Technology360

Read All About It

Departing Wall Street Journal editor Paul E. Steiger tells it like it is for newspapers these days in a major front page article for this weekend's edition of that paper.  The article is a history of the past 40 years or so of print journalism, but is particularly valuable for its analysis of the decade or so since the Internet started eating print's lunch.  Unfortunately, while public television gets a mention, broadcast journalism's main U.S. practitioner, National Public Radio, doesn't.  Read All About It: How Newspapers Got Into a Fix, and Where they Go From Here.  Link:  Wall Street Journal.  Steiger is leaving to become president and editor-in-chief of ProPublica.  Thanks to NPR Foundation chairman and fellow NPR board of directors member Antoine van Agtmael for the reminder to read my paper.  --Dennis

The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007

Blogger John Bracken, whose day job is at the MacArthur Foundation, sent me and a bunch of others a request to name the most influential media writing of 2007.  In spite of a reminder, I couldn't come up with anything on a par with Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks that I and many others nominated last year.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur was quite influential, largely as a provocation to the new media cognoscenti, and David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous has also been influential for more positive reasons.  Both are in my to-read stack, but I hadn't gotten to either of them so didn't feel comfortable nominating them.

Fortunately, others on John's list weren't as lacking in imagination as I and this year he's put together another great list.  I look forward to exploring the ones I've not yet read.  --Dennis

The Semantic Web

I'm interested in how humans attempt to extract value from the flood of information they create (search for my earlier posts on "Myth, Media and Meta"), devising more and more effective ways of extracting this value.  My candidate for the next big thing in this regard is what's labeled the Semantic Web, which the anonymous authors of Wikipedia describe as:

... an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.^[1] It derives from W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. ...

Link:  Wikipedia.

In a 2001 article in Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila described it in some detail.  The article, The Semantic Web, is still freely available on its web site.

The December 2007 issue of the same magazine has very good update on this effort, titled The Semantic Web In Action (authors: Lee Feigenbaum, Ivan Herman, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann and Susie Stephens).  Unfortunately, the Scientific American web site currently has it available for paid access only and that payment is greater than the cost of the magazine, so look for it on newstands before it disappears.  Highly recommended.

Also see Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall and Tim Berners-Lee, The Semantic Web Revisited, IEEE Intellilgent Systems, May/June 2006 and, for the technically inclined, the World Wide Web Consortium's W3C Semantic Web Activity page.  --Dennis

Bloog: The RSS Mod-Synth

I posted earlier this month about my son's "RoboWheat" robotics project at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is a senior industrial design major.  Another project is what he calls a bloog, a machine that ingests real-time blog posts and produces synthesized content from them.  I'll let him describe it:

Here is the finished project of what I wrote about here - a machine that scrambles the words and sentences of real-time blog posts, based on the look of a 1960’s Moog synthesizer.  It pulls in any RSS feed (for demonstration I used Technorati to create one that fetches all new net-wide blog posts about ‘music,’ har har). The knobs and sliders scroll through the text and add or subtract words from the screen, creating new ideas from the existing sentences.

Some examples:

Link:  AndrewHaarsager.com.  I note that one of the categories he filed this under is "Useless," but I don't know about that.  It might improve the content of many blog posts.  ;-)  --Dennis

PBCore metadata standard

The PBCore metadata standard is, IMHO, one of the most important and, arguably, the most progressive thing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has ever funded.  It's a necessary tool to enable public media to transition to the digital age -- assuming, of course, that public media's managers can find their way to the digital age. 

Marcia Brooks is directing the project from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH in Boston and she's written a great article on it for the December 17th issue Current, the public broadcasting newspaper.  Current seems to delay posting its articles online for some reason, so the the Public Television Digital Archive has posted a copy of Get going in metadata today with this amazing free kit! online [PDF].  Nice job, Marcia, and thanks to Nan Rubin for posting this important overview.

Update 29 December 2007:  I see that the PDF has also been posted at the PBCore web site.

Update, 4 January 2008:
An HTML version is now posted at Current.  --Dennis

Nokia: 25% of Entertainment by 2012 Will be Created and Consumed Within Peer Communities

From a Nokia release:

... Up to a quarter of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups. This phenomenon, dubbed 'Circular Entertainment', has been identified by Nokia as a result of a global study into the future of entertainment.  ¶  The study, entitled 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode', carried out by The Future Laboratory, interviewed trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles signposting emerging entertainment trends. Combining views from industry leading figures with Nokia's own research from its 900 million consumers around the world, Nokia has constructed a global picture of what it believes entertainment will look like over the next five years. ...

