Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

03.30.07
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If you want engagement, be ready to engage

I just spent the last hour have a very enjoyable time writing a post on the Guardian’s News blog about the ‘hack’ of John McCain’s MySpace page. I put hack in quotes because I really don’t like how the media uses the term. It’s very unsophisticated, and they usually mean breaking into computers you don’t have permission to use.

But the defacement of John McCain’s MySpace page is sure to go down as Mike Davidson, the ‘hacker’ and CEO of NewsVine, has dubbed it: The ‘immaculate hack’.

Mike gives Team McCain some criticism that rings true for political candidates but also for many news organisations who believe their staff needn’t be involved in their communities:

But then I read the article in today’s Newsweek about how politicians are all setting up MySpace pages in order to “connect” with younger audiences. McCain’s MySpace page is listed, as are the pages from several other candidates. I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.

Todd Zeigler in this post at the Bivings Report put it more directly:

This is another example of the point I made in my last post: if campaigns are going to play in these social communities they need to understand the rules and respect the culture.

It’s pretty easy to see through these cheap ploys, and they feel disingenuous. Setting up a static page on a social networking site actually makes it look even more static, not at all interactive. Just by being in MySpace, or having a Twitter feed or putting the odd video up on YouTube doesn’t make a media organisation more interactive if you don’t actually interact.

Publishing on an interactive platform is still just publishing. What happens when people ask your ‘content’ questions, and there isn’t a human being there to answer? Well, at the very least, nothing happens. People get bored and go away. But, sometimes bad things happen, especially when you’re not particularly clueful with your approach and don’t understand the space. If you want community and participation, be ready to participate.

03.30.07
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links for 2007-03-30

03.29.07
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links for 2007-03-29

03.26.07
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links for 2007-03-26

03.26.07
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Mini rant: Stop calling everything a blog!

Ok, I just looked up from desk and saw a segment on Sky News called Business Blog. What the hell is so bloggy about a business reporter sitting behind a desk on the telly? NOTHING! So stop calling it a blog.

Oh, but wait you say, Michael Wilson does have a blog on Typepad, buried somewhere in the sub-basement on the Sky News website right around the corner from janitor’s loo. Great! More news sushi! Just chop up what you would normally do and dump it on a blog.

What is interactive about this? Nothing. How is this engaging your audience? It’s not. Transparency? Nope. Easy for the gob on a stick (what some TV producers call the ‘talent’)? Possibly. Bottom line, what is compelling about this for the audience? Nothing. It will fail.

What I’m about to say may sound ridiculous coming from a ‘Blogs Editor’, but there is nothing magical about blog software – it’s just a really easy content-management system with comments. Just dumping content into a blog isn’t going to entice the masses to come round and participate. You actually have to engage with the audience, not just produce more flat boring content.

If you want to start a conversation with people, stop talking at them and start talking with them. Follow them sometimes, not the news agenda all the time. Link out. Link to blogs not just other news sites. Kick off a conversation. Don’t just ask: “What do you think?”

You can have the best technology and still fail because your content is stuck in the age of publishing, not the age of participation. And for chrissakes, stop calling everything a blog because you think a bit of branding is all it takes.

03.23.07
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Guardian Changing Media: The future of media?

Session Chair: Nick Higham, correspondent, BBC News

Andy Duncan, chief executive, Channel 4

Tom Loosemore, project director, Web 2.0, BBC

Alan Rushbridger, editor, The Guardian

Ok, I’ll be have be on my best blogging game now with the Editor – as he’s simply known as at the Guardian – speaking. He started off with one of his famous abstract presentation images – think Kandinsky does PowerPoint – that showed the blue line of depressing, falling print profits, the red line of rising online profits and an amorphous green bubble where most media organisations are. A little star in the bubble showed the current location of the Guardian with respect to the profit decline, profit growth curves.

Next, Alan pulled out an electronic reader from Illiad. It is a screen that has wonderful resolution and looks like paper. They are wonderful things, but it’s impossible to predict what form journalism will be delivered in the future.

