BBC has put out some data. It would be good if there was something like a wikipedia.

Suw: What are the benefits to programme makers?

Chris Jackson: Television has always been open.It’s important to keep it open. That is the best chance for them to get an audience. Most broadcasters don’t allow you to use that information unless you pay them or their agents. There are tremendous beneifts about getting people to watch your show.

Suw: What about the social tools around TV scheduling?

Paul: When it comes to broadcasters mixing it up with the community, you have people doing fan sites. People want to do this. Broadcasters might not. But you see the power of communities around programmes.

(He gave the example of Lost.)

Hannu: There is a huge opportunity to create recommendation engines.

Chris: There are people who like the Amazon system of last.fm system. But there are also great systems to build to see what your friends are watching. It’s an easy way to watch what your friends are watching.

(Last year at IBC, I saw a mockup by a major set-top box maker that showed a proof of concept allowing people to navigate through related material being broadcast at that moment or in the near future, material recorded on the hard disc of the set top box and also see what their friends are watching. This is an idea that will be part of mainstream technology in the near future.)

Suw: I want to talk about Zattoo. They are rebroadcasting live broadcast streams online. They are broadcasting live streams over the internet. It’s more interesting for what they can’t do than what they do. We are seeing a chilling effect by the licencing machine. Rosie, do you agree?

Rosie:We all know that there are a lot of people out there who are breaking the rules.

Ian: The quesitons to Zattoo were very telling. Can you time shift? No. Well, there are a lot of services that allow you to time shift.

Chris: There are quite a few contradictions with licencing. With a little playing, you could archive all of primetime video broadcast for a month on less than a $1000 worth of hard drive. With the iPlayer, you are limited. When you record over the air, you have a lot fewer restrictions than if you use the broadcasters’ download player.

Suw: You can see it as a threat or an opportunity. How do we communicate from the technology community to the broadcasting community that this is not a threat but an opportunity.

Ian: That’s why we’re sitting here. I would like to sit down for an hour with broadcasters.Her’s the legal way, here’s the illegal way. But how do you communicate the opportunity without talking to people?

Rosie: The broadcast community is a creative opportunities. They are probably not interested in the technology. But there are stories that can be told in new ways that are so exciting. If you aren’t reaching out and grabbing with this both hands, then you are mad.

Suw: In the podcast, people talked about how immersive, but Zattoo said that people want to watch video while they are doing other things. It’s very easy to get caught up that there is one way that people watch TV. There is a broader perspective than that.

Chris: I think that games are in between TV and the computer. You don’t want to come home after a long day at work and play on computer.

Suw: This brings us to the alternate reality games of Licorice Film called Meigeist. There were blogs, videos on YouTube. They branched out from online into SMS. The characters would ring some of the players. There were events where players could meet actors in character.

Rosie: What fascinated me about that was that people didn’t need to get involved but they could. It was designed to work on the internet, video over the internet, and other platforms. It was designed to do all of those things. It was not TV taken onto the internet.

Hannu: We’re bringing new levels of location awareness into mobile games, experiences with lost bring lots of interactivity. It is not just TV repackaged into other forms. If TV does have a future, it about increasing levels of interaction.

They briefly discussed the nature of the shared experience of television and then quickly turned to the reduced costs of experimentation.

Rosie: We don’t have to wait for 6m pounds and see what happens in a year. We can do something by next year. You can take continual feedback. You don’t have to take big risks.

Ian: I recently talked to someone who spent 650,000 pounds 125,000 pounds on a trailer, and put it up on the internet and wondered why no one was watching. That was a huge risk to take. CORRECTION from Ian: It was 125,000 pounds 🙂 650,000 would just be stupid 🙂 (What do people normally pay for a TV or film trailer?)

Paul: For a long time TV was the most efficient way to deliver an audience to advertisers. Now, you can do it much more efficiently on the internet.

Chris: I think there needs to be a bit of a disclaimer. Great TV content still costs a lot.

Suw: We are used to think about thinking of an audience in terms of quantity, not in terms of quality.

(She talked about the blog Treonaut that focused on the Palm Treo attracted a lot of people interested in the smart phone, and Palm and third party companies developing software, peripherals and accessories for the Treo knew to advertise there to reach Treo users.)

