Category Archives: Conferences

11.23.06
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PodCastConUK 2006: Podcasting and the Citizen Journalist

Neil McIntosh, Chris Vallance and Suw Charman sat on a panel last Saturday talking about citizen journalism and podcasting. Apart from knowing and liking everyone on the panel, I like how moderator John Buckley kept a tight lid on the prepared talks so that this was more of a conversation rather than the panel talking at the assembled podcasters.

Suw started off by burying the ‘us versus them’, journalists versus bloggers and podcasters old yarn. Suw and I are really tired about this false dichotomy. Instead, she tried to frame the question this way: “How can we support journalistic endeavours?”

She asked the audience: “Who here has never blogged a fact?” Only one hand went up in the back.

Chris added a great disclaimer saying that no one should ask him about BBC policy because in the BBC eco-system, “I am just above pond life.” Chris might be low in the BBC hierarchy, but he is doing some of the most forward-thinking work with citizen media anywhere in the BBC.

Chris and I helped launch the Pods and Blogs show on 5Live in April 2005, when I came to the UK to do some work on a blogging strategy for the BBC. I was in London, and Chris in LA. We worked together using e-mail, IM and Skype. He asked whether people would like to hear three pundits on the Iraq war or the voices of soldier-bloggers, Iraqi bloggers and others on the Iraq war, and said that that was where citizen journalism has an advantage over traditional radio – the opportunity for previously unheard voices to be able to tell their stories.

Chris said that podcasting had really opened his eyes to doing new things in radio. Knowing Chris, he’s both a great advocate for podcasting and new technology while also being a huge fan of traditional speech radio. He has seen how podcasting can open up a world of voices to improve traditional radio journalism. During the midterms, he put out a call for citizen journalists, and he
received not only text submissions for the blog but also audio clips,
one of which he played during the panel. He received the clip ahead of the US midterms from a podcaster that really demonstrated some of the divisions amongst US voters.

He rejected the ethos of crowdsourcing, saying that this isn’t about getting as much out of your audience as you can just to cut costs, but stressed that this was more about collaboration. Most of mainstream broadcasters are now frequently asking people what they think, but Chris said that this was only a small step. Podcasting allows a way for all these wonderful voices to be heard.

Chris stressed that this was a cultural shift for broadcasters more than anything and added that broadcasters needed to rethink their definition of news, making it more expansive than pundits and experts.

Neil, the head of editorial development at the Guardian, doesn’t really like the term citizen journalism, and he said that he felt a bit like an imposter being on the panel. He admitted that the Guardian news site is more interactive than Guardian podcasts. (That’s on my to do list when I get back from a couple of weeks of leave.) Neil said that citizen journalism was promoted by former journalists and academics who wanted to get on the conference circuit, and he said that while bloggers and podcasters pointed out things that journalism needed to do better, it was journalists’ responsibility to sort out these problems. He didn’t see citizen journalism as a solution to those problems.

The questions from the assembled podcasters began with one about fact-checking and the quality of information from citizen journalists, specifically about a rumour started by a podcaster that had been picked up by a tabloid. After a few questions from Neil, we found out the tabloid was The Sun, and that the podcaster in question was actually the guy who had asked the question. He made up a rumour about Doctor Who that a character was coming back.

Suw said that most media outlets are relying on a traditional paradigm of trust rooted in their brand. For instance, she said that the BBC rely on their brand, and say, “We are the BBC, and we have trust.” It’s led to arrogance, and it’s led to sloppiness like the podcaster described. She speaks to journalists in her role as executive director of the Open Rights Group, and after the article comes out, she sees her words quoted back to her incorrectly.

I would add that journalists worth their salt understand that they are only as good as their last story, and that credibility is something earned and all too easily lost these days. Over-reliance on trust in the brand of an organisation is an invitation to disaster. It can breed complacency amongst staff. Individual members of staff must understand that trust in the brand is everyone’s job.

As Suw often says: “Your brand won’t save you now.” And she questioned the question about fact-checking:

How can we progress citizen journalism when there is no fact-checking? …That’s the wrong question. How can we progress journalism and fact-checking?

Another question from the audience was about the changing relationship with the audience, a smart audience that can assess information in a very savvy way.

