The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs

I read through an article on blogging in the Financial Times this morning to help me as I develop some frameworks on the changing content creation landscape. The article was clearly negative on blogging being the transformative media it is touted to be, though brought out some interesting points. The writer makes the point that blogs are not self-sufficient – they depend largely on the mainstream media for their fodder.

“The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new – but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.”

Cute metaphor. Yet symbiosis is far more apt than parasitism. Mainstream media in its online form largely gets attention through blogs. Blogs add immense value to the original articles, by identiyfing what’s important, pointing out flaws, adding other perspectives, making visible to all the conversations that stem from media pieces. Blogs depend on mainstream media, with its resources and editorial capabilities, for sure. Yet media is increasingly dependent on blogging for the direction of attention and layer of value-add created.

Keynote on the Future of Global Business at the Harvard Club in New York

This April 27 I’m doing a lunch address at the Harvard Club in New York City on The Future of Global Business, organized by Claxton Speakers International – description below. Details and registration here. If you’re in the area, please come along and say hi, or feel free to pass on word if people you know may be interested in coming along.
The Future of Global Business
Business is now truly global. Communications technologies and deregulation are creating a world in which there are no boundaries for competition. Manufacturing has already gone to low-cost locations. Now almost-free communication allows legal work, financial analysis, and other professsional work – as well as customer service – to be done anywhere on the planet. Innovations are copied in the blink of an eye. Blogging, podcasting, and internet TV change the rules for media and advertising. The entire planet has become a intensely interconnected hive of business activity.
Yet despite the challenges, there are massive opportunities in this new global world of business. How should individuals, companies, and indeed entire countries, position themselves for success? The answer is in connecting. You must have at least one world-class capability, and then tap into global networks for both suppliers and clients. Those organizations that can create effective collaborative networks will dominate. Those that attempt to stand alone will fall. Today it is still about who you know, but also about how you can create value with your personal networks. In his compelling and energizing keynote, Dawson brings clarity to the unfolding world of global business, and provides specific, actionable strategies for individuals and companies to succeed in the challenging times ahead.

Newspaper headlines and search optimization

An interesting article in the New York Times on how newspapers are finding the art of writing headlines is changing. Back when you were solely trying to draw attention from readers of a broadsheet, being clever was the name of the game. But now that online content is starting to become a significant revenue stream for newspapers, and much of their traffic comes through search engines such as Google News or other new aggregators, creating headlines is becoming a very different art. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making your website friendly to search engines. As it turns out, headlines are a critical part of this. Google and other search engines very heavily overweight words that are in page and story titles. Words used in titles need to be relevant to the article, so search engines can classify them. It’s been very interesting to me as this blog has gained traction to see how people are finding the blog, and what gets good search engine rankings. For example posts on this blog come up #1 on Google for a wide range of search terms, including “monetizing eyeballs“, “client sophistication“, “blogging serialization“, and many others. These are all words that are in the titles of the respective blog posts. Understanding how this works strongly influences what I – or any blogger or editor – choose to use as headlines.
Part of what the newspapers are doing is setting up dual pages, one with the traditional newspaper headline, the other with the search-engine friendly version, intended for different human or automated readers. The thing is that you are not just targetting search engines, but also news aggregration sites such as Memeorandum and Daypop News. Michael Parekh makes some interesting points on this regarding optimization for multiple platforms. Tagging and other approaches will help on this front, but for now content creators need to work out their priorities in how they optimize their sites and content to be found on the web.

Massively multi-player sex games

This is going to be big. Naughty America: The Game is a massively-multiplayer game, due out in the next few months, in which players assume the role of characters who meet, date, and have sex. Up until now the big multiplayer role-playing games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft have been set in fantasy worlds. Now it will be in sexual fantasy worlds, where characters can invite others back to their apartment, designed to their own taste with home decorator tools. Or they can flirt or have sex in a whole variety of realms including the beach, back alleys, a cruise ship, or theme rooms such as make-your-own-porn. And just so it isn’t too tame, you can switch to sex mode, where you can turn on personal webcams, or of course set up in-the-flesh dates. A good overview article discusses some of the ins-and-outs of the market, including how Naughty America intends to deal with distribution, fears of sexual predators, and bringing people into a new experience. However, interestingly, Second Life, the biggest free-form online world, is said to be one-third based on sexual interactions. I think that the only potential limitation here is the quality of the graphics. But if it’s not good enough now, it will be soon. Having recently delved into World of Warcraft and been staggered at how far the multiplayer online games have come in the last years, I don’t doubt that a significant portion of many people’s lives will be spent in virtual worlds, as and when the graphic and interaction quality is up to it. And sex will be part of that virtual interaction.