Hannu: To bring the nature of mathematics and social networks, there are key nodes in the community. There are key hubs in any community that drive the whole community forward.

Ian: There is this trend of giving bloggers a product. People who write that blog are the centre of this huge community.

Suw: What was the one highlight?

Ian: Hard. TIOTI. Following TIOTI for a while. To see how far it comes, to see legal and illegal content in the same place is amazing.

Paul: It’s not illegal in some countries.

Paul: The highlight for me was Trusted Places and the amateur videos.

Chris: I was interested in the range of expertise.

Rosie: I was struck by the gulf between the broadcast industry and the technology people. I was hoping that events like it could bridge the chasm. I was excited about the level of engagement. People didn’t just sit there. I think that every project there got moved on. It was so fast and so exciting.

From audience: There are two parallel culture. The higher you up in TV organisations, fewer geeks. People who barely can do email. TV is a lot more competitive. Internet is a lot more collaborative. You’re going to have to go to them. It could lead to a new era of cyber-docs (documentaries) or cyber-dramas. There is an embarrassment about their lack of knowledge.

They are at the heart of 360 degree commissioning. There needs to be a convergence.

Ian: This is the very first time that we ever did this event. It is our first step. Our thoughts about next year.

Deborah Forrest with Studio Scotland: Looking around to see if any channel controllers are her. I hope not. I was Rights Lab in London recently. We had Bebo, Google and AOL, and the very last session, controllers. Didn’t have a Scooby(clue).

If we had a quarter million hits at sites at one time, the hosting, downloading versus streaming. Commercial aspect, we hate to bring it into this. But how do you pay for it? Streaming versus hosting. Some of programmes, some exposes, when exposed to larger audience, there would be a lot of reaction. What is the implication of a whole load of hits at one time?

Paul: This is a hard sell. But once something is broadcast, it is on the intenet. Maybe you should put it up there.

We are keen that people get paid. We’re not a bunch of pirates.

Audience: Once ship the bits. the physics of that work very nicely. Counterintuitive unless you live in that world.

Kojo, design director at ITN: The problems we are facing are culture. There is a technical culture you are coming from. TV coming from creative culture. You guys are trying to get the broadcasters attention. You communicate in a very technical way. It might be frightening. They are not technically minded. You were talking about business models. They are in business of making programmes and in the business of making money.

I have Two things say: 1) Next year, involve the broadcasters. 2) Add a production thing for this. It would be helpful to have demonstrations so that we can see what you are talking about.

Brian Butterworth, UKfree.tv: I take issue, saying geeks aren’t creative. We are really creative.

Rosie: That’s why we’re changing the world.

Paul Barossa, man in the audience: I run a music production company but have a background in psychology. The meaning of communication is the response you get. You have to look at another angle. You have to look at way that you are communicating the message.

Mike Butcher: MediaBites.com. I went to the TV Un-festival. Word that dare not speak its name: Facebook. Geeky and trivial but indicative of social networking going mainstream. When my mom asks me what it is about, I know that it is something different in ways that maybe blogging isn’t. Should broadcasters create their own networks or plug into networks?

Chris: Facebook takes things one step more. When you sign up apps, it tells you friends who have signed up before for that app.



The Gulf: Cultural, technical, political

That was about the end of the discussion. But Suw and I have witnessed the cultural chasm that both the Un-festival participants perceived as well as the festival participants at other conferences. We saw it at the Guardian Changing Media when it seemed that the executives were talking about media in a completely different way than we experienced it using a mix of traditional media and the internet. We saw it in how the media executives talked about brand in a way that was completely foreign, alien and alienating to us.

I don’t think that the gap can be put down to the differences in a technical culture versus a creative culture. I do think that there is something in the difference between the ‘sit back’ culture of television and the ‘sit forward’ culture of the internet.

In the end, I think one of the things that came out of the festival session was the lack of knowledge of the internet at senior levels of television companies, and more than that, I keep going back to something that Steve Yelvington said about newspaper companies that the people with the most internet experience have the least political capital in their organisations. Much of this is cultural, but it is also political both in terms of within the industry but also within the organisations. A friend of mine once said of the major broadcaster that he worked for: “There are managers who don’t want to create the future, they just want to control it.”

