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The Future of Media Summit 2007 participant blog is now launched.

The blog on this page, which was for the Future of Media Summit 2006, will remain as a record of some of the post-event conversations from last year's event.

Last year we only launched the participant blog for the Future of Media Summit 2006 at the time when the actual event kicked off. This year we’d like to build an conversation beginning before the event, and extending far beyond, so we will continue with the same Future of Media Summit blog for Summits in subsequent years, rather than create a new blog each year.

See you on the new blog!

The Future of Media Report 2006 has certainly achieved its intention of generating discussion with dozens of posts and also good media coverage. So far there has been discussion in five languages from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Peru, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, UK, and the US (these are representative links only – in most of these countries there have been many references to the report).

Here is the full list of links to the report and Summit website (Technorati).

There were two particularly thorough and thoughtful analyses of the report, the first of the reviews from Robin Good at Master New Media, and another one from Sanjana Hottotuwa – these are both very much worth reading. I’d like to pick up on and respond to just a few of their comments.

Robin says:

The report is way too US-centric. The revolution in the making is a global one, not an American one. Do you think that if by accident the US had a sustained black out this would somehow stop? Many other local and regional realities are at work, and often with a much greater impact on society and with a faster evolutionary speed than what the US content and advertising marketplaces have done.
…
Given the highlights and the relative majority of research data focusing on the US-UK-Australia triangle only, ironically the report could have been better titled something as The Future of American and Anglo-Saxon Media.

Absolutely a fair comment Robin. The reason we limited the research focus of the report to US, UK, and Australia was primarily one of resources. While Future Exploration Network is a global organization, these are our "home" countries. In creating the report we considered whether to include other interesting media markets, which could have included China, Brazil, Scandinavia, or many others. However the report was pulled together very quickly, and we simply didn’t have the time and resources to extend beyond these three markets for the research portion of the report. The other themes and issues, such as the strategic framework, absolutely apply in all media markets, and it’s certainly been encouraging how global the response to the report has been. We would love to do a report either truly more global in scope, or addressing specific markets such as East Asia, continental Europe, or Latin America, however this would require some resources. So if any organizations are interested in sponsoring or getting involved in a report that would go further than the original one, definitely get in touch with us.

Robin says:

Global media market highlights.
32 years [for the media and entertainment industry to double its share of the global economy]? I think it will take much less time than that, and looking at the report I get no reference or URL to verify and deepen my understanding. The data reported to support this point say only: "based on 1999-2004 trends" (page 3 of the report).

Sorry, yes this is worth elaborating. In 1999-2004 the global media and entertainment industries grew by 28.5%, while global GDP increased by 18.7%. If these growth rates continue, the share of media and entertainment of the global economy will double in 32 years. Since these years include both the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, they may not be representative. I too believe that it will take less than 32 years, but it’s an interesting extrapolation. While the global economy is likely to grow at a strong pace (barring disasters), the shift to intangible value will definitely accelerate.

Robin says:
Continue reading the rest of the post...

As John Maloney blogged ^* I mentioned the use of prediction markets to inform future of media strategies at the summit.

If you don't know about prediction markets please skip over to the Wikipedia article and Chris F. Masse's industry reporting.

How can prediction markets help with media future strategy:

• Information aggregation/discovery - use the 'wisdom of crowds' to get a handle on where road trends are going or whether your specific initiative will be pan out.
• Risk management - hedging and speculation.

Public and internal corporate markets have uses. Examples:

• Contract pays if NYT daily circulation declines 2005-2006.
• Contract pays if redesign of xyz.com launches by 2006-08-22.

Both of these are pretty mundane. The second is probably an internal market used to as a check on what the redesign team is telling management.

Since nobody knows what the future of media holds, using prediction markets may give you a critical edge (until their use becomes common, in which case navigating without prediction markets will put you at a critical disadvantage).

There are now many ways to try prediction markets: public real money markets, public play money markets (you can set up your own), open source software for running internal markets and consulting outfits ready to ... consult. Chris F. Masse has a comprehensive guide to these categories and more.

I've posted about prediction markets on my personal blog several times, though usually with a policy or technology focus.

As I said at the summit I'd love to hear about how media organizations and agencies that play in the media field are using prediction markets or ideas how they might -- including ideas for claims related to Creative Commons or more broadly the impact and role of peer production and related on media and vice versa.

^* Actually John wrote "... the critical question on how information markets will be used in the creation, use and syndication of media in the future." As worded that's a separate but very interesting and more speculative topic. The implication is that PMs could be an integral part of media production and consumption at a very low level.

Nicole Khan who attended the San Francisco side of the event offers some reflections on the Summit on her blog. The summary of her thoughts are below - check out the original post for specific reflections on what speakers had to offer at the event:

My overall thought on the event? I think it was well done! I liked the format, I can see that working again in the future, in a variety of contexts. I had hoped that more people would have added stuff to the event blog beforehand, oh well… and the framework and report (PDF) which were released before the event were helpful in developing pre-panel ideas. The collaboration was cool – I saw a definite difference in perspective (not goals or ideas) of the media world and the topics under daily discussion between Sydney and SF. This helped broadened the panel discussion and hopefully helped to close the gap between U.S. and Australian perspectives on the topic.

In the future I hope to see more collaboration, more exchanging of ideas in other countries, in ad hoc formats like videoconferences.

