Technology360

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

Accenture: ... How New Content and Technology are Redefining the Future of Media

Accenture has published a new paper by Jamyn Edis and Alexis Rose that's worth reading.  The executive summary:

Accenture’s Global Content Study 2007 surveyed more than 100 leaders and decision-makers in the media and entertainment sectors, including television, film, music, radio, video games, publishing,
interactive entertainment and advertising. The study solicited opinions from executives around the globe — across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific — to gauge their views of where the greatest opportunities and challenges will come over the next five years. Key findings include:

• 62% of executives look to “new platforms” as being the most important key to growth, followed by 31% “new content” and 7% “geographic expansion” as the key growth lever.
• Of these new platforms, online and mobile dominated; a combined 43% viewed online as most important (of which 17% represented a distribution of content through online portals or entertainment/information sites, and a further 13% through social networking sites and 13% through eCommerce sites), while mobile drew 17% of responses.
• 53% of executives surveyed indicated that “short form content” offered the largest opportunity for “new content,” with “long form” or “full length” video content (greater than 60 minutes) garnering 11% of responses. In addition, “video gaming” was viewed as a key growth area, according to 13% of executives.
• Asked what they believed was a top threat to the business, over half of the executives (57%) identified “consumer-based competition” or “user-generated” content; 46% of respondents viewed “piracy or IP theft” as a top three issue.
• However, despite the perceived threat, 68% of respondents believe that they will be able to harness user-generated content to create revenue within one to three years.
• Nearly 80% of those surveyed believed that there was no bubble in the Web 2.0 space, with 70% of respondents also observing that social media was a natural, “evolutionary” progression for media (versus 25% calling social media “revolutionary” and 5% calling it “a fad”.) As a reflection of this upbeat perception, over 90% of the executives said that their companies would become involved in social media over the next 12 months.
• Half of executives indicated that advertising could grow to become the most prevalent business model in the industry within five years, with digital advertising driving growth.
• Content remains king (according to 37% of respondents), although the crown is under attack by technology companies (26%) and telecommunications players (9%).
• Critically important is the need for digital readiness and a future technology road map. Only by transforming their organization and capabilities can media and entertainment expect to maximize the opportunity that digital offers. This includes increasing reach (through multi-platform distribution), engagement (through social media and interactivity) and monetization (through digital advertising). ...

Link:  Accenture [PDF].

Thanks for the tip to Terry Heaton.  His comments on the report are at Accenture: Biggest Media Threat Is Consumer-Generated.  Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog.

Accenture's Gavin Mann has an overview of the report here.  --Dennis

A Longer Look at the Long Tail

In June, Bear Stearns issued a very useful report with this title authored by research analysts Spencer Wang, Shub Mukherjee and Stefan Anninger.  It displays lots of good data and, though it focuses on video content, it has a great deal of validity for audio content as well.  The authors write:

... Value Will Reside in the Middle of the Supply Chain.  If our thesis is correct, one major problem with infiinite choice is the potential for overwhelming confusion.  Said another way, how do consumers navigate a world of unlimited choice and find what they are looking for?  ¶  We think this conundrum (the "Paradox of Choice") will increase the value of "middlemen," or packagers of content that can appropriately filter out the noise and connect users with the content that appeals to their interests.  This can be done through strong brands, editorial discretion, technology, and harnessing user recommendations. ...

Link:  Bear Stearns.  Recommended, along with a complementary one from IBM to which I linked a week ago.  --Dennis

Goldhaber vs. Keen

Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur, has attracted a lot of incoming missiles.  Last month, I linked to critiques by Clay Shirky and David Weinberger.  Michael "Mr. Attention" Goldhaber has just published Part I of a response to the book on his weblog he's titled, The Cult of the Professional.  I'll link to Part II when he posts it.  Link: Michael H. Goldhaber. 

Updated 31 August 2007:
Here's Part II, Social Networking vs. Gulags.  --Dennis

Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models - IBM report

The best "freebie" white paper I found last year relating to my electronic media responsibilities was IBM's The end of TV as we know it: A future industry perspective, to which I linked in January 2006.  It holds up well today.  So when David Leroy (thanks) pointed me at a pair of related new ones from the IBM Institute for Business Value and with two of t he same authors, I was hopeful.

The authors (Saul J. Berman, Steven Abraham, Bill Battino, Louisa Shipnuck and Andreas Neus -- Berman and Shipnuck being two of the authors on The end of TV...) didn't disappoint.  Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models and The fight ahead on media's main streets are, as the titles imply, about more than television -- but then last year's report was relevant beyond television also.