One year on, and the depressing abstract graph has moved on a little bit. And then he showed that the Guardian is competing not just against the Telegraph and the Times but against the New York Times, Yahoo, Google, Oh My News and just about everyone. And the move has been from one platform – print – to a multiplicity of platforms. We’re also mixing sources of content from our own journalists to a broader mix of content from users and our communities.

Ten years on, we hope the increase in online profits then surpasses the declining print profits. Although Alan showed this a lot better than I did – aging a few media moguls with a little Photoshop magic and the addition of white hair. He also wondered out loud what media organisations would fade as their owners aged, and their children took less interest in running media businesses.

Next up, Tom Loosemore. I have only met Tom a few times, but I really like his ideas. I remember Tom, Nico Flores and me sharing lunch with Jeff Jarvis last summer. It was one of the more interesting lunches I had at the Beeb.

Tom said that the BBC is cutting itself some slack, especially when it comes to be in the middle of Alan’s green bubble. Many of the assumptions that we built our business around are gone. The ability to copy digital media perfectly has fundamentally changed our models.

We are right at the top of the hype curve when it comes to Second Life, but it’s not crucial to focus on technology but on behaviours, especially people we used to find were our audience. When you look at young people, technology doesn’t really exist until they are 15.

When you look at the young early adopters, you see amazing changes. They see media as self expression, identity and empowerment. They use media on their terms. If it is not on their terms, they either nick it, ignore it or make it on their own.

What has changed in media is who is charge, who is control. I think we need to be honest on how much previous popularity of media was down to quality and how much was down to control. There used to be only so many channels. There is only so much room on newstands for so many newspapers and magazines. Was that content that good?

This is a generation that will not give control back. At the BBC, he says they have to balance the needs of his great aunt who thinks that BBC 2 is a little risque and his son. If he really wants to punish his son, he doesn’t take away the TV, he unplugs the router. The BBC has to succeed in making the licence fee payer believe that £130 a year is really good value.

We’re in a state of flux, but this is not the death throes of media. Those that win will take the long term view. Those who win will give up control gracefully.

Andy Duncan of Channel 4 spoke next. I’m not going to waste space writing up his talk. He spent the first 5 minutes making a pointless rebuttal of an article in G2 that asked: “What’s the point of Channel 4?” What was the point of his talk, more like. Obviously he sees a future in government, because after that he launched into a content-free mumble notable only for its cliches about progress and the role of media in the future of the British economy. It reminded me of Kang’s speech in the Simpsons when he and Kodo take over the bodies of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and run for president:

We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

That’s about the level of vision and inspiration that we’re talking about here. He of course spiced up his ill-prepared, or at least, ill-delivered comments with a few buzzwords like UGC and mobile community, oh and, of course, a radio station in Second Life. But that really was it. “We’re in a multi-channel world.” Duh? “Competition is growing.” Duh? Ben Hammersley and I liberated a couple of bottles of beer early from the drinks reception just to deaden the boredom.

Maybe he was playing it close to the vest lest he give away his strategy to his competitors. That would be the generous interpretation. Maybe he is just a poor public speaker. Maybe he’s just clueless. But I was left thinking to myself: What exactly does it take to become the chief executive of a media company?

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled round up. Nick Higham asked Tom: Well, the BBC surely can’t cede control, can it?

Tom responded by saying that this generation was much more media literate than we were giving them credit for.

Trusting content because of the means of distribution is over.

Nick asked whether the reader comments on Comment is Free would blow the Guardian’s brand proposition “out of the water”.

Alan said that journalists are struggling with the fact that they are not the only ones who know things. There is a danger that it might capsize the brand, but “there is something about the way the community moderates themselves”. And the Guardian did some internal subjective review of the comments, rating them on a five star scale, and most comments were in fact, high quality, with ratings of four and five stars.

The first question came from Patrick Smith of the Press Gazette and asked if there was still a role for the journalist. Alan said that there was still a place for an ‘unpolluted supply of journalism that people can trust’. But he added that it was not right to think that people in newsrooms in Wapping, Kensington or Farringdon were the only people who knew things.

Tom said that journalists now had a fantastic range of new sources, but he added that great editors had become more important not less.

