I wrote a post for the Guardian’s Technology blog about fascist IT policies and IT departments, but it’s something I feel very strongly about. One of the bottlenecks in companies is Corporate IT policies meant to ensure security but go too far and cause inflexibility. I don’t know how many friends had to run ‘trojan mouse’ projects with servers hidden their desks because corporate IT wouldn’t or couldn’t move fast enough. Too often, I’ve felt caught between a rock and a hard place – my manager wanting something done now and IT policy or rights issues that prevent me from getting my job done.

Territorial IT departments who view the computers as ‘their’s’ and other employees as the problem are now a serious problem. When I was with the BBC, several clue-ful field staff carried two computers – one with the corporate desktop for e-mail and wires and one ‘clean’ computer for getting their job done.

If your journalists’ computers are so locked down that they can’t file from the field, game over. Don’t laugh or dismiss that. I’ve had to help friends who couldn’t join WiFi networks because they didn’t have sufficient rights, and I’ve had to help friends who couldn’t file audio because their IT departments didn’t have the MP3 filters installed to compress the audio. It doesn’t matter how sexy your website is, if they can’t file, they’ll be back in the bad old days of phoning in copy and more often than not, getting scooped by the competition.

Technorati Tags: control freaks, IT, security

by Paul Pod from Flickr, Creative Commons licence

TV is dead? Long live TV. The afternoon session was a panel discussion recorded for a podcast for BBC Backstage. The verdict? It’s not dead, but some thought that big broadcasters needed to adapt to a world where consumers were taking more control of how, what and when they watch television.

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Suw and the Edinburgh TV Un-festival

Originally uploaded by Kevglobal

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.

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.

As friends will know, I have a habit of relating almost everything in life to the Simpsons. I blame it on the fact that while I’m an American, I’ve worked for British news organisations for almost 10 years now, and the Simpsons is one of the few common cultural touchstones that we both have. But as the Culture show on the BBC pointed out tonight, the Simpsons while being really good for a laugh is also brilliant for its social commentary. One of the clips they played was from an episode called “Much Apu about Nothing“. After a lone bear wanders into Springfield, Homer whips everyone into an anti-bear frenzy. The chanting mob marches on City Hall.

Homer: Mr. Mayor, I hate to break it to you, but this town is infested by bears.

Moe: Yeah, and these ones are smarter than the average bear. They swiped my pic-a-nic basket.

Helen: [frantic] Think of the children!

Quimby: All right, I promise to take swift and decisive action against these hibernating hucksters.

“Think of the children.” The phrase is one of those debate stoppers. It’s akin to Godwin’s law – invoke the Nazis and short circuit a discussion. In the US, it used to be enough to call a proposal in Congress ‘socialist’ to stop it dead in its tracks. These arguments can sweep aside rational debate on issues and nullify evidence by pressing people’s emotional emergency stop.

I thought of this after I was interviewed on BBC World today about MySpace and registered sex offenders. The root of the story was that the popular social networking had banned 29,000 convicted sex offenders, up from 7,000 in May.

My professional take on this was that this was a PR battle between MySpace, which wants to be seen as being responsible, and a coalition of attorneys general who want to use the emotive subject of sexual predators to increase their political standing. MySpace was pretty clear in the PR bump it wanted by calling on other social networking sites to follow their lead in banning sexual predators. The site is under pressure from a coalition of state attorneys general in the US to do yet more to make sure that sex offenders are not allowed to use the MySpace. The attorneys general are proposing predictable solutions that support their political ambitions but do little to address the real issues.

“Think of the children”. What is the problem we’re trying to solve? It is framed as a problem of convicted sex offenders preying on and abducting children while MySpace and other social networking sites does little to protect them. The problem is much more complex. The BBC story quotes that there are 600,000 registered sex offenders in the US. Are all of these 600,000 paedophiles? No, as I said in the interview, at least one of those registered sex offenders was guilty of “baring her ass out a bus window in college”, Regina Lynn writes on Wired’s Sex Drive blog. Another man was placed on a sex offender list for public urination.

