From Interruption to Engagement

Powerful comment from Will Hutton... British TV must be saved for the nation

British television is at a tipping point. Every night, our screens are filled with programmes that represent two conflicting traditions. On the one hand, we see examples of the great television culture Britain has created over the past 50 years. Use the remote and you get the new trash which threatens to spread throughout the networks. There are still many great programmes to watch, and much creativity on display, but unless something changes, our culture and civilisation are about to be seriously impoverished.

But it gets worse

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Earnings Today, And Pressure on the iPod Profit Machine

By Business Week

At least one person has been calling 2006 as >a href="http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2005/10/2006_the_year_t.html"/> the year the iPod died. That would be Tomi Ahonen a self-styled tech analyst, author and lecturer at Oxford University, who emailed me this week to inform me that the "iPod downturn is terminal, not seasonal." His argument is interesting though I'm not sure I buy it, at least not entirely.

His point -- which he blogged about in March -- is simple: Mobile phones are the next great digital music player. Phones that play music will get better at it, and consumers will shift their preference to carrying one device instead of two. Some 90 million MP3 capable phones are in use around the world, versus an installed based of 30 million iPods.

Further

Ahonen's argument would be fine, but there are problems with the conclusion. First, he seems to be assuming that while mobile phones continue to evolve and get better over time -- which they will -- the iPod will remain essentially static. We know it won't. Additionally, there's problems with the model of getting music to the phone. Wireless service providers want to get a peice of the download action and thus boost the price per song. Apple has set the price bar pretty firmly at 99 cents (in the U.S.) and consumers are going to resist anything that goes above a buck a song, which a wireless download would require.

And finally

This doesn't preclude someone from figuring out how to make playing music on all wireless phones as easy as using an iPod and selling that idea the Motorolas, Nokias Samsungs and LGs of the world. But even then, they'd have to also sell it to all the service providers around the world as well.

Still, the long-term threat that the mobile phone represents to the iPod is real, and Apple knows it. This is why the rumors about the iPod phone are so persistent. But last I knew that product had run aground.

Gadgets which play music held on iPods over FM radios are set to become legal in the UK. Devices such as the iTrip plug into MP3 players and connect them wirelessly to radios in cars and homes. Despite being illegal in the UK and Europe the gadgets have become extremely popular because the majority of car stereos do not have the means to connect iPods or other MP3 players.

Ofcom, the communications regulator, today outlined plans to legalise the use of iTrips and other "low power FM transmitters" in response to growing consumer demand.

whoops. better hide my iTrip

via times online

The French Parliament has voted Friday, June 30th 2006 to approve the DRM bill called DADVSI (« droit d'auteur et droits voisins dans la société de l'information »). This bill was voted by raised hands instead of the electronic voting system normally used for solemn votes of that kind. This law is both unacceptable and unenforceable. The EUCD.INFO initiative publicly notes that the government has gone to the furthest in denying democracy, by having the bill finally voted on Friday, June 30, eve of the parliamentary recess. See «  What does the new French copyright bill do ? » for a list of some of the known problems of DADVSI, including references to the articles in the bill.

Read the whole article here

TV's share price has dropped further today, after slipping below £1 towards the end of trading yesterday, heightening speculation that the tipping point for another takeover bid has been reached.

The broadcaster's share price was 97p at 4.20pm today, down 2.76% on yesterday's close of 99.75p.

ITV's share price has declined further than the market in general, with the FTSE 100 off 0.9% at around 4.30pm, on a day when reports emerged that its ad revenue projections for September could be down by up to 12% year on year.

and

ITV's share decline represents continuing market fears over the broadcaster's seeming inability to address declining audiences and ad revenues, as well as the possible fallout from the impending ruling by Ofcom on curbing junk food marketing to children. ITV's share price - which stood at 148p at the time of its listing in February 2004 - last closed below 100p nearly two years ago.

Via the Guardian

Whereas the Guardian and the BBC I believe see the world now as their marketplace ITV has been stuck with a national audience.

Its business model of spot advertising obsolete.

Like Houdini escaping hand cuffs: watches replaced by mobile phones

We've reported on this phenomenon on an anecdotal evidence level - and we discuss it in our book of course. But now the first true study has been released on the wristwatch industry and mobile phones. The story was covered by Business Week this week in story entitled Time's up for watch sales in Japan and I found it via our friend Russell Buckley over at the MobHappy blogsite

Its TV but not as we know it.

Fragmentation, convergence, cross-platform, curated consumption, primetime is no longer a time of day, its a state of mind, content delivered on-demand, non-linear and self-scheduled.

There must be life after the 60 second spot. Said Jim Stengel, In fact Jim Stengel Chief Marketing Officer for Proctor & Gamble says that he believes that interruptive TV advertising stopped working around 1987.

In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. In the early 1960s, typical day-after recall scores for 60 second prime time TV commercials were about 40 per cent and nearly half of this was elicited without any memory aid. Currently a typical day-after recall score for a 30 second spot is about 18- 20 per cent and virtually no one is able to provide any form of playback without some form of recall stimulate.

The number of brands and messages competing for consumer attention has exploded, and consumers have changed dramatically. They show an increasing lack of tolerance for marketing that is irrelevant to their lives, or that is completely unsolicited. Traditional marketing methods are diluted by a hurried lifestyle, overwhelmed by technology, and often deliberately ignored.

I was in the states recently and sat down with a family that had pre-recorded their must-see TV programme, Thief. All the ads, were zipped through. Just an observation :-)

Peter Lauria writes,

Television is having its Sybil moment. Not unlike the title character played by Sally Field in the 1976 made-for-TV movie of the same name, television seems to be suffering from multiple personality disorder. Advances in visual experience, control, technology, display, and the quality and diversity of content have come in such swift succession that the divide between new forms of television and the mainstays seems to widen daily.