Suw and I are considering writing a little round up of our thoughts. We’ve noticed a few early interesting items in our trackbacks asking why the conversation seems to have stalled or is getting a bit repetitive. Hugh Martin asked why I blogged here and I didn’t blog on the Guardian blogs, seeing as I’m the Guardian blogs editor. I have responded on his blog, but he has approved my comment yet so I’ll respond here.

I blog on Guardian blogs when I go to conferences, but if there are other Guardian staff blogging, then I usually write here. Also, Suw and I tend to write notes ‘with the eye of a stenographer‘ or ‘amazing near transcript quality‘, which is a bit different than the Guardian blog style. And I hope our little public service makes up for what this blogger felt was too high of cost for a ticket, shutting out citizen journalists and others.

Now, Hugh’s point is taken when it comes to my relatively low profile on Guardian blogs, and as I said in my as yet to be published comment, I’ve spent much of my first six months behind the scenes working on the tech, making sure it’s ready to support our editorial goals. But, I know that I need to be involved in community, not just poking at servers and software in the background. That will change soon enough.

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03.22.07
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Guardian Changing Media: Will IPTV change TV forever?

Session Chair: Nick Higham, correspondent, BBC News

Merlin Lilley, head of airtime management, Channel 4

Anthony Lilley, CEO, Magic Lantern Productions

Griff Parry, director of broadband and mobile, Sky Networked Media

Dr Abe Peled, chairman and CEO, NDS Group

Marc Watson, commercial director, BT Vision

Marc Watson of BT said they have 5,000 customers. The product is a hybrid set top box, a free set top box that has Freeview channels and BT broadband line – content, interactive services, games. We are progressing to spring launch.

NH: Are you a rival to conventional broadcasters?

MW: We’re an alternative to those platforms. What we found. Big gap between analogue and free services and subscription services. There is a big gap in the middle. People want extra services but not keen to subscribe. They can then access on demand content. People will be able to buy content at a discreet prices like premiership football, children programming and niche programming.

NH: Advertising or payment supported?

MW: Content that is free to access to the customer but has advertising wrapped around.

NH: Where will you get your money?

MW: We think that there is premium content that people will pay for. Sports, premium movies and adult content.

NH: Griff, is Sky worried about this?

GP: We tend to see this as suped up Freeview. We think the world is an interesting place right now. We’re moving from a world as far as television is concerned from a single platform to a multi-platform world. We tend to lean towards a world that follows customers. We expect linear channels to be a big part of the world, and we expect broadcast to be a big part of that world. I’ll start with Sky Plus. IPTV is often synonymous with on-demand. But we have SkyPlus and Sky on demand mobile.

Mobile is a different case, was launched as and conceived as pay-for service.

NH: Impact of DVR?

GP: I think the impact of DVR is over-stated. People still respond to ads.

People understand IPTV to mean on-demand.

NH: What is Channel 4 doing?

MI: We’re doing Freeview, BT, advertising paid for catch up and paid for catch. I think that Apple TV will be really big.

AP: Convergence is not can I watch TV on my PC but convergence of linear and on demand content. On demand is the ideal medium for niche content. Moving from a world where there were few terrestrial channels to gradually eroding. People can open window on a host of other content.

The main issues seemed to be whether subscription or advertising would support programming. What is the best model for on demand? Is scheduled programming dead? How are content producers going to be reimbursed? Will these new distribution channels support the production of content? I’ve heard these issues before.

Moving from channels to shops and to social networks, Anthony Lilley said. The business models have to converge, not necessarily the technology. One of the major challenges for industry and regulator (OFCOM) that you can’t simply slowly progress in this world. You have to have access to better material, more well tagged material. You can’t think the watershed will continue to work. The watershed is the time after which content deemed not fit for children can be broadcast in the UK. More than 25% of children know their parents’ PIN number to unlock age-restricted content, OFCOM has found.

Question from advertising agency about impact of Apple TV?

AP: They may be trying to do the same thing they did with iPods. Pay for razor, but give razor blades away for free. Most iPods only have paid content equivalent to one CD. Most of the rest of the content is ripped from CDs.