... Of the 9,000 consumers we surveyed:

    - 23% buy movies in digital format
    - 35% buy music on MP3 files
    - 25% buy music on mobile devices
    - 39% watch TV on the internet
    - 23% watch TV on mobile devices
    - 46% regularly use IM, 37% on a mobile device
    - 29% regularly blog
    - 28% regularly access social networking sites
    - 22% connect using technologies such as Skype
    - 17% take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
    - 17% upload to the internet from a mobile device

Link: PR Newswire via CNN Money.

Thanks for the tip to Terry Heaton who analyzes this in a post called Tracking the Rise of Personal Media.  Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog.  --Dennis

A Broadcaster's Christmas Carol

I've linked to it before, but Terry Heaton has "reprinted" his Christmas 2004 essay, a take-off on the Charles Dickens classic.  A sample:

... Ebenezer was a second generation Broadcaster, having built his empire from a small A.M. radio station his father owned in the 50s. With a penchant for squeezing every last penny from a dollar, Ebenezer Broadcaster had a reputation as a hostile and difficult employer. He boasted that many celebrities had come through his television stations on their way up the ladder, but the truth is he never paid anybody enough money to want to stick around. ...

Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog. If you're in broadcasting, don't miss it.  --Dennis

TV's Revenue Woes Reach Tipping Point

Diane Mermigas writes:

... Until now, flat-to-rising household TV usage was no real threat to earnings. “However, recent data points on TV viewing and HUT are more disturbing,” [Bear Stearns analyst Spencer] Wang said. In calendar 2007, HUT is down 1.2% from 2006 for the first time–without a change in the Nielsen measurement sample. TV’s core selling demographic (adults ages 18 to 49) has seen HUTs drop 2.5% from a year ago, even when adjusting for the new live, same-day and DVR ratings, that collectively underestimate the erosion. “We find it more than coincidental that declining TV usage is occurring in tandem with broadband Internet penetration reaching mass market levels” of more than half of U.S. homes, he said. ...

Link:  MediaPost.  --Dennis

Implications of the Writers' strike

Diane Mermigas has written three recent columns for MediaPost that are must-read analyses of the impact of the Writers' strike on television's economy:

TV Nets Stuck: Strike Ends With New Metrics, 12 December 2007

Strike Will Transfer Ad Power To Web, TV To Revamp, 18 December 2007

For TV, Crisis Is Catalyst For Change, 21 December 2007

Umair Haque looks at it in terms of how this relates to emerging business models for content:

... While writers and networks have been crippling each other with a simplistic - and totally obsolete - game of mutually assured destruction, Google is slowly but surely reinventing a better way for content to create value: one which doesn't need exactly the rigid contractual lockstep writers and networks are squabbling over.  ¶  See the point? Google is solving exactly the problem that core-focused players are paralyzed by; that's suddenly brought the existing value chain to a crashing, creaking halt. ...

Link:  Bubblegeneration.

Finally, read Paul Bond's article, [Bear Sterns] Report weighs ripple effect of writers strike on Street.  Link:  Hollywood Reporter.  --Dennis

MovieBeam closes. Bad news for Vudu, AppleTV?

Steve O'Hear writes:

... MovieBeam, an early attempt at creating a consumer facing set-top box and accompanying movie service, has closed its doors after fours years in business.  ¶  Originally founded by The Walt Disney Company and later sold to U.S. video rental chain Movie Gallery, MovieBeam was designed to bypass Cable and Satelite providers by beaming movies wireless into the home. The set-top box came with dozens of movies already stored and ready for rental (at $5 a pop), with forty new titles refreshed each month. In total the device could store around a hundred movies at any one time. ...

Link:  last100.

O'Hear thinks this may be bad news for other new entrants in the set-top box market.  I don't doubt that set-top box fatigue (what David Liroff calls the "topple factor") is at work here.  But MovieBeam also faced impending delivery problems.  It was distributing movies over the small amount of ancillary data capacity of analog television stations, including many public television stations.  Those analog transmitters are going away in 13½ months.  While the replacement digital system has much more capacity, it will also, IMHO, come with much greater support costs due to the fragile reception issues inherent in the ATSC digital standard.  I wouldn't be surprised if that figured in MovieBeam's decision also.

But even without the set-top box, video downloading is a problematic business.  After less than a year, Wal-Mart has announced that it's closing its video download store.  Again, Steve O'Hear writes:

... In a bid to get all of the major studios on board, while at the same time not compete negatively with Wal-Mart’s traditional DVD sales, the service was plagued by high pricing and a ridiculously large dose of DRM (one Windows-PC only). It was doomed from the start. ...

Link:  last100.  --Dennis