Consumers now live with broadcast television, cable television, video-on-demand, Internet TV, video iPods, time-shifted television via digital video recorders, and wireless video across an array of devices, just to mention a few of TV's multiple identities.

The effect of this fragmentation is to render the word "television" all but meaningless. An unfortunate consequence of being all-encompassing is that it also implies a lack of uniqueness. Indeed, how do you define the soul of a medium that was never suspected of having one in the first place? Rewind to the 1970s and recall that the cantankerous Archie Bunker, icon of CBS' long-running "All in the Family," dubbed TV "the idiot box."

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The Long Now Foundation says

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The Name
The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. When Brian first moved to New York City and found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

The emminent Stewart Brand says

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries

Though the Long Now Foundation is not neccessarily about Communities, it is certainly about what our world might become through a consilience of very different minds thinking about the future.

The Foundation has been running a number of seminars and these seminars can be download as podcasts.

Previous speakers have been: Chris Anderson Jimmy Wales – Kevin Kelly – Stephen Lansing – Peter Schwartz – Sam Harris – Clay Shirky – Esther Dyson – Ray Kurzweil – Robert W. Fuller – Jared Diamond

If you are interested in seeing a wider horizon line, jump in or at least dip your big toe in, the water may not be quite as cold as you think.

In a recent post I looked at some very relevant research around peer production and also the shift from push economic models to pull economic models.

My belief is that Pull platforms harness the passion, commitment and desire to learn of their participants, thereby enabling the formation and functioning of distributed communities that can rapidly improvise and innovate

Many believe that Communities of interest are now evolving into communities of creation and communities of economic production. And this is something that tradtional companies find very hard to emulate.

However, for new business it is pretty much a way of life, an approach that they feel comfortable with, because peer collaboration, inside and outside the organisation is something that is as natural as riding a bike.

Carlotta Perez says

The full deployment of the enormous wealth-creating potential brought forth by each technological revolution requires, each time, the establishment of an adequate socio-institutional framework. The exisiting framework, created to handle growth based on the previous set of technologies, is unsuited to the new one. Thus, in the first decades of installation of the new industries and infrasturctures, there is am increasing mis-match between techno-economic and soci-institutional spheres, as well as an internal decoupling of the economic system, between the old and new technologies.

Recently, I have been looking for a home grown case history that clearly demonstrates this theory. From push to pull, from an industrial model of front end, high capital expenditure, to a virtual, passion based, peer production model that can deliver the zen clap of the reallocation of human creativity, which incrementally can deliver exponenetial value. And I have found it in my home town of Cambridge.

The company in question is called 82Ask Below is a brief case history of how the company formed and how it has developed.

The story of 82Ask

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Cooperation Commons

Howard Rheingold , has a truly inspiring speech on what cooperation between individuals and communities could create and deliver, in an interconnected world.

His belief is that nobody is as clever as everybody, by which he means collective intelligence created through sharing of information, even incrementally has huge beneficial potential for us all.

The collaborative effects of peer production and peer creation, far outweigh, the intellectual impact of the individual.

I have an image in my mind, which is of the Unimind in Toy Story and their hypnotic saying

We are one

Or as ali would have said

I is We

It is full of insight and optimism. He has drawn on biology, science, network theory (in particular Reeds Law ) sociology, technology, history, amongst other things.

It reminds me of Edward O. Wilson's book entitled the Consilience of Knowledge Go and have a read at wikipedia

I strongly recommend that you take the time to listen to what Howard has to say.

also go and check out CooperationCommons

and finally as my co-author Tomi Ahonen likes to say

In a connected world, sharing information is power

Thank you Howard, that was truly inspirational.

Mobile communities - how to do it right

Mike Butcher mentions communities dominate brands in a post about mobile communities.

Mike says

Kenetworks is a fantastic little mobile development agency in Stockholm who excited me about the potential for mobile to drive communities, and therefore communities to drive brands . Meeting Gustav Söderström in the bar of the Lydmar Hotel was great fun and he took me through, step by step, the service they have come up, which currently runs on Playahead , a huge youth community site in Sweden. There is a great Flash presentation which keeps it simple

Thanks Mike for the advocacy :-)

I have been thinking about the issues surrounding commons based peer-to-peer flows of communication. Something that I blogged about last year within the context of JD Lasica's book Darknet: Hollywoods war on the digital generation And more recently referencing Lawrence Lessig the leading thinker on IP, copyright and the implications of recent developments in the explosion of peer-to-peer communications in tensile friction with big media and big new media.

In the piece I have been reading recently when push comes to pull

David Bollier explains his view on PUSH

Briefly put, a “push economy” – the familiar industry model of mass production – is based on anticipating consumer demand and then making sure that needed resources are brought together at the right place, at the right time, for the right people. A company in the “push” model forecasts demand, specifies in advance the necessary inputs, regiments production procedures, and then pushes the final product into the marketplace and the culture, using standardized distribution channels and marketing.

and PULL

By contrast, a “pull economy” – the kind that appears to be materializing in online environments – is based on open, flexible production platforms that use networking technologies to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products for mass markets, companies use pull techniques to assemble products in customized ways to serve local or specialized needs, usually in a rapid or on-the-fly process.