The papers explore issues around the familiar scenario framework that creates four quadrants with the X-axis being "Distribution and device platforms" ranging from "proprietary" to "open" and the Y-axis being "Content blend" ranging from "Produced by professionals" to "User/community contribution."  They view the upper and rightmost dimensions as being particularly disruptive amd posit that these four quadrants will be the four business models in use over the next 3-4 years.  The figure here (click for larger image) depicts these business models.

The authors provide ten specific recommendations for media companies some of which seem pretty obvious (e.g., "Put consumers at the center of your business and boardroom"), while others more insightful (e.g., "Give control to get share").

Link:  IBM: The fight ahead on media's mean streets.  IBM: Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models.

Also see Saul J. Berman, Adam R. Steinberg and Louisa A. Shipnuck, Beyond access: Raising the value of information in a cluttered environment.  Link:  IBM (pdf).

Adoption of Social Media is tough in Public Radio - what about a virus?

Rob Paterson has a continuation post of sorts of one to which I linked earlier this week (If markets are conversations - if media will be conversations - then what will we do?) and to a new report on public radio social media experiments to which I also linked.  Check it out.  Link:  FASTForward Blog.  --Dennis

The Keen/Weinberger debate

Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture) and David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder) had an interesting debate on Web 2.0, the full text of which has been posted by the Wall Street Journal.  --Dennis

If markets are conversations - if media will be conversations - then what do we do?

Rob Paterson describes working with two public broadcasting organizations, writing:

... I think that it is clear that not only will markets be conversations where consumers have a voice - think Dell Hell and Jeff Jarvis - but also the media. The media will have to listen as well. They will have to host conversations as well as have them. Their relationship with their listeners, viewers and readers will have to change as it will have to change in all enterprises. They will have o change their voice and their relationship with their customers and inside.  ¶  The challenge is - How do you do this when you never have done this before? For it’s not just about will - it’s about habit. It’s about learning a whole new way of being. This post is an introduction to how hard this is to do. How hard it is when you want to do this but don’t know how.  ¶  Over the last 2 years I have had the honor of working with NPR and with some stations in both TV and radio as they struggle to make the same shift from “One to Many” to Hosting a Trusted Space where Many to Many could have a safe conversation. As a system we learned what we had to do and how important it was to do this for our future. The new challenge is - to find out how best to put these ideas into action.  ¶  I am working directly with 2 stations right now. KETC, St. Louis and WOSU Columbus. We are struggling with what do we have to do to change our relationship with our audience from a “Kinetic” to a “Participative” relationship? ...

Link:  FASTforward.  Interesting post.  --Dennis

Michael Rosenblum: What future for public television?

Michael Rosenblum spoke to the NETA Board Planning Conference in New York this weekend.  This is from his blog posting of what he said:

... I think PBS has enormous potential to become an engine of change in the new world of democratized video. Perhaps it is better positioned than anyone else to effect this change - this need for publishing instead of producing. ...

Link:  Rosenblumtv.  --Dennis

Citizen Media: A Progress Report

Dan Gillmor gave this topic as a keynote at the Citizen Reporters' Forum in Seoul in June.  He's posted much of the talk, which begins:

... We’ve come a long way. There’s a growing recognition and appreciation of why citizen journalism matters. Investments, from media organizations and others, are fueling experiments of various kinds. Revenue models are taking early shape. And, most important, there’s a flood of great ideas.  ¶  But we have a long, long way to go. We need much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects. The business models are, at best, uncertain — and some notable failures are discouraging. Dealing with the issues of trust, credibility and ethics is essential; as are more tools and training, including a dramatically updated notion of media literacy. ...

Here are the headlines for what follows:

1. Recognition of Citizen Media
2. Traditional Media Get It Now
3. Backlash
4. Tools and Ideas
5. Business Issues
6. Experimentation Is Cheap
7. Some Experiments to Pursue
8. Ethics, Reliability, Civility
9. Assisting Trust
10. Media Literacy

Link:  Center for Citizen Media Blog.  Recommended reading.  --Dennis

WKRN's web woes

A lot of us have held up WKRN, Nashville's ABC affiliate, as an example of a station that really got it.  Former GM Mike Sechrist hired the best consultants -- Gordon Borrell, Terry Heaton and Michael Rosenblum -- and put together innovative local news and community-centric web entries.  However, Mike and some of the other architects of this exemplary effort are now out, casting a shadow over these innovations.  Michael Malone has the story.  Link:  Broadcasting & Cable.  --Dennis

Andrew Keen on the Net; Clay Shirky on Keen

It's Andrew Keen's (his blog) turn to be Internet villian of the month, occasioned by the recent publication of his book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture.  At the same time, his thesis will be cheered by many in the traditional media.  Moira Gunn spoke with him on her Tech Nation program.  Link:  ITConversations.com.