We are definitely considering this as a starting point. Future Exploration Network will certainly do more multi-location events, and we hope others will too.

Over on my Trends in the Living Networks blog, I've posted about this blog, as below. Join the conversation!

Haven’t posted here yet on yesterday's Future of Media Summit, as I am now spending more time over on the Future of Media Summit Participant Blog – go check it out. This is kind of an experiment – we’ve set up a blog that every Summit attendee can write posts on. All attendees received a personal login and password, and were given a participant blogging instructions page. We didn’t get a whole lot of blog posts during the event, partly because of WiFi problems in Sydney, but it is now picking up a little as people join the discussion. There has been a lot of discussion globally on the Future of Media Report (more on this later), which is beginning to be reflected in the blog. In addition, there were 14 “audience panels” at the Sydney event, where participants gathered around their chosen theme. (It’s interesting to see the top themes people chose.) The Drivers of Mobile Content and User Generated Content panels have already posted a summary of their discussions on the blog – hopefully some of the other panels will report back too.

So this is what you could call a Large Group Blog. Around 175 people have logins to the blog - everyone who physically attended the Future of Media Summit in either Sydney or San Francisco. While not many have posted yet, more may do so. I’ll invite a few other people who couldn’t make it to the event, to join in if they choose. Starting points for blog discussions are of course the general theme of the future of media, the Future of Media report, the blog discussion around it, an article on the Summit in the Sydney Morning Herald, other media coverage, with more content to come very soon, including a videostream of the event, a video summary, and more articles. So if you have anything to contribute to the discussion, whether or not you were at the event, just email us at fen [AT] futureexploration [DOT] net and we’ll set you up with a blog login. No idea what will happen with this, but I think it’s time to experiment with blogs with large numbers of people around a particular theme. In the past this has been done on forums and discussion boards. Blogs have usually been for one or a few authors. An event seems like a reasonable starting point to get some interesting people to discuss things of common interest, especially since they've met before. It's also an opportunity for people who have never blogged before to try it out, especially when you have not only the die-hard fanatics in the audience. It seems kind of obvious, but I'm not sure anyone's done it before quite like this. So whatever happens with the blog, be it small or large, it will be very interesting.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a nice piece today on the Future of Media Summit, titled You read it here and watched it there first. The article opens...

MEDIA owners and journalists will have to join big advertisers in chasing consumer "mindshare" across a myriad of channels they may not own or control to ensure their editorial efforts sustain current attention levels.

The "multichannelling" of editorial was a key theme to come out of a media forum yesterday in which a line-up of trend spotters from the US and Australia argued that media companies must move quickly from managing their assets as individual products to creating diverse "content networks".

During the Summit ABC TV caught me in a break and interviewed me on the future of media - this appeared on their Midday Report nationally. The producer particularly asked me to speak about how older people are participating in the changes, as much of their audience is not-so-young. I referred to the fact that 18% of over-65s in the US have created content on the Internet, and 7% of over 70s in Australia have downloaded music from the Internet. The way older people have experienced how email and video calls can connect them to their children and grandchildren has led them to find other ways new media is of value to them personally.

The Australian Financial Review also has an article on the event in today's issue, though unforunately this is not available online. I'll summarize it when I've had a chance to get a copy of the paper...

I think any worthwhile event will have solid discussion between participants. The implication of the traditional "talking head" conference is that the speakers have infinite wisdom to impart, and the audience are there to absorb as much of it as they can. At any good event the participants can have as much insight and experience to share as the speakers, so to have only a series of speakers doesn't make sense. At the Sydney side of the Summit, we created "audience panels" - we established a number of topics, people signed up for these, and speakers and other experts in the audience acted as convenors for the discussions. It's always interesting to see what panels people choose to join. The audience panels - in approximate order of their popularity - was as follows.

New business models: how to monetize content
What advertisers want today
Online social networks and media
The drivers of mobile content
Content overload and user filtering
User generated content
Globalization of media
The impact of legislation
The convergent newsroom
Bloggers: are they newsfinders, newsmakers, opinionshapers, or annotators?
Blogging and media
The long tail
Issues for specialist publishers

The Drivers of mobile content panel have posted a summary of their panel discussions. If you participated in one of the other panels, it would be great if you could post some of what you discussed or what was useful to you from the panels so others can benefit - thanks.

One of the issues highlighted today is the challenge of new technology combined with a relatively poor internet infrastructure in Australia...
The on-demand archive of the conference will be available in the next few days
Ian
www.viocorp.com

To all San Francisco participants in the Future of Media -- Welcome!

The Future of Media Summit is intended to be a highly participatory event that will spark conversations and new ideas, strategies, and initiatives.

Anyone who is participating in the Future of Media Summit in Sydney, San Francisco, or via live videostream, can post to this blog. Click here for instructions on how to log in and contribute to the blog. If you have registered for the event you will be able to log in.

The blog will run live during the event, and for (at least) one month after the event, so event attendees can discuss and reflect on the ideas and conversations generated during the Summit.

If you did not attend the live Summit in person and virtually, but would like to participate in this blog, please email us at fen [AT] futureexploration [DOT] net and we will provide you with a log in.

Welcome to the conversation! We hope to get many people who are not regular bloggers to participate in a broader dialogue, and to generate a useful and stimulating conversation on the future of media. Please join in.