In the interview, I also tried to question the presentation of the internet as a no-go place for children and teens. What is the threat? Stephanie Booth pointed me in the direction of a report in 2000 in the US that showed of statutory rape cases, only 7% were internet-initiated. Steph speaks widely about child safety and the internet. She gave me more information than I possibly could have repeated in four minutes. Rather than re-iterate her arguments, I’ll link to two excellent posts she wrote. MySpace Banning Sex Offenders: Online Predator Paranoia and Parents, Teenagers, Internet, Predators, Fear…

The fundamental question is that the facts don’t support the standard presentation of blogs, social networks, chat rooms or the internet in general as a dangerous place for children. As a matter of fact, in research presented by David Finklehor in testimony before the Congressional Internet Caucus in the US, hardly any children under 13 were victims of online sexual predators. Dr Finklehor is the director of the Crimes Against Children Resource Center and co-director of the Family Research Lab at the University of New Hampshire. Most of these cases are teens. Most of them know the age of the people they are communicating with online. These are cases of criminal seduction, as Dr Finklehor called it.

I didn’t really get to go into any of this in four minutes, as you can imagine. I was asked why MySpace didn’t turn over information about sex offenders to authorities in the US. I would have liked to know the exact information that they were being asked. The US Department of Justice has in the past used the pretext of trying to collect information about sexual predators for wide-ranging requests from internet companies. Google is the only company we know was asked it because they contested the request as overly broad. I was asked why MySpace didn’t block the registered sex offenders from setting up a profile in the first place. I questioned exactly what it took to get on the list. (See above.)

I’m not taking issue with the interviewer, Mishal Husain. She’s an old friend of mine, and she’s intelligent and an excellent interviewer. I am not trying to minimise the concern that parents had. As a matter of fact, after the interview, another old friend was very concerned about his 13-year-olds profile on MySpace. I should have asked how she got an account seeing as I thought the minimum age was 14, but after all of the precautions that he had taken, including having a chat with her and moving the computer into a public space, the kitchen, I told him that he was doing the right thing and just to keep communicating to her about her activities online.

I am taking an issue with the format and the journalistic assumptions made. Yes, there is a problem here, but it’s not the one that is being shouted in the headlines. The facts don’t support the sensationalist story of a predator lurking behind every MySpace profile or blog post. As Steph points out in her posts, the threat to youth isn’t in them having blogs or being on social networks. The problem is one of emotionally vulnerable teens being preyed upon by opportunistic adults. It’s more complicated and less emotive than saying: Keep the paedos off of MySpace.

How we can we possibly fashion effective public policy if the debates are so simplistic? Isn’t it our jobs as journalists to question the emotive grand standing of politicians, not simply repeat it? Isn’t it a disservice to repeat misleading quotes without context? How can we have these discussions in four-minute – or worse one minute 30 – chunks? That only leaves room for sound bites filled with false dichotomies that bleed the nuance and complexity out of issues.

Contrast this with the discussion online. It’s filled with complexity, nuance and links to source material that allows concerned parents to weigh the evidence. I’ll link to a few more here to give a sense of what I mean. Brandon Watson of IMSafer, a service that scans IM conversations for ‘predator issues‘, responds to posts by danah boyd and Steph. I agree with Danah that this is a PR exercise for politically opportunistic state AGs, but I’m not sure that I would under-estimate the PR office of Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace. In Brandon’s post, he mentions reports by Dateline NBC. Anastasia Goodstein on the excellent Media Shift blog for PBS in the United States says of the Dateline NBC series: “If I was a parent, this would scare the crap out of me.” But Anastasia adds: “The problem with this message is that it’s both fear-based and divorced from reality.” There are some good follow up comments on Anastasia’s post.

Is there any way to bring this level of complexity and depth to the discussions that news organisations host, whether on air or online? There has to be, but we have to take the responsibility to make it happen.

Technorati Tags: community, journalism

I originally thought of this question as: What does your news organisation do better than everyone else? But then, most news organisations would interpret that question as about quality and quickly answer that their writers are better or they have higher production standards. That’s not what I meant, so I changed the question. What is it that you do that is unique or what could you do that none of your competitors are doing?

