Technology360

Mobcasting the news

At NPR, we have occasional brown bag lunch (is there any other kind of lunch at NPR?) presentations.  Today's was extremely informative and given by our social media expert, Andy Carvin (twitter @acarvin).  His topic was Mobcasting the News: Crowdsourcing, Volunteers and Journalism (slides) and audio.  Recommended.  --Dennis

'Better Than Free' revisited

At the end of January, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired and formerly publisher/editor of Whole Earth Review, posted what I think was the best essay of 2008 of relevance to us in the media -- Better Than Free -- in his blog called The Technium.  The post has also attracted a number of good comments in the months since.  I linked to it at the time and compared it to Chris Anderson's upcoming writing on the same topic.  The essay is now available as a "manifesto" in pdf form at ChangeThis.

On this topic, also see his People Want To Pay and Where Attention Flows, Money Follows, from which comes:

"... Free is always a fine way to win a flow of attention. As Chris Anderson's clever parsing of the four types of free shows, whenever a free product or service is given, the free is exchanged for attention. Without the flow of attention back to the producer, the free is meaningless. A producer might as well dump the free things in the woods if attention from customers did not count...."

--Dennis

Who are you, Master, and why do you want to control me?

My sister and brother-in-law have been staying with me in Washington this week, so I've played hookey a few hours during the week to do touristy things with them.  One of them was a visit to the Newseum yesterday, a beautiful tribute to the values of big craft journalism -- which, of course, I try to nourish every day.  However, that particular visit followed a briefing that our management team at NPR got from Andy Carvin concerning social media plans.  I'm trying to nourish this kind of thinking every day also.  So this juxtaposition of media values, which some observers might think are contrasting, were at work when I ran across the foot tall MASTER CONTROL letters on the 3rd floor of the Newseum.  What room in a media company could be more at odds with social media?  --Dennis

Open is King - The Future of Meida Beyond Control

... is the title of a lecture that Gerd Leonhard gave at the European Centre for the Experience Economy in Amsterdam earlier this month.  Lots of good stuff here.  Link:  Media Futurist [PDF].  --Dennis

Horowitz Assoc.: news video has top online usage

Horowitz Associates has released a study of broadband video consumption on multiple platforms.  It's the first I've seen that gives information about the relative popularity of what people are using.  And it's good news for those of us in public media.  News video segments top the list, moving from 22% to 36% online weekly usage, 2006 to 2007.  That beats "non-professional online videos," which doubled from 15% to 30%.  The report overview says this about motivation:

... While consumption of broadband video has grown, the study shows that television is still the preferred platform for traditional TV content.  The vast majority (70%) of Internet users who watch TV online say do so because they missed the episode on TV.  About two out of ten (18%) of these respondents say they watch TV shows online to watch them a second time (after having watched them on TV), or that they watch TV shows online just when they happen to find them or when someone else tells them about them (20%).  Conversely, one out of ten (13%) Internet users who watch TV shows online say they watch them directly online, and not on regular TV. ...

Link:  Horowitz Associates.  Thanks to Craig Birkmaier on the OpenDTV mail list.  --Dennis

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

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

On the Internet, Is Everyone an Expert?

Laura Sydell did a piece today on NPR's All Things Considered on the controversy about amateur vs. expert content on the Web.  The report's audio, a text version, and links to a number of related stories are available at NPR.org.  --Dennis

Media Conversations

Doug Kaye has started a new "channel" on The Conversations Network, a non-profit distributor of worthy audio and video programming.  The new channel is called Media Conversations and starts with three interviews by Ralph Simon with Glen Hiemstra and Gerd Leonhard (separately and together) on the future of media.  I'm a big fan of Leonhard's work in the audio space, but am less familiar with Hiemstra.  In any case, these interviews are well worth your time.  Link:  Media Conversations channel.  --Dennis

Myth, Media, Meta: Three Information Epochs and What They Mean For Broadcasting

I was happy (though I had to follow two of my tech heroes, John C. Dvorak and Mark Schubin) to give a presentation again this year as part of the Iowa DTV Symposium, a national event held annually in Des Moines and organized by Dan Miller's great staff at Iowa Public Television.  My topic was the title of this post and attempts to use information theory to find a middle ground between legacy media and new media, the former group too often suffering from hubris and the latter often characterized by naïvté.  I made a preliminary series of four posts on this topic back in early June (here's part I and you can get to the other three from it).  My wife the professor and I are writing a book expanding on the topic.  Stay tuned.

I think they'll be posting audio to their web site, but for now, you can look at my PowerPoint deck which I've posted in the Files area on the left of this blog's main page.  Here's the direct link.  --Dennis