His book has generated a lot of intemperate comment, but, not surprisingly, Clay Shirky has provided the most thoughtful critique I've read in, What are we going to say about "Cult of the Amateur"?.  Here's a sample:

... More importantly, talent is unevenly distributed, and everyone knows it.  Indeed, one of the many great things about the net is that talent can now express itself outside traditional frameworks; this extends to blogging, of course, but also to music, as Clive Thompson described in his great NY Times piece, or to software, as with Linus[Torvalds]’ talent as an OS developer, and so on. The price of this, however, is that the amount of poorly written or produced material has expanded a million-fold.  Increased failure is an inevitable byproduct of increased experimentation, and finding new filtering methods for dealing with an astonishingly adverse signal-to-noise ratio is the great engineering challenge of our age (c.f. Google.)  Whatever we think of Keen or CotA, it would be insane to deny that. ...

Link:  Many 2 Many.  --Dennis

Gorman and Shirky on authority vs. openness

The Britannica Blog has hosted a very interesting exchange of essays between librarian Michael Gorman (ex-Dean of Library Services at California State University, Fresno) and Clay Shirky, teacher (New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program), writer and consultant.  I've been reading Shirky for years.  It's the openness vs. authority argument; Wikipedia vs. Encyclopædia Britannica (though of course, not just that); or, in book length, David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (reviews) vs. Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture (review).

Gorman begins with The Sleep of Reason, Part I (11 June) and Part II (12 June).

To which Shirky responds with "Old Revolutions Good; New Revolutions Bad" (14 June).

Gorman continues with The Siren Song of the Internet, Part I (18 June) and Part II (19 June).

To which Shirky responds with The Siren Song of Luddism (19 June).

Gorman continues again with Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part I (25 June) and Part II (26 June).

The Britannica Blog follows up with other responses:  Publisher Roger Kimball (The New Criterion, Encounter Books) also contributes to this debate in Technology, Temptation, and Virtual Reality.  Doctoral candidate (U. C.-Berkeley) danah boyd in Knowledge Access as a Public Good (27 June).  Reference librarian Thomas Mann in Brave New (Digital) World, Part I: Return of the Avant-Garde and Part II: Foolishness 2.0?.

I've not gotten through the essays in the last paragraph yet, but so far it's good reading.  --Dennis

Feeling addicted to Personal Broadband Broadcasting

VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver writes:

There is a trend in the air. And it is already beyond the “Alpha Geek” stage. This trend is something I have been referring to as “Personal Broadband Broadcasting Networks.” The fact is that today, anyone who wants to have their own Internet TV channel can have one. Getting and keeping an audience is a different issue (Kfir Pravda has ideas about this), but these days it is possible to broadcast your own Internet TV show for free. And the fact a bunch of companies (BlogTV, Mogulus, Operator11, Ustream.TV, Veodia and more to come) are all now appearing at around the same time means to me that we will see a feature war evolve which will force these companies to push the feature sets forward on their respective products. And I wonder how long it will be before the folks at YouTube decide that “LIVE” is just a feature that they should be supporting too. ...

Link:  The Jeff Pulver Blog.

What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies

Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, has a very interesting two-part essay with this post's title on his blog.  It's based on a keynote that he gave at this week's National Media Education Conference.  Link:  Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Part 1, Part 2.

YouTube and CNN Discuss "Most Democratic" Presidential Debate Ever

Many public broadcasting stations air candidate debates.  Here's a great idea that would be easy to steal.  The CNN/YouTube debates for presidential candidates will be 23 July (Democrats) and 17 September (Republicans).  Luke O'Brien writes:

... The debates will feature 20-30 questions culled from a pool of possibilities sent in by the American voter. ... Potential questions will be posted to YouTube's YouChoose platform, a section tagged specifically for material relating to the 2008 campaign. Questions will not be selected based on the number of views on YouTube.  Nor will the selection process be made public, in order to prevent candidates from prepping.  During the debates, the questions will be aired on a giant video monitor. YouTubers will be able to leave comments on the questions beforehand.  They will also be able to comment on the candidate's responses, which will be posted to YouTube after the political showdowns have wrapped up. ...