People are drowning in information, drowning in media choices. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures called it ‘the looming attention crisis’. Umair Haque puts it this way:

Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest – and so most strategically vital – resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry.

Umair says that the media companies that succeed will be the ones that allocate attention most efficiently, not necessarily the ones that produce most efficiently.

I’m thinking about the economics of the business after reading an article in the Press Gazette comparing the economics of the newspaper business and comparing it to the online business. The web revenue threat is no myth, or to put the terms in dollars and cents:

In the US, digital media consultant Vin Crosbie has calculated that
each printed newspaper reader is worth between $500 and $1,200 a year
in terms of reader revenues and advertising cash.

By contrast, Crosbie suggests that the average online newspaper reader is worth perhaps $8 a year.

That is why newspapers are trying to grow their online revenue as quickly as possible. This isn’t simply about declining readership. Dan Gillmor put it very succinctly at the NMK Forum:

Advertising is being systematically separated from journalism because
there are companies that do advertising better than journalism
companies.

Peter Kirwan wrote in that article in the Press Gazette, “According to McKinsey, for example, US newspapers lost $1.9bn in classified ad revenues to the web between 1996 and 2004.” He also quotes Jeff Jarvis:

I think that you have to boil down to your assets. Put your resources behind what makes you special and more valuable.

I couldn’t agree with Jeff more, although Peter assumes that he is politely advocating mass redundancies. I don’t actually think that Jeff is simply advocating huge job cuts. (Disclosure: I used to work at Advance Internet when Jeff was president and creative director.) I think Jeff is right that the days of ‘big revenues and big costs’ are ending.

I think back to the US. Thousands of journalists attend the nominating conventions for the political parties, actually more journalists than delegates. At some point, newspapers and television stations will have to ask themselves what value is added to have their reporter or camera crew there. In the UK, the redundant coverage is justified because newspapers have more of an individual voice or point of view. But with morning and evening freesheets in London, is an individual voice and a point of view enough of a unique selling point? As budgets are squeezed, there will have to be rethink of what is essential for bespoke coverage and what is better done through aggregation and contextualising.

This is all about attention and one thing that gets my attention is relevance. I think this subtle statement from Steve Yelvington says it all:

Readership declines are very real, and they’re way ahead of circulation declines.

Personally, I’m so time-starved that I need boring information and
really don’t read newspapers for their scintillating writing. I just
need to digest a lot of facts quickly. I can skim RSS feeds and come
away quite quickly with the papers’ positions if I really want to. But
normally on my way to work, I just listen to the NPR hourly summary and
New York Times Front page podcasts (about 8 minutes for the both of
them) while skimming headlines on Avant Go from the Washington Post,
the BBC, the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian and CNet.Brand loyalty? You gotta be kidding. I search and sift and don’t look to one ‘brand’ for my news.

I go back and forth about having Sky News or News 24 on in the
mornings. The channels are OK for background noise to catch the odd thing I’m interested in, but if I could find a good
morning on demand audio or video news service, I’d switch the TV off in
a minute. It takes too long for me to find out anything that I’m
actually interested in.

However, I’m not going to extrapolate my information consumption to everyone because I’m a journalist, and part of my job is sifting through a lot of information. However, I’m not alone in being very busy and not having as much time as I once did for news and current affairs.

I think we as journalists have to be honest with ourselves. We need to stop demanding that we’re relevant and prove our relevance to our readers and viewers. We need to do more explaining to help give readers a sense of why world events are relevant to them and not just assume that they see the connections. It’s a bit cliche, but context is becoming king. Dan Gillmor also said at the NMK Forum that he thinks the media can play a role in helping people navigate all of this, in helping them become more media literate in this hyper-saturated media landscape.

Personally, I also see an opportunity in Dan’s news as conversation model.