David Bollier writes

The surge of user-generated content is likely to continue, especially for low-cost genres of creativity such as music. Yet even expensive genres such as video and film, which have historically required expensive equipment, now are more accesible to commited amatuers and upstarts. Homemade videos are quickly moving from the style of "America's Funniest home videos" to strikingly professsional, if more idisynchratic shorts and documentaries. Such videos, in fact, constitute a great deal of content on Al Gore's new channel, "Currents"

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The economic survey is undertaking tracking research on trust via the World Economic Forum

Full Survey: Trust in Governments, Corporations and Global Institutions Continues to Decline

Since signaling the importance of trust in world affairs, the World Economic Forum has been monitoring public trust levels through a bi-annual global public opinion poll conducted by GlobeScan Incorporated. The latest findings from the poll show that trust in a range of institutions has dropped significantly since January 2004 to levels not seen since the months following the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The poll also reveals that public trust in national governments and the United Nations has fallen the most over the past two years.

The same set of questions has been put to representative samples of citizens around the world since January 2001. The major findings from this year’s poll are:
*Public trust levels in national governments, the United Nations and global companies are now at their lowest since tracking began in January 2001.
* Since 2004, trust in government has declined by statistically significant margins in 12 of the 16 countries for which tracking is available. The Russian government is the only exception, enjoying continuously increasing trust from its citizens since 2001.
*The United Nations, while continuing to receive higher trust levels than other institutions, has experienced a significant decline in trust from 2004 levels in 12 of 17 tracking countries, suggesting an impact from the scandal over the Oil for Food Program.
* Public trust in companies has also eroded over the last two years. After recovering trust in 2004 to pre-Enron levels, trust has since declined for both large national companies and for global companies. Trust in global companies is now at its lowest level since tracking began.
* NGOs remain the leaders in trust, but they also have to contend with decline. In 10 of 17 countries for which data is available, trust in NGOs has fallen since 2004, in some cases sharply (e.g., Brazil, India and South Korea).

These findings are based on a global public opinion poll involving a total of 20,791 interviews with citizens across 20 countries (n = 1,000 in most countries), conducted between June and August 2005 by respected research institutes in each participating country under the leadership of GlobeScan. (Please see page 13 for a list of research institutes in each participating country.) Each country’s findings are considered accurate to within 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The survey asked respondents how much they trust each institution “to operate in the best interests of our society”. Identical questions were asked in most of the same countries in January 2004, August 2002 and January 2001.

This got me thinking that if we are trusting institutions less, then who can we trust?

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I have been reading the Aspen Institutes latest ouvre, entitled When push comes to pull. The new economy & culture of networking technology

Which resonates deeply with Communities Dominate Brands.

David Bollier the author states

If the world seems a confusing place at this moment, part of the reason may be that we are living in an epochal period of transition bridging two very different economies and cultures

Bollier references Carlota Perez and her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital read a review here

The full deployment of the enormous wealth-creating potential brought forth by each technological revolution requires, each time, the establishment of an adequate socio-institutional framework. The exisiting framework, created to handle growth based on the previous set of technologies, is unsuited to the new one. Thus, in the first decades of installation of the new industries and infrasturctures, there is am increasing mis-match between techno-economic and soci-institutional spheres, as well as an internal decoupling of the economic system, between the old and new technologies. The process of re-establishing a good match and creating conditions both for recoupling and full deployment of the new potential is complex, protracted and socially painful

Just listen to Lawrence Lessig describe the impact of this decoupling is having around the issues of copyright

The report looks at society, communication, the media, business and education. And discusses at great length the differences from living in a "Pull vs. Push economy"

The report also mentions a couple of favourite themes. Creative Destruction and also punctuated equilibrium and of course the power of the connected community

Thoughts that fell out for me from the piece is that technology as we argue enables us to connect, work and collaborate in ways previously thought impossible. And the industrial mindset of rigid institutions and architectures of revenue created as choke points can no longer work, when we are busy creating our own, content, our own media ecologies, our own brands and business models.

Its a bit like the Punk movement, but hypercharged.

The Long Tail gets a look in and so does a discussion around how one creates value in a world where production and businesses are being virtualised.

The benefits of living and working in a pull world? John Hagel believes

that pull is much more adept at promoting innovation, learning and capabiility building (read the world of warcraft piece ) on the part of the people. It assumes that you're going to give people resources in very flexible ways so that you can experiment, imporovise, and tinker in ways that you cannot anticipate.

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I was speaking at the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit yesterday.

One of the topics discussed was "finding new ways to connect with consumers in a collaborative world."

Unfortunately, there was not enough time to really get stuck into the topic.

Its interesting to me that the focus, was purely on "consumers and consumption," as I believe that the changes we are witnessing at a societal level requires us to think about these issues in a wider context.

First and foremost, my view is that if we have migrated from a static mass (cold) media to a social (hot) media, where the revolution is in the explosion of peer-to-peer communications then that requires businesses/organisations by default to build into their behaviour a social dimension.

So its not marketing to extract value, its not education as a cheese factory, its not health care as we know it.

Especially if they/we want to succeed in this new marketplace/ecology.

Something that has occurred to me is this, in a super-connected world, valuable knowledge can be created by a more disparate and geographically dispersed group of people. And the value created through a commons-based peer production is not just economic, its personal and it has a uniquely social dimension.

I met up with Hilary Cottham of RED at the Design Council last night and continued my musings with her and Adrian Bailey, where essentially we discussed the idea of empowerment through collaborative approaches to business, organisational, political, and social challenges.

By taking a horizontal and collaborative approach, one has the opportunity to engage people into a community focused on solving a common goal. Its more contextual.

This is where industrial age marketing falls flat on its face. Because "we" can have no ownership, we know that broadcast style comms or factory style teaching is about control.

We know that our education system is not really about unlocking "my" true potential its about something far more unflexible. Though we do know that there are significant policy changes going on in this area

What in my mind is more powerful is a bigger idea about the role and purpose of a brand, an organisation and living that purpose. Inside and outside the organisation.