Neil said that it’s faintly depressing thing when you know a lot about an issue that you read an article that doesn’t quite get it right. And he said that even he has been misquoted in press trade publications.

Suw said that there are patches where the media has respect for their audience, but she said that many in the media treat their audience in the Points of View paradigm, a programme where Barry Took and then Ann Robinson would condescendingly read out letters from the audience, often attributed to Angry from Milton Keynes.

Many in the media believe that their audience is insane or only give feedback when they are pissed off. But that belief allows them to dismiss the views of their audience and keep the audience at arm’s length.

Chris said that comments and feedback have always been important to radio. He spoke to Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles about the difference between traditional feedback and what goes on with podcasts. Dave felt that it was one of power. In the past, the radio presenters always came from a position of power relative to their audience, now there is equality between podcasters that allows them to have a genuine conversation.

Culturally, Suw said that this was about niche content, and she called on a re-definition of news. News is not all about current events. She wishes that there was better hyperlocal content.

I’m spotting a trend here. Both Chris and Suw have called for a redefinition of news. Chris wants to bring in other voices. Suw thinks that news is more than current affairs. I remember shortly before I left the BBC, one of our presenters had contacted a blogger in Indonesia about a ‘news’ story. The blogger said that no one in Indonesia was talking about that story that had gripped the international media. Everyone in Indonesia was actually talking about some popular song.

I often joke that the only people who are generally interested in news
are journalists and maybe politicians. Most people have a range of
interests and personal passions.

I wonder, in this post-scarcity age with respect to information, why the agenda can sometimes still be so narrow? We can cover so much more, and work with our audience to expand the agenda. But as the amount of information increases, we also need to develop much better tools to help people find their way through this information.  

Back to PodcastConUK and another question from the audience: If you listen to the comments, do you focus too much on a vocal minority? That’s a good question. Participation models usually show that only a fraction of our audience currently participate, although that participation occurs on several levels.

The conversation ended on democratisation of media, based on a question from Ewan Spence. Ewan said that we were in a golden age, a renaissance, but as we emerge from the industrial age, but “we are fucking it up”, screwing up the planet through our shortsighted ecological mismanagement. Suw commented that the one thing that was different now to past renaissances was that now we have democratised media, this is a renaissance of the people, not simply a change in power from one elite to another. And that it was this democratisation that gives her hope that we might help turn the tide.

The key thing, I think, is the change in culture and the change in relationship between journalists, podcasters and the people formerly known as the audience: More voices, a broader agenda and more collaboration.

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10.22.06
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Monaco Media Forum: Peer-to-peer grows up

It looks like the industry is finally getting over its fear of peer-to-peer. Programmers and network operators understand the elegance of peer-to-peer. There was always a business paradox with centralised digital content distribution. The more successful you are, the higher your bandwidth bills are. But with peer-to-peer, every consumer becomes a distributor.

It was really interesting to see peer-to-peer companies trying new business models. Companies like Kontiki are setting up a legal peer-to-peer business, and Warner Brothers is launching a P2P service in Europe.

In Monaco, I met one of the developers behind Azureus. I’ve used their free BitTorrent Client. Azureus has now developed another service that uses its own seed servers in a legal BitTorrent distribution network. This allows companies to distribute high-quality video, huge files, without insanely high bandwidth costs. That’s the beauty of peer-to-peer. Seed servers help distribute the files. The distribution happens on the public internet, the files are stored not on central servers but on the customers personal computers. From the demo, it looked like BBC America is one of their clients.

AllPeers embeds peer-to-peer technology in the browser and allows people to distribute content directly to a group of friends. It is also using a system of micro-payments to allow musicians, movie makers and other artists to distribute their content, easily and cheaply. AllPeers makes a commission on the micropayments.

But I’m just having a brainstorm here. I have to look into how this works, but I’m wondering if I could use something like AllPeers to send video back to base when I’m in the field? They say that communications is encrypted with standard SSL, but I wonder how secure the file transmission is? I probably will have to do a little more research before I try to run this by our IT people.

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10.21.06
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Monaco Media Forum: Creating video online

There is a theme running through the first session this morning: There are a lot of companies gunning for GooTube. Douglas Warshaw showed off Motionbox which definitely builds on YouTube. Just yesterday as I was uploading video to YouTube, I was wishing that they had some simple editing tools. All I wanted to do was to ‘top and tail’ the video, cut off the bit where I told the person I was interviewing that we were recording. Motionbox allows that.

