Category Archives: Media 2.0

08.09.07
by

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: , , ,

08.09.07
by

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.

Technorati Tags: , ,

08.09.07
by

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.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

08.08.07
by

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)

08.06.07
by

Let’s get ready to rumble

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.

08.05.07
by

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…)

Continue reading →

08.03.07
by

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.)





07.26.07
by

New health fears over big surge in misleading and irresponsible science reporting

As soon as I saw the news that Dr Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who first alleged that there was a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, was to be brought before the General Medical Council on charges of professional misconduct, I knew that there’d be a media feeding frenzy. Despite lots of evidence that the MMR vaccine is safe and a distinct lack of evidence that there is any link between MMR and autism, journalists from every corner of the media insist on writing stories that lead the public to believe quite the opposite.

As the misconduct story broke, I saw stories on both ITV’s morning show GMTV and on the BBC, which managed to paint Wakefield as some sort of misunderstood hero and imply both that the link between MMR and autism was real, and that the ‘establishment’ was working to deliberately mislead the public. Both broadcasters used the same ‘reporting’ tactic – to interview the parents of autistic children, (along with the autistic children themselves and their non-autistic older brother, on GMTV), giving them the opportunity to promulgate their beliefs for five minutes, whilst a GP was given two or three sentences in which to respond. The last word, on GMTV at least, was given to the parents.

The pieces were incredibly biased, pitting beliefs against evidence, with the presenter clearly coming down on the side of the parents and, to all intents and purposes, dismissing the evidence and views of the medical experts out of hand.

This, by itself, is appalling. Beliefs are not evidence. Nor is suffering. No matter how much sympathy I have for children and adults with autism, symptoms by themselves are not evidence of the cause of those symptoms. And the fact that people are suffering these symptoms should not be interpreted as proof that studies finding no link between MMR and autism are ipso facto wrong. Believing things does not make them true – science is not some sort of Secret where the power of the mind can change reality.

What is true is that the media have exploited the beliefs of those who are suffering, and in doing so have denigrating the work of many respectable, honourable and diligent scientists in order to create outrage, because outrage sells. They have portrayed the flawed work of a minority of doctors – now charged with acting unethically and dishonestly – as David to the rest of the medical world’s Goliath, purely so that they can profit from covering the manufactured conflict.

Things got even worse on the 8th July when The Observer’s Denis Campbell wrote an article entitled “New health fears over big surge in autism”. The original article has been removed from The Observer website (i.e. Guardian Unlimited), so if you click that link all you’ll get is a 404 page, but the whole thing has been posted in the comments of Ben Goldacre’s blog, Bad Science. The chances are that the article has been pulled for legal reasons, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Continue reading →

07.06.07
by

Steve Yelvington talks about networked journalism

Steve Yelvington talks about networked journalism

Steve Yelvington, Robb Montgomery and I conducted three days of workshops with journalists from across Asia on ‘citizen journalism’ and other ways to parnter with the audience.

I first met Steve at the Web+10 conference at Poynter in January 2005. He really is a digital journalism pioneer. Over dinner, he talked about writing Usenet clients for his Atari ST in the mid-80s and taking the Minneapolis Star Tribune newsroom onto the internet in 1993, either the first or second newsroom to connect its network to the internet. He has always seen the internet as a communication and community tool and not just as an information, publishing or broadcast tool because of his early experience with online bulletin board systems and early work on the internet. And he takes that sensibility to planning projects for Morris Communications.

I asked him a few questions about why community sites are important for news organistions. The video ends abruptly. Sorry about that, but 1GB is just not enough to hold all of Steve’s great ideas.

07.04.07
by

Steve Yelvington describes NewspaperNext innovation process

I’m with Steve Yelvington at the IFRA Asia workshop on citizen media. He’s one of the great minds trying to take journalism into the future, thinking about the business, thinking about the journalism and thinking about both print and the internet. He talked about the NewspaperNext project.

The American Press Institute wanted to try to figure out what was happening to the US newspaper industry and what they could do to meet some of the business challenges that the industry was facing. API has focused traditionally on newsroom training, but now it wanted to focus on the business of newspapers. They applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation and worked with Clayton Christensen of Innosight Consulting.

Steve Yelvington served on the 24-member advisory board for the year-long project. News companies including Morris Communications that Steve works for and Gannet are taking the results very seriously. He described the findings of the research and how newspapers could apply them.

The basic findings:

  • Great incumbent companies consistently collapse in the face of disruptive technology.
  • “Cramming” old products into new forms is the wrong approach so new companies with new approaches win.
  • Products succeed by helping customers get done the jobs they already have been trying to do. (Newspapers are so all-purpose and flexible that they often fail in understanding what jobs they are meant to do. Classifieds? Sports pages to follow statistics of baseball? Money spent for static stock market listings when people get live data at their brokers’ site?)
  • We can learn to spot opportunities for growth, not just wring our hands over losses. (Steve demo-ed Dodgeball, a social networking site focused on basic human needs. If you’re 22 years old, you’re not sitting at home. You’re out with your friends. To find where your friends are, you can track them via your mobile phone and the web. Newspaper shouldn’t put out a youth-oriented tabloid, they should look to filling the needs of youth.)
  • Most market research misses the real opportunities.

Innosight Consulting was hired by a fast-food chain that wanted to sell more of its milk shakes. They used traditional market research and asked people what they wanted in the milk-shake. The research came up with lots of contradictory observations. Innosight, instead, hung out at a fast-food restaurant observing customers. Why do you buy a milkshake? What they discovered surprised them. There were two groups of customers buying milkshakes. In the morning, young, single people bought milkshakes between 7:30-8 am. They bought milkshakes and only a milkshake and left. In the late afternoon or morning, a family came in and bought a milkshake for their kids.

They began asking the customers why they bought milkshakes. The morning people were commuters with 30-40 minute trips to work. They wanted the milkshake to last. They couldn’t drink it fast and liked the thickness. The afternoon purchaser, the families, were parents trying to calm down and quiet unruly kids.

For the morning crowd, they created a milkshake with bits of fruit that was satisfying and would last. For the afternoon crowd, they created a smaller and thinner shake. By understanding the jobs that people are trying to do, they could better tailor the products.

  • Too much capital can doom a project. When trying to develop something else, pull it off. Give it a separate profit and loss statement. Make sure managers understand the imperative.

Steve next compared sustaining versus disruptive innovation.

Sustaining: Better, premium price, new & improved, leap forward and complicated.

Disruptive: Different, lower price, good enough, leap down and simple.

Is blog software simple? Yes. Blog software has disrupted the business model of traditional content management software. The transistor radio is a disruptive innovation. When it came out, the radio was tiny, small and tinny. It wasn’t as good as the cabinet radios. But it was good enough. And you could take to the beach. It didn’t compete but created an entirely new market for radio.

Disruptors:

  • Low end or new market that’s ‘beneath’ existing players.
  • Starts with least profitable customers.
  • Moves upmarket. (Steve said it comes up from underneath you and cuts off your legs.)
  • Changes the rules of the market.
  • Topples existing players.

Examples:

  • Steel mini-mills
  • Semiconductors, microprocessors
  • Minicomputer, personal computers
  • Desktop publishing
  • Digital photography
  • The Internet
  • Linux
  • MySQL

The bad news is that new entrants succeed at the expense of incumbents, and the very thing that make an incumbent successful lead to its failure including on focusing on your best customers, paying too much to your bottom line and focusing on continuous improvement.

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

Steve said that you can download an 85-page report from the Newspapernext site.