But this requires greater organisational fluidity and trust. But the benefits can far outweigh the growing pains.

John Seely Brown said

The collaborative peer production acheived througth pull platforms can be radically more efficient than classically structured corporations can acheive

Also, we cannot ignore the erosion of masculine and feminine approaches to life. In the agricultural and industrial ages, we were very male dominated. But, in a knowledge economy where value is created more by how we are connecting and collaborating. Communities and collaborative approaches instinctively feel more feminine - there is by default more nuture.

Its no bad thing in my book.

Google is now in danger of being passé - as a purely mechanical way of finding information

Says Alan Rushbridger Editor of the Guradian

Further

And just to be "really terrifying", hundreds of sites are scraping the ads out of sites and aggregating them.

The Guardian looked at the phenomenon of how people are looking to these technical aggregators. So for instance, "Overheard in the UK" has had 457,000 visits in the last month.

"Comment used to be our field. Now there are web sites for fragmented audiences who want stuff they are interested in by people who are like them... However fragmented you want to be, it can be done better than a newspaper. What does a newspaper do?"

Rusbridger said that he decided to launch a new Guardian site, "Comment is Free", after seeing how a liberal-minded blog in the US, The Huffington Post, a had overtaken The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones and The New Yorker in web traffic.

All of this content is created for free.

Further

But for a society to work well, citizens have to be informed across a range of subjects. Politicians, in fact, would find it hard to govern without informed citizens. And newspapers stand outside government and can critique it.

Rusbridger drew on an anecdote about a dinner he attended where representatives form the highest levels of politics, the military and judiciary were present, just after the Iraq war.

"One by one they said we all failed. All the parts if the state that were supposed to work didn't. The only thing that did work was newspapers and broadcasters."

In an age where some parts of the world remain no-go areas to ordinary people, like Baghdad, it's newspapers which are sending reporters like Jonathon Steel, 67, who said "he wanted to go. What happens if all the journalists pull out? There's a duty to go. There' aren't any bloggers volunteering to go."

"I will never lose sight of the role of newspapers and their role," said Rusbridger. "In some ways it's the most exciting time to be in newspapers. There's a revolution as big as Gutenberg and Caxton going on, but in many ways it's also frightening."

Via Mike Butcher

Tomi is featured in two periodicals this week on the topic of mobile-TV convergence. In the American business weekly Barrons, he is quoted at length saying pretty much the same stuff he's on about here at our blogsite, for example:

Tomi Ahonen predicts people will use their mobiles mainly for "snacking" on favourite TV content at idle moments of the day. The mobile phone will never become an alternative viewing platform, he argues, adding that the real challenge is for operators to create bold new TV services around the unique features of a mobile handset. These features, he says, include the ability to interact with, personalize and pay immediately for TV-related content.

Barrons 20 March 2006

Unfortunately that issue is not free online, so you have to buy the issue to read more.

But if you want to read more about how to do 3G-TV, with several real examples of mobile-TV services and how the fourth screen differs from Cinema, TV and the PC screen, Tomi's column in European Communications of Spring 2006, is worth a read. Tomi explains how to use his mobile service creation theory, the Six M's, to build billable value into mobile TV services. Their Eurocomms website is open to access for all, so we warmly recommend visitors to our blogsite to hop on over and read Tomi's full column entitled "3G TV Convergence, the Personal Touch".

But this is something I picked out, that caught my eye

The fourth M is Multi-user, or extending into the community. A good example of a Multi-user mobile TV service is viewer participation in the form of SMS-to-TV chat. Launched in Finland in 2001, over the years it has evolved to SMS-to-TV dating as in Italy, SMS-to-TV games as in Malaysia and SMS-to-TV Rap the latest hit in Finland. But the most advanced concept of premium user-generated content on the mobile phone, broadcast live on TV, comes from Korea, on the Tu Media network. Last Autumn Tu Media introduced videoclip-to-TV chat. Any viewer could send their videoclips as premium-cost MMS messages to the broadcaster, and moments later these would be broadcast live. Your kid having a birthday? Shoot the video and turn on the TV.

To read the full column please visit European Communications

Darwin said, for wont of repeating myself that

it is not the strongest or most intelligent that survive, but the ones most adaptive to change.

The other important point Darwin made was the ability of the opposite sex to attract; to find the best mate, another survival instinct.

Just think of the peacock, its gotta have something going for it, right?

So, Channel 4 is no longer a broadcaster, they are mutating into something else. Whilst other broadcasters are buying friends reunited , (though I think Murdoch got the better deal) as their advertising revenue crashes down around them, and mass audiences are in inoxerable decline. (ITV said that their advertising revenue was down £50million). Plus a recent survey by google showed that internet vs. TV attention now was 164 minutes for the internet and 148 minutes for TV.

John Naughton in his big think the piece The age of permanent net revolution , mentions the word ecology and then references this to Television and its historical dominant role (see below) equally there is a terminology called media ecology and this is going to play a key role in our media landscape going forward.

For most of our lives, the dominant organism in this system - grabbing most of the resources, revenue and attention - was broadcast TV. Note that 'broadcast' implies few-to-many: a relatively small number of broadcasters, transmitting content to billions of essentially passive viewers and listeners. This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us grew up. But it's in the process of radical change because broadcast TV is in inexorable decline; its audience is fragmenting.

Twenty years ago, a show like The Two Ronnies could attract audiences of 20 million. Now an audience of 5 million is considered a success by any television channel. In five years' time, 200,000 viewers will be considered a miracle.