Online video heats up

YouTube, recently the belle of the ball at the Digital Hollywood conference, has just raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital in a Series B round. YouTube is currently the leader of the pack in providing online video hosting, but it still doesn’t have an evident business model. Apparently it will start putting advertising into its site – which it currently doesn’t do – by mid-year, but the costs of hosting video means this revenue stream has to be significant. Far more likely it will look to cut deals with major entertainment companies to be an outlet for video content, in turn tied in with related revenue streams. However YouTube is far from alone in the space, with Jumpcut launched yesterday, and yet to be released service Motionbox declared the best video service by TechCrunch, even before its launch. Both of these services allow video editing, with Jumpcut in particular having some nifty video mashup and remix features, while YouTube is just an upload site. Bubble, bubble, toil, and maybe trouble on the other end of this boomlet, but it has a very good run to go first.

Internet video becomes true new media

We all know that television will migrate to distribution over the Internet. Broadcast and cable will certainly co-exist with the Internet as distribution channels for moving image content for the foreseeable future, however broadband access and the availability of capital for new media ventures mean that the Internet is already becoming a viable alternative for television viewers. Some traditional free-to-air television channels will at some point simultaneously broadcast their programs over the Internet. However what is more interesting is how video programs over the Internet take advantage of the channel and the media consumption patterns of the likely audience. Case in point is Heavy.com, which targets young males with a showcase of funny, sexy, and crude short videos, set in an extremely advertising-intensive frame. It looks different from just about anything else out there, with few words, and plenty of user-driven interaction, movement, sound, and color. The site is openly modelled on video games. An a very interesting recent article in the New York Times that discusses some of the dynamics of advertising to this demographic, says that the site had 5.5 million visitors in February, while the company estimates it will take in $20 million in revenue this year. Advertisers like not just the audience, but the depth of exposure they get from the in-your-face advertisements. Around half of the videos are amateur productions submitted by the audience, though selected by the site editors. Heavy.com is now ramping up its own video production capabilities. Of course, this is just one facet of the Internet video world, with other players like Youtube, Videobomb, OurMedia, and others providing a whole new domain of user generated and filtered content. Heavy.com is showing the way in actually doing something new which has not done before, rather than simply distributing traditional content in new ways or taking text and image models into video. There will be a lot more exciting and new in this space in the very near future.

Representing ourselves and creating avatars

A teenage girl’s video clip on YouTube about her breakup with her boyfriend has been viewed over 155,000 times in the last five days, primarily because she was playing with features on Logitech web cameras that allow her to change her appearance. The features available on the cameras include adding glasses to a person’s face, changing their eyes, or an entire range of complete characters, such as an alien, gingerbread man, or bulldog. The software tracks movements in the person’s face to keep the modifications aligned with their image. While the features are fairly basic, they still look good, are included with a $100 web camera, and the quality will quickly improve.
An avatar (from the Sanskrit, originally meaning a manifestation of a deity on earth) is a person’s representation in a virtual environment. Any multi-player game involves avatars that players use to play their roles. The Logitech features are an important step to blurring the boundaries between video calling, and taking on a completely different visual representation online. This starts to answer the question of how we will deal with video calls when we don’t always look our best. We are on the verge of being able to look perfectly coiffed and groomed in a video call, irrespective of how we look in real life. Just as we can get a “voice lift” to surgically make us sound younger, we can modulate our digital voices too. Starting from around now, we cannot know if the image we are seeing, even in a live video call, is actually showing a person, or a digitally manipulated image of them. So how do YOU want to look and sound?