It took 30 years of circulation declines for US newspapers before those declines seriously threatened their business. It will take more pain before major broadcasters feel the need for change. As was said during the session, television has been the most efficient way to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, but now the internet is challenging that. It’s best for broadcasters to experiment now – especially with the cost of experimentation decreasing. It is far better to change while you have the resources to manage that change rather than delay and have change forced upon you.

08.25.07
by

Suw and the Edinburgh TV Un-festival

Suw is helping host the Edinburgh TV Un-festival, hosted by BBC Backstage. Ian Forrester of Backstage set the stage by saying:

The whole reason that we are here is the clash of online and TV. I want you to go to the TV festival tomorrow and experience the difference in worlds. That is the whole reason that we are here.
Do people think that online is just this other place where people put their content out there?



I’ll be blogging here, and also on the Guardian’s media blog, Organ Grinder, where there are lots of posts about the main Edinburgh TV festival as well.

At 3pm, there is going to be a podcast called “Is TV dead?” That should be fun.

08.22.07
by

Bring on the noise

Looking through my feeds, I noticed a wonderfully droll post by Steve Yelvington on yet another tedious bloggers versus journalists article, this one by Michael Skube in the LATimes. Mr Skube’s professorial tone befits the news as lecture model that he seems to be defending like a modern day Williams Jennings Bryan. Mr Skube writes: “One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more.” To which Steve responds:

One does? Perhaps one gets such an uneasy sense from not reading the blogs about which one is opining. Or from not writing what actually gets published.

It would appear that Mr Skube’s commentary is “a potpourri of opinion and little more”. You see Mr Skube, as Steve and others points out, hasn’t actually read many blogs. He hasn’t done the reporting that he’s chastising bloggers for not doing. But more than that, Skube refers to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo as an example of a bloviating blogger. TPM and its sister site, TPM Muckraker, actually do journalism, and more than that, they have some of the more successful examples of crowd-sourced journalism to date. Josh e-mailed him and asked if he was familiar with TPM why had he included it as an example of a “dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere”.

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …”

An editor added the reference and Skube didn’t know enough to ask that it be taken out. Dan Gillmor calls on the LATimes to print at least a correction if not an outright apology.

UPDATE: (Via Jay Rosen at PressThink. Thanks for the link and quote, Jay.) The LATimes editorial page editor Jim Newton has published this note about the editing process:

Note from Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton

August 22, 2007

A number of readers have contacted The Times in recent days regarding an Aug. 19th opinion piece by Michael Skube. In some cases, readers have asked whether Times’ editors improperly inserted material in Michael Skube’s piece without his knowledge or permission. That was not the case, as this note from Skube makes clear:

Before my Aug. 19 Opinion piece on bloggers was printed, an editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.

– Michael Skube

Readers will choose to agree or disagree with Skube’s conclusions, but I hope the above resolves questions about the editing of the article.

Sincerely,

Jim Newton

Editorial Page Editor

This reader doesn’t see a clarification, but a game of pass the buck. What’s even more shocking, is that this is the second poorly researched and reported piece by Skube on the subject, notes Paul Jones, who teaches at the University of North Carolina.

Skube unfortunately seems to fall in the trap of so many commentators who seem to think that style trumps substance and that a finely honed piece of prose somehow obviates the need for research. Dearth of reporting perhaps, Mr Skube?

I share Shane Richmond’s reaction:

What’s exasperating is that every time some journalist notices blogs (where have they been, for goodness sake?) and decides that they herald the end of civilisation as we know it, there’s some editor somewhere who will print their ravings.

These columns keep getting printed because they play to the professional biases of journalists. They play to the uninformed view that passes for conventional wisdom that there is a monolithic blogosphere, and that it is populated by wannabe columnists who try to get a foot in the door of the media by being louder and more irresponsible than the columnists they hope to replace. If you want the model those bloggers are emulating, look to comment pages and the head-to-head battles of cable news networks.

But the problem is that despite a consistent portrayal in the media of the blogosphere as political shouting shout match, this represents a fraction of the blogosphere. In the US, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that only 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government and only 5% focus on general news and current events. My hunch, and I won’t say that it’s a well researched one, is that these commentators only see political blogs because there is a professional selection bias. They comment on politics or current affairs so every blog they are familiar with, or indeed interesting in, is about politics. The blogosphere is a rich world to be explored, not just a political battlefield of the intemperate shock troops of right and left.