I have personally witnessed enough changes first-hand to want to investigate what this means to all businesses whether they be media companies or businesses that use and deploy any media as marketing tools. We realised that what we were witnessing was the wholesale unbundling of the media, of business models. Dramatic changes in consumption habits, and the explosion of peer-to-peer flows of communication both online and via the mobile phone.

Hence the book that I wrote with Tomi. Also worth a read here and here

The big question was the pace of that change. Last year demonstrated the pace has accelerated. Or was at least arriving at a dramatic chapter in the story. What some might call a page turner.

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Internet users consumed more bandwidth than ever last year, driven by the growing popularity of peer-to-peer networks and heightened demand for video files.

Burgeoning demand also prompted internet carriers to upgrade their network capacity to handle the upswing in traffic, a new report indicates.

According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm, international demand for bandwidth grew 42 percent in 2004, with the largest upswing in usage coming from Asian nations. Last year marked the second consecutive annual upswing in demand, the firm said, after carriers added 62 percent more capacity in 2003.

Via Wired

Digital music downloads triples

Digital music sale revenue tripled in the first half of 2005 compared with 2004, figures have suggested

Digital music sale revenue tripled in the first half of 2005 compared with 2004, figures have suggested. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimated 6% of record industry sales were digital, worth $790m (£450m).

Whilst Young Canadians are more connected than ever , and at a surprisingly early age. The second phase of the Young Canadians in a Wired World (YCWW) research project reveals that an astonishing 94 percent of young people access the Internet from home, with students as early as Grade 4 beginning to rely on the Internet to explore social roles, stay connected with friends and develop their social networks.

And our connected world online is exploding , a new blog is created every second and the phenomenon has grown 60 times larger than it was three years ago, says Technorati in its periodic 'State of the Blogosphere'. There are about 27.2 million blogs and 75,000 new ones created each day. At that rate, the blogosphere doubles about every 5.5 months.

In terms of connectivity A Pew Internet and American Life Project study found online teens are increasingly tech-savvy . Nearly nine out of 10 teenagers say they use the net, up from 74 percent in 2000, according to the Pew study.

While e-mail is seen as a tool for communicating with adults, instant messaging was proving the most popular way to chat with friends. Three-quarters 75% of online teenagers in the US have used IM, the survey found, with personalised features proving popular.

Features such as buddy icons are a popular way for teenagers to express and differentiate themselves.

And The mobile phone could overtake the internet as the most popular medium for music downloads before the year is out, the global record industry lobby group has predicted. In its 12th annual global report the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said 3G technology would drive the growth of digital music downloads to mobiles.

And consumption habits are changing: London, 21st June 2005 – 15-24 year olds across Europe are spending less time watching TV and listening to the radio as a result of using the Internet, according to research from the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), the pan-European trade organisation for sellers of interactive media. Almost half of 15-24 year olds (46%) are watching less TV, preferring instead to browse the web while 22% are listening to less radio. A third of those questioned are even reading less, choosing to consume information over the Internet.

Activities done less as a result of using the Internet:
Watching TV 46% -- Talking on the phone 34% -- Reading newspapers 33% -- Reading books 32% -- Listening to the radio 22%

Across Europe, this key target audience is spending almost a quarter of their media time (24%) online, more than reading newspapers (10%) or magazines (8%). In comparison, the average European devotes 20% of their media activity to the Internet. Among 15-24 year olds, TV continues to represent the largest share of media time at 31% with radio just ahead of the Internet on 27%.

Finally; online Chat
The EIAA research also reveals the extent to which youths are using the Internet to communicate with friends, with 58% preferring to chat to friends over the Internet. Meanwhile, over a third admit to talking less on the phone now that they are online while 26% send less text messages.

“The 15-24 age group is the holy grail for most advertisers and the EIAA research conclusively demonstrates the extent to which the internet now represents an essential media for this audience, increasingly replacing other media including TV and radio

Simon Waldman posts Radio 1 Dj's log onto Myspace

referencing Robert Hamman

Simon points out

that a load of Radio One DJs have set up stall on MySpace (here’s Jo Whiley ). I suppose this is a modern day version of ‘hanging with the kids’. Obviously something the err cash-strapped BBC could never do on their servers. Is David Cameron on there yet? No… not this one..

and he's not wearing flip flops.

· · ·

Terry Heaton says

But now we've entered the world of unbundled media, where people download individual songs instead of buying CDs, watch programs when and where they want (without the commercials), and read news stories or snippets of stories via the World Wide Web instead of going out to the driveway every morning. Movie-going is down; music radio is falling fast; and you can now watch Lost on your Video iPod instead of Wednesday night on ABC. The mass audience is disappearing and with it, and the economy it supports.

If unbundled media is where we're headed, then unbundled advertising must necessarily follow. This is a scary concept, however, for there is no command and control mechanism or manipulable infrastructure in the unbundled world. The upside, though, is that it costs very little to participate. All that's necessary is the release what I call "ad pieces" into the seeming chaos of the internet, where other businesses will take those pieces and reassemble them when summoned by customers who are trading their scarcity for information they actually want.

Via TV News in a Postmodern World. The Economy of Unbundled Advertising

Conversations on Convegence

Monday's International Herald Tribune had a fascinating article with views from several directions on convergence in the media space. The IHT quoted EA (Entertainment Arts the video gaming giant), Star the Asian satellite broadcaster, and SK Telecom Korea's biggest mobile telecoms operator. Here are a few tidbits from the story:

Entertainment Arts Executive Vice President Gerhard Florin says that videogaming differs from other media in that when gamers interact with a videogame, they do it with full attention. That is not true of most other mass media - when we have the TV on, we might be reading a newspaper or while reading a magazine we may have the radio playing in the background etc. For those thinking gaming is a teenager phenomenon, check out this stat. In the past ten years, the average age of the gamer has shot up from 17 in 1995 to 25 in 2005. That is the average age, so it means there are plenty of us 40-somethings also into gaming ha-ha, and most tellingly, the average age of the gamer is still rising. And relevant to convergence? EA says that the future of gaming involves mobile phones, as the mobile phone allows micropayment elements to be built into the gaming experience (as we discuss in our book Communities Dominate Brands, in the case study of the Habbo Hotel). EA expects something in the magnitude of 40% of revenues in gaming coming in the future from mobile phones. Fascinating?