The web is truly becoming a platform, and these new video services definitely show that. Motionbox generates a series of thumbnails that make scanning and editing video easier.

Douglas was pitching Motionbox to media companies who wanted to set up a service to take in videos from their audience. One of the most problems that companies face in opening up to a lot of video is evaluating all of the material. Creating a stream of thumbnails allow editors to quickly scan video.

Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz of vpod.tv allows companies or people to set up their own online TV channel. The tools were very elegant, especially when you consider that it was all done within a web browser. It’s was like embedding iMovie in a web browser. Before broadband, this would have been impossible, but it also showed how far interface design online is evolving.

Video clips are just drag-and-dropped into a channel schedule. Sites on vpod.tv can be ‘reskinned’ at the click of a button, just selecting a drop down menu, the entire look of the site changes. These tools are going to allow a lot of entrants into the online video business.

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10.12.06
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Parliament and the Internet

I was at a conference today at Portcullis House, APIG‘s Parliament and the Internet Conference which was examining a whole range of internet-related issues, which I wrote up over on the Open Rights Group blog. Here are links to the four sessions I blogged:

– ISPs in the content driven era
– Plenary discussion round up: internet governance, e-crime, ISPs
– Jon Gisby, Yahoo!: were are people going online and what does it mean?
– William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute: what are people doing online?

Interesting day.

10.04.06
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UK AOP: The social web

Another panel discussion here at AOP, now talking about the social web. Simon Waldman, of the Guardian Media Group, moderated the panel.

The panel:

  • Tom Bureau, CNET Networks UK
  • Adriana Cronin-Lukas, Big Blog Company
  • Lloyd Shepherd, Yahoo!

Tom talked about CNET Networks UK. They try to create ‘architected participation’. They will look at Gamespot. One of the biggest interactive, online-only publishers with about 115 million unique users each month. They have News.com, CNet and other sites.

It’s important to think about who you serve. There is only a small sliver of groups who will contribute, but they are very important. They are not trying to be AOL, Yahoo or MSN to cover everyone. What they are trying to do is to focus on the top third of level of passion/expertise and numbers. They are not trying to reach the ‘true freaks’ but with ‘avid contributors’ with a very deep way. They want to create value for the smart consumer (probably people like me with the obsessive-compulsive comparative shopping gene).

They have to be aware of brand sensitities both ours and our clients. Also, they are looking at challenges with quality, appropriateness and relationship to their core mission. He talked about MySpace and Bebo issues of size of community and ‘child care’.

He also talked about the issue of centre of gravity. Without a centre of gravity, they wither, eg Friendster. You give people are a reason to return.

Systematic approach for created architected participation

  • Draw in passionate and high value users
  • Solicit their knowledge and get them to contribute and translate that to the broader audience.
  • Encourage them to make contributions and connections

He gave the example of Gamespot UK. Globally, it reaches 30m unique users. First thing they realised, users create content everyday, their use, their links. They created a product called Gamespot Trax, a real-time reporting tool. You can find out an enormous amount of what they are doing. They use this information to focus on what content they need. They have to register. They have to use site for several weeks. They must use drop downs. They set a barrier to entry.

They promote user content. They encourage them to create better content. They create an identity for themselves. They have over 3000 ‘editors’ on Halo Union.

Your profile is your social identity. They have blog levels. Profiles. They are encouraged to set up their own identity. She can contact and track others and start to make social contacts. Real life connections hapen. People take their online contacts to make offline social connection. Someone set up a Gamespot UK Frapper map. How many users are using your site and for what period? That is the new metric.

Adriana and the social web and Web 2.0. Changing attitudes and behaviour. This is not about technology but a developing culture. This about creating content and distributing it like never before. The one trend driving this on all sorts of fronts. The consumer is no more. The monolithic is no more. People are contributing. Does this technology allow people to do what they could not do before?

Control was always a delusion and you were never were able to control the context for the content. The process of distibution on relaying a message to the final audience has been disrupted.