I’ve stated my view in the bloggers versus journalists debate frequently. Bloggers don’t want our jobs. Most bloggers write about their personal experiences. Yes, they write about their cats, their sewing, their kids’ footie games. But occasionally, they get caught up in a news event, and then they keep blogging. They commit random acts of journalism. As I just wrote this week for the Australian site, NewMatilda.com, it’s not a threat but an opportunity for those journalists willing and open-minded enough to take it.

08.21.07
by

links for 2007-08-21

08.18.07
by

X|Media|Lab Melbourne: VastPark and Dotman

Dotman: Dr David Liu, Founder and President, Cyber Recreation District, Beijing

I’m going to paraphrase (heavily) Dr Liu’s presentation. The two things that I took away from his presentation is that they are creating what seemed to me to be an incubator for digital companies in Beijing – the Cyber Recreation District. This includes animators, game developers and other digital media companies. One of the words that was used over and over during the presentations was ‘eco-system’.

It seemed to be used in two ways at the conference and more widely in business. I have often heard it used in the context of Silicon Valley and the eco-system of education, talent, start-ups and venture capital that helps drive the innovation economy there. For a long time, businesses and governments have been trying to replicate the magic of Silicon Valley around the world. The Cyber Recreation District looks to be another effort to create that sort of eco-system.

The other way that eco-system was used was to describe a self-reinforcing business model around a service or a product. Fora.tv’s Brian Gruber probably put this best where competitors can become collaborators.

Back to Dotman. The business model of Dotman is a virtual world where you could also buy real world products and financial services. Brad Howarth put it this way in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Dr Liu says Dotman will be a virtual world for conducting business with fully integrated, standard commercial transaction mechanisms. Money and services can easily be exchanged between online and offline areas within the CRD.

Brad also notes that Dotman will be based on “Entropia Universe platform from Swedish developer MindArk”. Dotman looks to bridge not only the virtual and real worlds, but as Brad says, the rest of the world and the Chinese market.

Bruce Joy, founder and CEO of VastPark

Second Life has been getting a lot of media and disappointing a few people, Bruce said as he started. They will get over the issues of scalability, he added, but asked: “What happens when there isn’t just one SL but thousands? What happens when there are vast numbers of virtual worlds like blogs?” He said.

Old media has been about control of the connection between consumers and content. Now, viewers expect to have a voice. We are starting to programme our own channels. It’s about participation. It’s a discussion and a relationship. You and I can come together and form a new medium.

Virtual worlds seem a great fit for this, but most will fail. If there are millions of virtual worlds, they will have no value. Marketers should wake up. SL is delivering a ‘mall’ type experience. The user experience won’t scale past SL number 3.

He said that virtual Worlds are failing:

  • We have brought back the concept of distance.
  • We also have ‘application-itis’. People don’t want to install another app.
  • The skills necessary to create good 3D experience take time.

We see that virtual environments and user generated rooms are taking off, and he pointed to Habbo Hotel. He said:

Let’s share a little dream together. What if you could have shared realities, created and linked by users. Small is smart. It’s a viral medium. You could pass it along and recommend it. If you were a content creator or a consumer, you could have a direct one-to-one experience. Make the content episodic.

VASTPark. It is about owning your own virtual world or content. You can create a space and allow users to create rooms off of that.

He wanted to create a virtual space where it was OK to be alone. If you compare that with the model in SL, they are not that great at giving you cool content that you can play with. He compared his vision with JF Sebastian, the genetic designer in Blade Runner who created companions for himself.

VASTPark allows linking through virtual worlds. It’s scalable and it transcends spatial problems.

I agree with Bruce, Second Life has some problems, but the users of SL are very loyal. I think there will have to be an interface breakthrough that makes virtual worlds easier to use and a better development platform than SL. But it continues to be an interesting experiment.

Will SL be the VRML of the 1990s or transcend its current problems? Will one of the many competitors – like VASTPark – take advantage of SL’s shortcomings or advance virtual worlds? At the moment, SL is definitely on the wrong side of the hype curve, but it continues to show what is possible with virtual worlds.