Jo Twist, recently returned to the BBC, asked about closed versus open systems. Closed systems have failed. Mobile systems haven’t shown as much innovation because of the closed nature of the platforms. She asked about how to tie in social networking such as possibly using Alcatel’s Amigo.

Jo, Jemima Kiss, Suw and I have talked about the divide here. Jo is getting upset as the Sky guy just called Sky an aggregator. Corporations are using the language, but that is only the first step in cultural change. They are still trying to dress up old business models, sometimes merely with new buzzwords (like micro-chunking) without adapting to new business realities.

03.22.07
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Guardian Changing Media: Business model for free content?

Session Chair: Nick Higham, correspondent, BBC News

Christian Ahlert, director, OpenBusiness.cc

Suw Charman, independent social software consultant

Adam Freeman, deputy commercial director, Guardian News and Media

Question to Christian, what did Google do right?

Christian: At first, they were kind of a bit crazy. They didn’t have a clue. Google created a really good technology, but they didn’t have a business model. Everyone could use good and they can still use Google. The only way that they could create a business model was on top of the attention they created. Giving something away on top of the attention they created. This is key way that the internet and business on the internet works.

When it comes to Web 2.0, social activity has become a product unto itself. I created OpenBusiness two years ago because of Bill Gates. I’m involved with Creative Commons. That is an alternative rights mechanism. Some rights reserved instead of all rights reserved. Bill Gates said two years ago, “What those Creative Commons guys are doing sounds like Communism to me.”

One business model is Last.fm. They give stuff away for free. It allows people to share their tastes.

Last year, he consulted with a major media company. They wanted to become a Web 2.0 company, but the first thing the company said is that they had sent a cease-and-desist letter to someone who had put something on YouTube. He thought the meeting was pointless. Six weeks later, they had another meeting, but a smart executive put the same message up on YouTube. But he got a cease and desist letter because they said he was using YouTube for commercial purposes.

There are hundreds of ways in how you can create revenue. Many of his business ideas are taken from the world of open source software development. People build very successful business models around open-source software. Or you can upsell, by adding premium or paid for services, or even free-ium content.

Suw Charman: There is an idea if you give something away for free that you can’t make money for it. We see this in the publishing world with Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds. Certainly, Cory Doctorow has been very open with his figures. His first novel has been downloaded 700,000 times, but Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is also on its fifth or sixth printing.

The people who are most aggressive downloaders are also the largest buyers of music. We’re still seeing a shake out in business models. If you have a product that is desirable, then people will buy it. Downloads aren’t exactly equivalent to the physical product.

Nick: DVDs, the physical product comes with extras.

Suw: When you look at the music industry, you see a nice blip when people were replacing their tapes and vinyl with CDs. This created an artificial hump in sales. The music industry is shifting fewer units so are selling less. To blame this entirely on downloaders is spurious. You have a small number of bands shifting a large number of units.

Suw called it a power law issue. Mark Cuban calls it the ‘rat’s ass of the long tail’. And it takes a lot of money to climb further up the tail, although I’ll leave that image there.

Adam Freeman: We are a multi-platform player. Today it is printed words on paper. In the future, it will probably be video. We are not on the web but part of the web, and fortunately, that has coincided with a boom in advertising. It has to be compelling, and it has to be unique. You can’t do that in news, but you can do that in crosswords or news compilations for expats. They also have a dating service.

CA: Lots of business give away things for free but use that to generate business. We didn’t mention quality and convenience. To bash the music industry again, who developed iTunes? A computer company. (Nick Higham: How many have iPods? Almost 100%.)

The guys who started Skype have launched Joost. The quality is great. I mean, YouTube, Google Video? The quality is crap.

Question from audience: The music industry didn’t invent iTunes because it wasn’t their core competencies. He went on to insinuate that Suw and people like her thought music was ‘shit’ because her tastes were changing as she was aging.

Winning argument boss, or not. Suw’s a square because she’s getting older?!? Blame the user. Blame the listener. This seems to be the music industry strategy. Don’t innovate. Don’t invest in new business models. Defend your old business models with a stable of lawyers.