1. By allowing the people formerly known as the audience to ask questions of us and our sources, we become an indispensable source of news and information.
2. We don’t have to assume that we’re staying relevant to our readers and viewers, if we share control with them, we know we are remaining relevant.
3. We can tap the wisdom in the crowds to make our journalism better.

This is one possible future for journalism. It is the journalism of social media, and it is part of the future that I’m embracing.

technorati tags:journalism, economics, attentioneconomy, Media 2.0

Suw and I listen to lots of podcasts and online radio and use services like Pandora and Last.fm. We are supporters of Soma FM because we love the music especially Secret Agent. But today, Pandora, Soma and a host of other online radio sites including heavy hitters like MTV Radio, Launchcast, Real’s Rhapsody and Live365 are silent. Why? They might be priced out of the market by dramatic changes in music licencing.

As Rusty says on the Soma FM site:

Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a
recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to
Jan 1, 2006!). SomaFM will be liable for $600,000 in additional
royalties for 2006, and over $500,000 for the first half of 2007. As of
July 15th, we will owe $1.1 million dollars in additional royalties.

Tim Westergreen at Pandora put it this way:

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the
RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically
increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream
songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen
months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as
internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

This Day of Silence is similar to another successful event in 2002 that led to the Small Webcaster Settlement Act for the period of 1998-2005.

When I first heard about this proposed rate increase, I thought back to something that Ben Hammersley said at the Guardian Changing Media conference earlier this year that entertainmentt industry was acting like someone who had just got a Valentine’s card from their lover (music and movie fans) and was ripping that card up in her face.

I’m a music fan, not a thief. I pay for music, and the music industry is yet again punishing me, a music fan. What business survives and thrives by protecting a business model by punishing the very fans that support that business model? Loyal fans will travel hundreds of miles for a concert, hunt through stacks of vinyl for that out of print record and pay money for music. Fans might not pay the margins for a download that the music industry was used to in the era of the CD, but that is an issue of margins, not passion.

But after covering the music industry years, I don’t see them letting go anytime soon. Hey, compadres back in the States, go ahead and send your member of Congress a loud and clear message. A little democracy in action. It worked back in 2002, and hopefully, it will work again. If it doesn’t, it won’t be just one day of radio silence on the internet.

technorati tags:saveinternetradio, online, music

• The Rememble Blog – Remembling the world!
  Suw: This looks interesting – going to have to find time to play with this soon.
  (tags: rememble memories tracking)
• Press Gazette – BBC reporter tours Turkey in social media experiment
  Kevin: Ben Hammersley starts new project with the BBC to cover a story using social media. It’s an interesting experiment on what social media can mean for international coverage. I like the openness of it.
  (tags: BBC socialmedia reporting hammersley)

Just as Graham mentions what a great job I’m doing live blogging, I take a break to help Martin Stabe of the Press Gazette with an MP3 file of Dan Gillmor’s talk. TechDigest is live blogging, although I’m wonder why I’m throwing them a link seeing as they slightly twisted a quote from me.

(For the record, I said that Jemima Kiss is one of our great blogger journalists at the Guardian, along with Bobbie Johnson and Roy Greenslade, just to name a few. Blogging is not simply about publishing and sharp writing. It is about engagement. Journalists and corporate bloggers could learn a little from Jason Calacanis who is in comments here on Strange responding to comments about Mahalo.)

Martin Stabe has a great post focusing on new genres of journalism online. Speaking of Bobbie, he’s blogging at the Guardian’s Tech blog. And Jemima is blogging on Organ Grinder, the Guardian’s media blog. Robin Hamman from the BBC is blogging on Cybersoc with a couple of posts on UGC and journalism and a blogging roundup.

• Walid al Saqqaf, COO TrustedPlaces.com
• Philip Wilkinson, founder crowdstorm.com
• Euan Semple, independent consultant
• Justin Davies, founder Buddyping
• Paul Carr, FridayCities
• Jemima Gibbons, co-founder and MD, I Know How
• Mike Butcher, moderator

Walid: We received a half a million pounds. TrustedPlaces is an ever growing website. We’re going to use it to improve the product and improve the recommendation and personalisation engine.