Link:  Wired.  --Dennis

War Stories

Congratulations to Neal Shapiro and his team at WNET Thirteen on an innovative online community engagement initiative called War Stories.  Partnering with Open Media Network, the initiative permits people to submit video recollections of their wartime experiences.  They can do so by either video tape or direct uploading to OMN.  You can view the project at www.omn.org/partners/WNET/WarStories or through a link on the front page at thirteen.org. 

Update 15 June, 2007:
I've been pointed to a similar effort at KETC/9 in St. Louis -- also a nice one for which congratulations are in order.  I am told by their consultant that they were doing this first.  KETC is using YouTube and Facebook instead of OMN.  I'd be interested from others who are doing this.  Thanks to Rob Paterson for the tip and apologies to KETC president Jack Galmiche for missing this -- both friends.  --Dennis

TiVo adds sharing of Internet video

Thomas Claburn writes:

... Earlier this month, TiVo partnered with Amazon to offer subscribers access to movies downloaded through Amazon's Unbox service.  ¶  And this week, TiVo announced a new way for subscribers to share personal videos using One True Media's online video post-production service.  ¶  The arrangement allows One True Media users to create a personal TiVo channel that will show the videos they've uploaded, edited, and scored online. They can then invite TiVo owners to subscribe to that channel, at no charge, using TiVo's Season Pass feature. The content creator's videos will then be available in the subscriber's Now Playing list, alongside professionally produced shows that have been saved for ad-skipping or viewing at a more convenient time. ...

Link:  Digital TV DesignLine (from InformationWeek).  I was impressed with how many companies were offering Internet-to-TV solutions at CES this year.  --Dennis

New Report Shows How News Orgs Encourage Audience Involvement

Dan Gillmor writes:

We’ve just posted “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement” — a report that looks at how traditional media organizations are starting to involve their audiences in the journalism process. ...

What They’re Doing

There appear to be four primary approaches to opening the newsgathering process to “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.”1

* “User generated content” (UGC): People are encouraged to post their own material, such as stories, photos and event listings.
* Blog hub: Participants are able to submit stories, photos, and event listings, but they get their own weblog with a unique Web address on the news organization’s site.
* Community hub: Often incorporating the elements above, these sites also offer social networking — connecting participants to each other.
* Newsroom transparency: The news organization opens a window into its news-production process, helping the audience to understand — and weigh in on — what the editorial staff is doing. ...

Link: Center for Citizen Media.

A many-to-many radio using HD + IP

OK, this is mostly just for fun, but fun with a point.

Broadcasting has forever been a one-to-many medium -- one transmitter, many listeners.  With production and publication tools increasingly within the reach of nearly every web user, the web is now considered to be a many-to-many medium.

As an internal exercise last fall, I wanted to describe the many-to-many concept in a way that would be easy for broadcasters to internalize, so I sketched out a concept for a "many-to-many" radio.  The result, which I've shown to a few people outside my station, was the drawing below (click to enlarge or access here).

What it depicts is a mash-up between an HD Radio and an Internet "radio."  Interestingly, the HD Radio standard makes use of an open mark-up standard called Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (more SMIL info at Wikipedia), a relative of the HTML standard that's used to build web pages.  What that means is that it would be fairly trivial to program an HD Radio to tune many more channels than the three or four that come in via the broadcast spectrum such as standard Internet addresses accessible with a second built-in radio for WiMAX or some other 3G or 4G wireless service (most cell phones today contain multiple radios in one device).  A station could transmit authorized Internet addresses (URLs) using the HD Radio's data capabilities. 

The result would be a consumer device that, for each station in a market, could tune in dozens or even hundreds of program channels.  Some of those might be in the clear, others accessible through conditional access.  Of course it would take a willing consumer electronics manufacturer to build this thing, but just about anyone with HTML skills could "breadboard" the Internet part of it.

But how would one program it?  That's where the many-to-many part comes in.  Not to mention a possible army of copyright lawyers.  One possible way to enable listeners to program their own channels would be to use RSS feeds from (in our case, public broadcasting) audio sources.  A listener-programmer could go to your web site, sign up for a "channel" (URL), select from a list of podcast feeds like NPR's or PBS's, and arrange them to suit the programmer.  When a listener tunes to a channel, the stream is triggered (unless someone else has already triggered it).  When no one is listening, it goes away.  When someone is listening again, the stream picks up where it left off.  Old episodes are replaced by new ones via the RSS mechanism.