CA: Decoupling using a product and not paying for it is nothing new. Radio has been doing that for years. The internet has changed transaction costs forever.

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03.22.07
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Guardian Changing Media: Democratising content in the user-in-control era

Session Chair: Janice Gibson, assistant editor, the Guardian

Edwin Aoki, chief architect, AOL

Ben Hammersley, multimedia reporter, GuardianUnlimited

Tariq Krim, CEO and founder, Netvibes

Steve Olechowski, cofounder and COO, FeedBurner

Tariq Krim: I used to be a journalist. I used to be in the media space. When the blog came out, I decided to go to the other side. I created NetVibes mostly by accident. I was trying to survive in the age of personal media. He found himself subscribed to 1,000 blogs. He wanted to know how to aggregate all of the content and services he used, not only blogs but also e-mail and eBay.

The real issue is where do we put our attention? If they spend one hour on the internet, where did that one hour come from?

The architecture of the internet has changed with RSS and syndication. Syndication is the first way to reach the user, through the RSS. (My colleague Neil McIntosh responded to the question of why there was such low adoption of RSS by British newspapers last week. I think that RSS is more than reading feeds in purpose-built feedreaders. It is an enabling technology. The real power of RSS is liberating content from websites and their front pages as well as liberating content from platforms. Adoption will be driven by simple tools like NetVibes. Bobbie Johnson, one of the Guardian tech correspondents, said pretty much the same thing in Neil’s comments. Don’t worry Neil, we aren’t ganging up on you.)

Steve Olechowski: FeedBurner manages syndication for publishers all over the world from Reuters, the Daily Mail, the USAToday to bloggers and podcasters around the world. People are consuming content outside of the context where the publisher originally created it. In 2003, RSS was mostly blogs, but in 2006, there are podcasts, blogs, video blogs, retail and e-commerce, online media companies and web services.

Ben Hammersley: It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks and I’m beginning to feel like an old man. I’ll be 31. I’ve been building websites for 15 years. I was on FidoNet, which none of you will remember unless you’re really geeky. He offered to buy someone a beer if they had heard of FidoNet, but

He sees the sames mistakes, the same debates in 1994, 1998, in 2002. They are based around the problem that large corporation and brand managers are fundamentally at odds with their customers. The content that you are producing is very personal to the people who you are creating it for.

You have a create a love affair and then get out of the way.

Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen media companies, record companies actively trying to destroy the love affair their users have with their content. As an example of this, Viacom is suing Google. They think they are suing Google and they are against Sergey, another big corporation. But they are really at war with their users.

They are taking a Valentine’s Day card and burning it in front of the person who gave it to them.

Edwin: Yeah, this is really the same.

Old Media:

  • Controlled by a select few
  • Out of date by the time it’s printed/broadcast.

New Media:

  • Let a thousand flowers bloom
  • Or, let a thousand people with typewriters create something

He focused on user generated context, mashups and remix culture.

Tariq: Most media view RSS as as a way to get people to get back to the website, but he said that one liners aren’t getting people back to the websites.

Steve: There is no evidence that putting more content in your feeds is taking traffic away from your users. You certainly aren’t losing audience by publishing feeds. The people reading feeds are different from the people reading your website. Feeds and syndication are a separate medium from websites.

They talked about ads in feeds. What is really working in terms of advertising in feeds, is people engagin in feeds.

Edwin: You bring them back to your site with other services and other levels of participation. Sites that are successful do drive people back to their sites by offering fuller feeds.

Ben: What is micro-chunking? Micro-chunking comes around every 18 months. It is one of those buzzwords that come around that is nothing more than a good excuse to have a conference. As a word, you can ignore it. As a concept, you need to know what it is.

Steve: The difference is that there is a 24 hour publishing cycle not a daily publishing cycle. The old feedback loop was writing a letter to the editor. Now, feedback is instantaneous.

Question from person from Chinwag, RSS is a way to build results through search.

Ben: If Google is indexing your RSS feeds, sack your webmaster. That is a Fisher-Price mistake. Write headlines in a way that works best for Google not best for a way that is elegant. That is a shame because I like puns. All of the other technical issues are down to having competent technical staff.

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