2929 Entertainment

are an interesting company they are about to release a film shot on HD called Bubble, directed by David Soderbergh simultaneously in Cinemas and by video-on-demand.

This has got Hollywood in a bit of a pickle - and is nothing short of heresy according to Rolling Stone Magazine

Is Bubble the future of movie watching? Some theater owners would like to screw off Soderbergh's head for threatening their business. Others think this triple-release strategy will save millions in marketing costs, serve a wider audience and appeal to a generation that wants what it wants right now, whether it's on a DVD, a computer or an iPod

Whilst Boing boing commented

Some cinema chains in America are refusing to show Steven Soderbergh's new movie Bubble because it's being released in a new way -- in theaters, on DVD, and via pay-per-view all at once.

In fact according to CBC Theatre chains in more than 15 states have refused to show the film, saying Soderbergh's plan will take a big chunk out of their bottom line.

"It's the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today," John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, said of the so-called "day and date" release strategy.

The 2929 way

At the center of this shift is 2929 Entertainment, the media company co-founded by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban-the high profile founders of online radio company Broadcast.com, which they sold to Yahoo! Inc. in 1999 for $5.7billion. Taking advantage of their deep pockets, Wagner and Cuban have used 2929 Entertainment to marry a vertical collection of holdings that includes their two digital cable channels-HDNet and HDNet Movies-along with Rysher Entertainment, 2929 Productions, HDNet Films, Magnolia Pictures Distribution and Landmark Theatres, allowing them to digitalize completely the production and distribution of movies. By doing this, they plan to shift the power of viewing choice from the studios to the consumer.

Despite widespread adoption of VHS, DVDs and more recently video-on-demand, Hollywood has held tight to the series of windows through which it distributes and allows consumers to access its films-a system designed to extract maximum revenues from each medium. Studios actively drum up interest
in a film in the months leading up to its release, and then limit the number of theaters it is initially sent to in an effort to enhance the buzz before it is sent on to smaller screens across the country. Roughly 60 to 90 days after a film's release, it is publicized again and then released to the home video market and video-on-demand. Once revenues from those windows have been exhausted, a film will finally be licensed to cable providers such as HBO and Cinemax, before ultimately making its way onto free TV, where it will generate advertising revenues. The studios have intentionally held to this formula in an effort to keep the rental market from cutting into a film's initial theater sales, but with DVD sales now responsible for the bulk of films' revenues, the new companies believe the model is flawed.

Many think it's time to compress the time horizon. That's exactly what 2929 Entertainment is doing. "We have the ability to make a movie, put it on TV, put it in the theaters and sell a DVD simultaneously; the consumer is now in charge and gets the choice of deciding," says Wagner, 2929 Entertainment's chief executive. "It's about leveraging technology-leveraging the fact that it's a digital world and saying, let's get these products to people and let the consumer decide,' as opposed to some arbitrary window."

The Observer commented on this on Sunday whilst looking at Disneys purchase of Pixar studios

There is an industry-wide realisation that the business model underpinning media companies could become obsolete in the face of new technology.

The release of the new Steven Soderbergh film Bubble this week, the first to be released simultaneously on DVD, in cinemas and over the internet, marks a watershed. American movie-goers have typically seen films first, with additional revenues added through DVD sales to pay-TV operators and, finally, terrestrial broadcasters. Releasing movies at different times in different countries also maximised revenues. The dissemination of information over search engines like Google, which recently launched a 'searchable' online video store, make that model impracticable

Currently, studios control the distribution of films. In the future, they may struggle to maintain that grip as content becomes available on a myriad of new platforms. Every major TV and film studio is examining ways of making their content available over the internet, on mobile phones or on other hand-held devices, including iPods.

The key to all this - does it enable viewers, consumers of content in valuable ways?

If NO - then don't bother - then you have to work out your business model.

But it is the future - so get used to it.

Soderbergh interviewed by Wired said of the benefits of embracing new technologies for film making and distribution

When the changeover from film to digital happens in theaters in five or 10 years, you're going to see name filmmakers self-distributing. Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, "Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out there - people can see either or both. For instance, right now I know I could do two very different versions of The Good German.

I stumbled upon this post Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? by Jeff Jarvis who quotes Yochai Benkler

A whole set of other behaviors that have grown up in the household, in friendships, in communities, the motivations that they capture, the signals that get people to explain what it is that they desire, how they desire, what they want to do, what they’re trying to do, all of these things are suddenly becoming integrated into the core economic activities of the most advanced economists, and all of the players inside of these economies need to begin to think. It’s a new set of social competition. It’s a new set of opportunities. It’s a new solution space for ways to solve production problems. And we need to start learning how to live with, use, provide platforms for, use the outputs of without undermining this new set of social cultural practices.

Jeff also quotes Tom Evslin

I think lesson one is don’t try to build a business and network at the same time…. Let’s forget Reed’s Law for a moment because Metcalf’s Law is steep enough, that everyone knows that Metcalf’s Law says use networks that increase value, and everybody forgets the converse, which is small networks have no value. And so what value is there to the first few users in joining a small network. Almost none. And so you can’t extract anything in return. You can’t put friction in the way of people joining a small network. You have to make it incredibly attractive and easy. That’s the secret of Skype’s success. They only had distribution experience. Then they used that, and they didn’t introduced Skype in and Skype out because it would have been a distraction until they reached critical network mass.