This has the potential of burning through a lot of bandwidth, so through subscription or contribution or pay-per-access or underwriting/advertising, one would have to recover those expenses.  I'm sure there would be a number of other problems to work through, but as I said at the top, this is just for fun, right?  --Dennis

Notes from Public Media 2007 and Beyond Broadcast conferences, part 2

A week ago I posted several links to posts by Todd Mundt in his blog, Converge, summarizing the Public Media 2007 and Beyond Broadcast conferences.  I'd like to share two more:

Some take-aways from the Public Media Conference
Public Media Conference:  Our Own Innovator's Dilema and Solution

--Dennis

Notes from Public Media 2007 and Beyond Broadcast conferences, part 1

Iowa Public Radio's Todd Mundt has made a very helpful series of posts summarizing sessions from the Public Media 2007 and Beyond Broadcast 2007 conferences that wound up yesterday and today, respectively, in Boston.  Here are links (chronological, rather than blog order) to those made as of this writing:

Public Media 2007
CEO Sessions
CEO Seminar: Henry Becton
"If I'm repeating myself..."
Opening Session with Michael Rosenblum  (I posted about this one also, as did OMN's Ben Hess)
Adding the Social to Media
Social Media 201
Social Media on a National Scale
Station Experiments in Social Media
Closing Remarks from Doc Searls

Beyond Broadcast 2007
@ Beyond Broadcast
Henry Jenkins (David Weinberger also posts about this one, as does Andy Carvin)
John Palfrey, "The Internet and Politics" (David Weinberger also posts about this one)
Panel, "Participatory Culture" (David Weinberger also posts about this one)
Closing Remarks, David Weinberger

--Dennis

The future of public access cable

Dan Gillmor and Jason Crow are doing a workshop on the future of public access cable at today's Beyond Broadcast 2007 conference and engage in a pre-conference debate on Dan's blog.  Link:  Center for Citizen Media.

Public Media Conference 2007

If you're not able to attend the Integrated Media Association's Public Media Conference 2007 in Boston this week, here's where you can catch what's going on:

Click here for the conference schedule.  The general conference sessions begin tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

Update: All events that happen in the main hall are being streamed live in both audio (MP3) and video (Windows Media) versions (the official weblog below has links to Mac WM players).

There is a conference wiki that will enable you to post questions or comments for any of the speakers in any of the sessions.

Brendan Greeley is doing the official Public Media 2007 Conference Blog.  RSS feed.  RSS for comments.

Other bloggers are listed on the top page of the wiki, including HighTouch, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth, and Open Parenthesis.  I'd be surprised not to see Rob Paterson and Jake Shapiro write about the meeting as well.   I'll be adding some things in absentia.

Today Rob posted Public Media 2007 - Some Context.

This post will be revised and extended as appropriate.  --Dennis

21st Century News: Challenges and Opportunities for Public-Minded Media in the New-Media Age ...

...was the self-explanatory title of a meeting held this past October at American University.  Jane Hall has written a report on the meeting, available as a pdf from the Center for Social Media.  --Dennis

How TV Will Become the Ultimate Open Content Platform

Steve Rubel writes:

Since the dawn of the medium in the 1950s, big media has had a stranglehold over what you watch on your TV. However, that's all about to change. A perfect storm is brewing. A-la-carte programming, branded entertainment and peer-created content are all coming to your TV in glorious high definition - all brought to you by the letters IPTV.  ¶  This is going to be one of the most important media trends over the next five years. The rapid pace of change will not only turn TV into an open content platform, but it will radically shift how advertising dollars are allocated and how the entire ad industry operates. ...

Link:  Micro Persuasion.

In Praise of Radical Transparency

Chris Anderson (Wired, The Long Tail) has been writing recently about corporate transparency and, in particular, the impact of blogging on the tradition of corporate secrecy.  Check out In Praise of Radical Transparency, Radical Transparency and National Security, What would radical transparancy mean for Wired? (Part 1), ditto (Part 2), and Transparency reaction, all in his blog, The Long Tail. 

Update 17 Dec. 2006:
Jeff Jarvis adds some interesting comments on Anderson's posts at BuzzMachine.  --Dennis

As online viewing booms, the amateurs give way to big media

There's not a lot written about media trends to buck up those of us involved in professional media production efforts.  Indeed, I think we're going to have to share that stage from here on.  But Scott Kirsner is an exception and makes an interesting case for professional efforts:

... Since the video publishing revolution began last year, much of the content that has been published and viewed on the Internet has been produced by amateurs: Chinese teens lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys, motivational speaker Judson Laipply dancing to a medley of pop songs, an angry senior citizen scolding a fellow passenger on a Hong Kong bus, skateboard tricks gone awry, and kitties doing adorable things -- like prancing across a piano keyboard.  ¶  But as movie studios, advertisers and television networks make more of their content available online, viewers' habits may be starting to shift. If Web video was dominated by citizens with camcorders in 2005 and 2006, the pendulum in the coming year will likely swing toward professional content producers and big media companies. ...