We’ll be right back after these imporant message. Feel free to go fuck yourself in the meantime.

from a Hugh McLeod business card

Channels and networks. In the early days, ots of people see the internete as another channel. TV, print, radio and internet are just seen as another distribution channel. But the internet is a sea for the other channels. It is creating leaks from these other channels. We all swim in the same pool. The internet is not a one way channel.

All of the other pipelines have a particular business model. The current model is based on pipelins. Media makes society one way. Internet is many-to-many. The internet is interconnected. We are all networked even in the offline world to some extent. Why does thi matter? Online if aster. Change is being amplified faster. The balance of power between the broadcaster and the audience is changing.

Social media: Blogs, RSS, wikis, live search. The social aspect is far more important than technological.

The demand side, the customer, the consumer is now supplying itself. It is no longer a straight forward supply-demand curve. She pointed to the rise of the amateur professional. First came the geeks, then the news junkies, then the teenagers and now anyone. It is not mainstream as in the mainstream media, but it is mainstream. The network is more dense. The amateur professional is someone who uses their knowledge but uses social media tools. You can’t cry that these aren’t amateurs. They are professionals.

Why talking about social media? We’ve had new media for a long time. People used to pigeon hole me into new media. The progression from old media to new media means that old media is moving to the digital space. The pivot where new media and social media meet is the individual.

Where’s the business model? New media doesn’t change the core competency of the media. Google sells reach. Amazon sells reviews. eBay sells reputation. It goes back to what O’Reilly said this morning that we are selling something but it might not be what we think.

She said that media used to sell eyeballs to advertisers, but now they are trying to sell content as audiences flee.

The internet is a network. Users are rerouting around the gatekeepers.

One things she said really resonated with me:

Content is never finished. The ultimate audience is gone.

Lloyd Shepherd with Yahoo! finished up the round of talks. He started off with a couple of quotes defining social media, one from Tom Coates of Plasticbag:

The age of social media then is probably about a fusing of these two

ways of thinking – the communicative and the publishing/creative parts

of the internet – into something new and powerful. It’s an environment

in which every user is potentially a creator, a publisher and a

collaborator with (and to) all of the other creative people on the

internet.

(I don’t think this is the quote of Tom’s that Lloyd actually used, but it’s a good one.)

He then quoted a blog Monoman.com in an article called the Myth of Social Media:

Social media is just one metaphor for the way that humans tend to

coalesce into various thought collectives. Let’s not forget that we’ve

been doing this for millennia anyway – mainly in offline mode. And the

jury is still out on whether social networks can establish anything

beyond weak, loosely-coupled relationships;

Lloyd then walked us through all of Yahoo’s social media sites, including Yahoo 360, Yahoo groups (800,000 groups in Europe alone), messenger, MyWeb and, of course, Flickr and Del.icio.us. He credited Flickr with unlocking and spurring a lot of social media and interface design at Yahoo. They just launched a feature in the US called The 9 (note the video automatically loads on launch and note Suw, number 6 is Chocolate: It’s what’s for dinner). The programme is the top 9 videos on the web based on what users think.

One of the interesting things things that Lloyd talked about were some interesting mixed community-driven or user-generated content advertising campaigns. One was on the Yahoo! France for the launch of the Ford S-Max. They gave 10 people a S-Max for a week, and asked them to blog about it. The person who had the most popular blog won the car. After a week, the bloggers had posted 1200 photos, 168 posts, 15 videos and 3 podcasts. Wow.

They also had a contest called Get Your Freak On and had people do their own versions of a Shakira video. The most popular user video got as many views as Shakira’s video.

In the Q&A, one of the questions about the attention economy: How do keep relevant with all of these new bits of content out there?

Adriana said watch what the individual is doing. I’d follow that my network is my filter. So much of what I read, watch and listen to come from recommendations from my friend. My social network points me in the direction of articles that I’ll be interested in either in e-mails or IM conversations. I was slightly surprised that this wasn’t brought up. But a former BBC colleague said that she was surprised that no one has mentioned RSS today. I would be drowing in information if it wasn’t for RSS, and I’m constantly looking for better tools to manage those feeds. But in the meantime, my friends are my filter. And they are a damn spot better than the EPG on TV.