Jeff states

I believe we start with the notions that: * We all want to control our contributions. * We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit. * We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty * And we all — individual, collective, enabler — find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.

But there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:

This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.

And if you try to take control away from us, you will lose. It used to be that you could take control away from us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can always go somewhere else for content or information or service. There’s always another news story, always another email service, always another search engine. Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.

Michael Jackson, the former head of Channel 4 turned US television executive, is to lead a new internet programming venture at Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp.

Mr Jackson has taken the role of president of programming at IAC, a major player in the internet sphere as owner of the Ask Jeeves search site, dating service match.com and Ticketmaster. New and old media companies are crossing paths as they seek to develop internet-based business models. While established content makers such as News Corporation are buying into web platforms such as myspace.com , IAC and others are looking for content to make their sites more popular.

Then

Mr Jackson said the venture would not just amount to "making soap operas and putting them on the web," but would include user-generated content and original programming. He cited AOL's coverage of the Live8 concerts and the viral success of "Lazy Sunday", a Saturday Night Live sketch that built up a cult following via the web, as examples that IAC will follow. "It just feels that compelling content can connect with an audience through the web in a way that was not the case a year ago. There is now an economic model to support it," he said.

Via the Guardian

And why is this of importance?

Martin Burke can't guarantee what time he'll get home in the evenings: his work as a chartered surveyor and project manager in Nottingham tends to have unpredictable hours. That's a problem, because his favourite TV programs, such as Little Britain and Top Gear, are broadcast at rigidly set times. But Burke, 33, doesn't mind that. He is one of the millions of people who have embraced video on demand (VoD) - making it possible to watch whatever is available, at a time that suits him and his wife, not the network schedulers. When he gets home he can press a button on the remote control, and in NTL's data centre on the M4 beyond Heathrow, a server will begin streaming the program he has chosen to his TV.

If his neighbours press the button one minute later to start watching the same program, they will get that program streamed separately. NTL says it has signed up 600,000 households since launching the service in January this year, and expects to hit 1m by next March.

In the US Time warner Cable reports that the avaerage home watches 30 VoD programmes a month, whilst Comcast has recorded a billion programmes downloaded so far this year.

From Television on your own terms

also read BT evolves into a broadcaster

Bye-bye, newspapers. If you're reading this on thin paper that folds and crinkles, has many other things on oversized pages and gets ink on your fingers, then you are helping stem the decline of an endangered species.

Sorry to say it, but you may be a dying breed yourself. Between 1998 and 2005, weekday newspaper readers dropped from 58.6 to 51 percent of all adults, according to Newspaper Association of America figures. For 18-24 year olds, the drop was from 43.5 to 38.4 percent, and for 25-34 year olds, readership fell even further, from 45.9 to 36.8 percent. Younger nonreaders are undoubtedly unmarried, since married people read newspapers more often than singles -- perhaps to hide behind at breakfast.

argues Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the Miami Herald today

Rosabeth goes onto say

Newspapers don't have to ignore disinterested potential readers. Niche publications grab young audiences that newspapers lose. For example, School Sports magazine has been growing in local markets while newspapers have reduced coverage of high-school sports.

Wave bye-bye to broadcast television, too. As mass media become niche media, TV suffers from similar afflictions. New media audiences want to be more engaged and in control. They want to:

• Direct the action (video and online game players).

• Produce the package (on-demand viewing; content recorded for replay).

• Create the content (short Web films; blogs).

• Develop their own networks (e-mail communities with pirated content; news spread virally by hitting ``forward'').

These consumers are not just the young. A British Broadcasting Corporation brainstorming session on the future of the BBC that I attended included a role-playing grandmother who finds video games more interesting than television.

And finally

Newspapers have been pretty good at developing an Internet presence. The problem is that they haven't yet answered the question of whether a newspaper is the news or the paper. Will they keep saying bye-bye to their journalists and not to their printing plants? Will they keep focusing on which channel of distribution to favor rather than on the quality of their content? Those would be unfortunate choices.

Simon Waldman posts a lengthy muse on the future of book publishing.

Personally, I find reading e-books tough. But that's me.

Via the BBC

The impact of the internet on news has the potential to transform the interaction between politics, media and the public, beyond recognition, argues the BBC's Director of Global News, Richard Sambrook.

The argument is

The information revolution is in its earliest stages. But it has the potential to alter the dynamics of public debate, and the interaction between politics, media and the public, beyond recognition

Further

Just as the printing press and later the end of licensing produced a seismic shift in public debate 300 years ago, the internet is having a similar impact now. Information, knowledge and public access are being redistributed, with consequences we have only just begun to feel.

Tabloid newspapers are popular the world over. The news business has been based on a model of limited information gathered by select organisations with the resources to do so, and then distributed in ways controlled by the media or the regulators.

That world has gone. We now have unlimited information available - it has been commoditised and democratised. Thanks to the internet, the role of media gatekeeper has gone.

Information has broken free and top-down control is slipping inexorably away.

And as we say, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't go back to your day job. In this instance, that is the passive uniformed consumer, reader viewer, who today expects and no less demands their voice to be heard.

News organisations do not own the news any more. They can validate information, analyse it, explain it, and they can help the public find what they need to know.

But they no longer control or decide what the public know. It is a major restructuring of the relationship between public and media. But it will affect politics and policy as well.