10 Trends for 2006+

Future Exploration Network Chief Futurist Richard Watson, within our sister organization NowandNext, has just come out with what will be an annual report. 2006+ 10 Trends: Predictions & Provocations is through Richard’s generosity available here as a free download (usually £35), and Richard is allowing any use of his material with acknowledgement. The ten trends Richard explores in the report are:
1. Anxiety
2. Connectedness
3. Speeding-up
4. Mobility
5. Convergence
6. Privacy
7. Nostalgia
8. Localisation
9. Authenticity
10. Happiness
He then goes on to explore specific sector trends, including society & culture, government & politics, media & communications, money & finance, healthcare & well-being, travel & tourism, and far more.
Just a tiny smattering of the juicy tidbits from the 64-page report:

* In the UK the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) now has more members than the three main political parties combined.
* Reason magazine recently sent out 40,000 personalized copies of its magazine, each with a circled aerial photograph of the subscriber’s house on the cover, and detailed information about that subsciber’s neighbors.
* 42% of the US workforce is unmarried.
* More young people voted on American Pop Idol than in the last US Federal election. But politicians in Lithuania gave away drinks at polling stations, to help increase voting from 23% to 65%.
* At Harvard University, 75% of students support the armed forces, compared to 20% in 1975.
* 36% of high-school students believe the US government should approve news stories prior to publication.
* In 1900 Americans slept 9.0 hours per night, today they sleep 6.9 hours a night.
* It took 30 years for Japan to build to 17 million outbound trips a year, but only 5 years for China. There are 800 million internal trips in China each year, similar to the number on the rest of the planet combined.
* The MTV Starzine magazine, produced by MTV and Nokia, consists entirely of text and photo submission by mobile phones from readers.

Stacks more insights, trends, predictions, and observations in the report.

The state of news media

A great report just out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on The State of the News Media 2006, focusing on the US news industry. It provides detailed analysis across all news media, including newspapers, online, TV, radio, alternative and more. The new major emerging trends they picked out this year are:
* The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.
* The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century.
* At many media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over.
* That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation – finally.
* The new challenge to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time.
* The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if will ever be as big as print or television.
Underlying these trends is the game being played between traditional media and new media organizations, with a large convergent space in the middle, and possibly the beginnings of hardball tactics as we have seen in the music industry over the last years.

Peer-to-peer banking

A new peer-to-peer bank, Prosper.com, is launching in the US, attracting articles in both the New York Times and BusinessWeek, with the latter titling the story “The eBay of Loans”. The principle is simple – you lend to individuals at interest rates based on their credit rating, and since you’re cutting out the bank as middleman, both lender and depositer get more attractive interest rates than they can get commercially. This is not a new idea – UK-based Zopa has been running for almost a year with essentially the same business model. Anecdotally Zopa is doing well, and intends to set up in the US soon. One of the differences is that Prosper.com focuses on groups that know each other or have common interests. It also has a more evolved bidding model so lenders bid to have the lowest (and thus winning) interest rate for a particular lender.
Banks are the archetypical intermediary, in this case between depositers and lenders. They get a very hefty spread for lending to individuals, however they do some things to create that value, including insurance (by pooling loans), risk assessment (making independent and accurate assessment of creditworthiness), and convenience (at their best!). Prosper.com allows lenders to split their loans across many borrowers, giving some loan pooling and security against default. Certainly, an online marketplace cuts out the middleman and the spread it charges – all part of e-commerce 101. However rhe really interesting part of this model is the risk assessment. In the first instance, people can find out about someone as an individual and make a personal assessment on their default risk. The next phase is when more sophisticated models are used to assess credit risk, aggregating a wide range of perspectives. This is not possible by a financial institution. However, with a borrower willing to disclose information, arguably more accurate credit assessment is possible. If some kind of effective deposit insurance through pooling or other mechanisms is put in place, in addition to superior credit assessment (not difficult given the paucity of the bank’s data and models), then there is no reason peer-to-peer banking will not over time become a competitive issue for mainstream banks.