10.04.06
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AOP: The evolving content model

Torin Douglas of the BBC moderated this panel. The panel:

  • Rod Henwood, head of new business Channel 4
  • Zach Leonard, digital media publisher, Times MediaTim Weller, chief executive, Incisive Media
  • Jim Scheinman, VP of business development and sales, Bebo

    • Rod Henwood, 600 channels on Sky’s basic pack. Our business model is under threat in a multi-channel world and with the disruptive force of broadband. He says what will save their bacon is brand (We worship our brand, he says), exclusive content, cross-promotional capability, corporate focus and adaptability. The biggest challenge is not so much what to do but what not to do. They have embraced video on demand. It is a possible threat, but they see it as an opportunity. They are looking for platform ubiquity.

    I’m glad that VOD is coming. Even with 30 channels of choice on Freeview, too often it’s 30 channels and nothing on, and I go back to DIY video on demand.

    Zach Leonard and the Times are gunning for the Guardian. The last six months he said that they are bringing in deals that before were only familiar in a print market. The story telling process of journalism has changed forever. He made a plea for developers to come see him. “I am sure that we can make you an attractive offer,” he said.

    Good to hear that. At least someone is hiring.

    Integrated newsrooms and common platforms are just the beginning. They are also looking at user-generated content and community. They recently posted the video of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 that was just discovered. Their traffic doubled and trebled. And their podcasting is ‘dominating iTunes’.

    Tim Weller, founder and CEO of Incisive. One of 40% that didn’t know what a blog is. He was the target of bloggers in the States for their search engine strategy. He founded the company 12 years ago. They turn a quarter of billion in revenue. They connect people who want to buy products with people who want to sell. They are platform agnostic. Key challenge is that the call for ROI (return on investment) is getting stronger. Buyers want real-time market intelligence.

    Work with search engines or block them out from paid content? I think it’s a fabulous marketing tool. Develop more community-based content with user-generated content. MySpace and Bebo, peer-to-peer markets are great at breaking down barriers to people communicating with each other.

    Jim Scheinman, of Bebo, was a no show. Bummer. I wanted to hear from him.

    Rod of C4 said the word: Convergence. I’ve heard about convergence for years, and for C4, it’s all about VOD right now.

    Torrin said that at C4 and the BBC, they have public money coming in, but how does the Times finance these changes. Zach says that they have a range of titles from the Times, the Sun to the Times Literary Supplement. On the Sun, they can play more with community.

    There was an interesting discussion happening about how to innovate. Rod said that there was the integrationist and the internal incubator model. They are two extremes, but he said that a balance must be struck between speeding up innovation but also getting this to the core of the business model.

    After listening to this, the absence of the voice of Bebo was noticeable. People are talking very peripherally about community, but you can tell it’s not core to their business models right now.

10.04.06
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UK AOP: Five challenges for online publishing

I’m of at the UK Association of Online Publishers. The keynote is about how to compete in a new economy, giving by Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, so my boss’s boss’s boss, or some such high level above my head.

She laid out five challenges for online publishers:

1) Our brands and our staff are the foundation of our future. This didn’t wow me at first, but then she started to talk about online brand tracking. I don’t think (and Suw will tell you) that companies are doing too little to monitor how their brands are being talked about online.

Dell Computer’s business is a little soft. Did Jeff Jarvis’ continual drumbeat of discontent on Buzzmachine play a part? Definitely. Hard to say how much. But he’s offering them suggestions.

2) Stay close to your users. She mentioned that Flickr doesn’t even talk about users but talks constantly about community. This is one opportunity that bloggers like Robert Scoble understand implicitly, but publishers don’t yet. Blogging is an opportunity to listen as well as publish.

3) Innovate to learn. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You have to start somewhere.

4) Excel at software development. Our best developers are as important as our best journalists. Adrian Holovaty will be cheered to hear that his message is getting out.

5) Drive digital revenue growth as soon as possible. I’m not a hard-core money maker, but I feel very strongly about the importance of quality journalism, which costs money and takes time. It’s desperately expensive, but without getting into the pro-am debate, it’s also pretty important. Newspaper revenues are in collapse in the US, well at least they are declining from the double digit margins of the past. But to continue to pay for quality journalism, the revenue model has to change.

Torin Douglas asked who has time to read Comment is Free, the Guardian’s mega commentary site. Carolyn, honestly said, that she only goes there a couple a times a week to get a flavour of what people are saying about Iraq or the Labour Party.