People can now address politicians directly, and politicians can reach the public without going through the media any more. Public discourse is becoming unmediated.

As a consequence the roles of all professionals are changing and if journalists are becoming people who help manage information, perhaps NHS Direct is an example of health professionals becoming people who help individual manage their own health.

The availability of information and the pressure for transparency is raising new political issues which we have not had to confront before.

Today, the truth will out at greater speed, with greater impact.

The Community Generation
Generation 'C' shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.

Also Community rules all
Digital is our destiny

Less than two years ago, an article in this newspaper coined a word to describe a new trend for posting audio files online. Since then, podcasting has taken the internet by storm, with millions listening to radio shows, comedy skits and the random musings of strangers through their MP3 players.

well worth a read of the highs and lows of the podcasting phenomonen

Via the Guardian

Well according to the Guardian they were top of the iTunes podcast chart last week.

In less than two years podcasting has gone from the periphery of the internet to a mainstream digital platform, exploited by newspapers, broadcasters and amateur web enthusiasts.

Gervais's weekly show on Guardian Unlimited has been downloaded more than 2m times, while the best of Moyles' Radio 1 breakfast show was downloaded nearly half a million times last month.

Radio shows account for a third of the top 30 podcasts, six of them from the BBC. Comedy podcasts dominate, making up half of the top 30, from spoof President Bush speeches to Howard Stern and The Simpsons.

The Daily Telegraph's podcast is at 66, 37 places behind the Sun. Unlike the Sun, whose offering comprises a speech by Tony Blair and a Steve Coogan interview, the Telegraph offers a daily package of news and comment, presented and edited by former Radio 5 Live presenter Guy Ruddle.

meanwhile

The BBC's podcasting trial of 20 of its radio shows was due to end last year, but has been extended until the end of June with another 30 programmes made available. "The audience response has been staggering," says Simon Nelson, controller of BBC Radio and Music Interactive.

Via the Media Guardian

And have a read of Jeff Jarvis nattering on about podcasting

LONDON ( Reuters ) - Universal Music, the world's biggest record label, is digging deep into its vaults to release download-only recordings from its vast back catalog.

The company said on Wednesday it is embarking on a program to digitise 100,000 out of print 1European recordings, beginning with 3,000 British, French and German albums from artists such as Marianne Faithfull, Brian Auger and Brigitte Bardot.

"Over the next three to four years, we aim to reissue perhaps as many as 10,000 albums for downloading, which amounts to more than 100,000 tracks," said Barney Wragg, senior vice president of Universal Music Group International's eLabs division. "This program will offer material that, in some cases, goes back to the early days of recorded music."

The digitised songs, many of which have only been published on vinyl LPs, will then go to Universal's online music partners such as Apple's iTunes Music Store.

The new initiative -- carried out after Universal digitised all of its active catalog -- reflects the new reality of Internet music stores where "shelf space" is effectively infinite, and a large proportion of sales come from the long tail of non-blockbusters.

Digitising music, particularly back catalog recordings, can be complicated by the fact that older contracts with musicians and publishers did not include digital rights. That adds a tangle of red tape to the task of converting analog tapes or vinyl into a digital file that can played by a computer or a device like Apple's iPod.

Thanks to Jackie Danicki for the hat tip

This post is without doubt worth a proper read.

Participatory Journalism - From Reporting To Dialogue: An Italian Viewpoint

It covers all the major issues facing the creation, delivery and distribution of news and content in a superdistributed world.

Highlights for me

In our case, new technologies have played a very important role. After each issue of "Profondo Italia", the Corriere della Sera online site has received many contributions from readers, who not only were expressing their views on the newspaper treatment of the subject, but who, and here is the real news - were contributing themselves facts and information, which in turn significantly extended and enriched the panorama painted by the report while providing new points requiring further investigation and research: a contribution to which newspapers will not be able to do without."

The courageous experiment conducted by the Corriere della Sera best demonstrates the possible benefits that audience involvement can bring to today's journalism. To continue in this direction is the message arriving from a Universe in constant evolution in information on new media.

And

The most successful experiment among Italian participatory journalism is surely Il Barbiere della Sera.

Born on the total voluntary idea of a small group of young journalists, the Barbiere has rapidly become a reference point for uncensored information on the world of journalism and communication in Italy.

Apart from the tight knit newsroom composed by volunteers, the BDS (as it's known in it's circle of readers) is packaged in large measure thanks to news sent in by registered users.

There are almost 5,000 of them, many of them who work in the world of information and communication and tell of its facts, gossip and secrets.

"Every day", writes the Barbiere Della Sera, "in our work we see the actual daily life of a newsroom, the relationships with the directors and managers of the companies that we work for, and we automatically capture in our memories small episodes, comments, ideas and tips of our many colleagues, all news which often remain unused in the drawer because they are not "in line" with the rest or because the chief editor has decided not to use them.

At the Barbiere Della Sera, if a news story is true and verified, it is always good to publish it."

originally written in Italian by Diego Galli
as "Che cos’è il giornalismo partecipativo?
Dal giornalismo come lezione, al giornalismo come conversazione"
on Problemi dell'Informazione (il Mulino)
September 3rd 2005

via Robin Good

google goes a little more mobile Via Simon Waldman

The whole mobile internet thing has kind of left me behind. Despite the hype, too many things are just too hard to find, too hard to use, or just well - a little bit rubbish. However, I’m gradually getting there thanks to my Nokia N70. Shozu - really did it for me with pics. A single button send to Flickr that has never failed, is quite wonderful. Then a mobile version of Gmail - which just works, and very wonderfully (and has actually stopped me moving to a different mail provider).

Then I find Bloglines works like a dream on a mobile.

Now Goog