Mike: One of the biggest criticisms of Web 2.0 companies is that they launch features not companies. Are you a feature or a company?

Walid: We’re a company. We’re here to improve people’s lifestyles. How many people go to the same restaurants and bars? Exactly.

Mike: How do you differ from TrustedPlaces?

Paul: Exciting place, local information and personalisation. Our idea is to ask a question about any place, not just restaurants and bars. I think there is room to achieve the same goal in different ways.

Local social networks are a big thing. It’s inevitable that there will be a correction. It’s not going away, but hopefully this is something that will evolve.

Justin BuddyPing: Mobile is exciting because you know what people are looking for. On mobile, people aren’t browsing. They are looking for specific bits of information.

Mike: Jemima, what’s your view of Web 2.0 startups?

Jemima: Lots of people talking about social networks and money to be made of. The voice in media are hearing are white male voices. There is only one social site where you see a lot of faces. There are a lot of people not being included in social networks.

E-democracy and participation, I’m interested in the social enterprise issue.

Philip: People invest in social networks. They don’t want to have to invest time in that, find something useful only to have to move to a new network.

Euan: Surprised how new media becomes old media. It quickly became something to own and be fought over and controlled over.

There is a complacency about how to manage this. Reboot last week, I found it quite smug. They were slightly disparaging about people who didn’t get it.

Walid: I don’t think that this is middle class thing. He pointed out a lot of ethnicities on TrustedPlaces like suggesting Ethiopian restaurants.

Mike: I just finished uploading all of my information to Facebook, and now I’m tired.

Paul: When people stop wanting to know information about the cities they live, we’re in trouble. We had a bit of a crisis with the whole middle class, white thing. Aren’t we all terribly white and middle class? Yes, we are. We’re the most likely to sit in a computer for half of our days.

But when you bring in mobile, that will change.

Question. Everything that we’re doing here in the UK is being done but on a larger scale and with more money. It’s a very advanced model. In the States, the venture capital that you can access is so much greater.

Mike: Perennial problem of UK start-ups.

Walid: Well, the US forget that we’re European. We know European cultures and norms.

Do you believe that there is sufficient capital in the UK to run a company?

Justin: A good idea in the US is based on your education and background. It is down to your academic background.

OK, my two cents here. I’m sorry Justin. That’s not true. Yes, there are a probably a lot of people from Stanford who get a look in from the California VCs, but the networks aren’t based solely on education. Certaiinly, just as in the UK, education jump starts your business social network, but unless you’re applying for a gig at Google, they don’t care so much about your educational background.

Besides, I know several British and European companies or entrepreneurs who went to the US for one thing: Funding. Surely, they didn’t meet their VC contact at Stanford. No, many left for VC or angel funding because the money was available and the terms were better. Someone Twitter-ed earlier this spring that a European VC wanted 5% ownership for a €5000 investment. That’s a ridiculously small investment and a big ask for a young company.

Jason Calacanis said that entrepreneurs need to support each other more and dream more. You guys are way too cynical. You beat each other more. The press is more pessimistic. He said that he got his ass kicked at the Geek Dinner last night. He said that 60 to 70% of the comments were negative last night. If I were you, I’d go to the US to start up my company. There is a reason that the big companies come out of the US. We dream bigger. Where is Europe’s Google?

Another comment from the audience was that the difference between the US and the European market was the angel investor. Angel investors not only provide money but also provide support and guidance.

Kyle McRae from Scoopt said that VCs here in the UK were absolutely risk-averse. (A guy applauded in the back of the room.) They got VC interest in the US, but it was on the condition that they move to the US. They couldn’t move, but they were forced to sell the business. And he agreed with Jason that cynicism reigned.

It wasn’t a very uplifting discussion. I didn’t like and don’t want to contribute to the US versus Europe feel to the discussion, but I also know from experience that it is easier for companies to get funding in the US than in Europe. It is changing, but unfortunately, for a lot of European entrepreneurs not fast enough for them to be able to grow their companies here.