Link:  San Jose Mercury News.

In a post called, Is Web Video Shifting to Professional? (which called my attention to Kirsner's article in the first place -- thanks),  Terry Heaton writes:

... But I think this misses the mark in three areas. One is that Kirsner’s talking about moving conventional television and films to the web — albeit in an unbundled form — without evidence that this is sustainable with the weakened Media 1.0 foundation that inevitably results. ...

... Secondly, I think Kirsner assumes that mass marketing will always be the way media makes its money, and I don’t agree with that. Regardless of how clever one can be in assembling the mass, it will be rejected by those who are now tapping videos online — the people formerly known as the audience. ...

... The third problem I have with this is the assumption that every day people create these amateur videos for mass consumption in the first place. ...

Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog. 

NPR's Talk of the Nation featured Kirsner discussing this.  Worth a listen.   Link:  NPR.  --Dennis

The Digital Horizon

In spite of its geographically constrained name, the Iowa DTV Symposium is a very good national meeting, sponsored by Iowa Public Television, that happens each fall in Des Moines.  This year, IPTV asked Todd Mundt, himself a very savvy "newmediaite," to interview several of the speakers.  They've just posted seven of these (about a half hour each, Real and downloadable M4V formats) online.  The interviews feature yours truly; Michael Geoghegan, author of Podcasting Solutions: The  Complete Guide to Podcasting; Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University; Maryann Baldwin, director, Magid Media Futures; James Pence, marketing director, Teacher's Domain, WGBH; Sara Linner, executive producer of new media, Nebraska public television; and change consultant Rob Paterson.  Link:  Iowa PTV.

The PowerPoint for my session at this meeting, "Opening the Gate: Expanding Local Service Through Online Content Partnerships," is now posted to the essays and presentations section of this weblog (left).   --Dennis

Media Innovation Briefing

Umair Haque, whose work I admire and link to with some frequency (his blog), has written a very good piece (unsigned) on media innovation for the UK-based Innovaro consulting firm.  He writes:

... Consider more generally the three key dimensions along which today’s media is beginning to differ radically from yesterdays. First, most obvious, today’s media is more and more interactive, where yesterday’s was inert. Consumers can rate, rank, comment on, review, and respond to the new world of media. Though the media industry is fond of an ugly and deceptively simplistic term – “user generated content” – it’s more accurate to say that the distinctions between amateur and professional media are fading fast. Second, today’s media is pulled by consumers, not pushed at them. At iTunes and Last.fm, for example, it is connected consumers who decide – individually or collectively – what music to pull into their iPods and hard drives. Third, today’s media is microchunked, rather than monolithic. At blogs, consumers read posts; at YouTube, consumers watch microchunked videos. All of these are functions of the new production and consumption possibilities markets, networks, and communities open up. In turn, these three new characteristics of media point to the fact that markets, networks, and communities aren’t simple product or service innovations; rather, they are equal parts strategic and management innovation – equal parts rethinking how the firm manages interactions, especially with consumers, and rethinking how value can be created and captured. ...

Link: Innovaro.  Highly recommended.  --Dennis

Your Guide to Citizen Journalism

If you're interested in the idea of citizen journalism, Mark Glaser has a very good overview.  Link:  Media Shift @ PBS.org.  --Dennis

Democratic party [no, not that one]

Diane Mermigas gives one of the best overviews of the social networking/homegrown content phenomenon and why it's significant to us in the media.  She writes:

... MySpace says it's signing up 150,000 new users a day. YouTube claims that it is empowering users to become "the broadcasters of tomorrow" and, to that end, showcases "more than 70 million videos on the site daily."  ¶  It's clear that, at least for the twentysomething set, we've become a user-generated-content nation. The emerging medium combines the intimacy of a chat with friends with the distribution capabilities of mass media. Video, still photos, text explication and, often, a rockin' soundtrack meld to make a potent creative cocktail that is unprecedented as a form of self-expression. ...

Link:  Hollywood Reporter.  --Dennis

Unpopular culture

Jeff Jarvis has some interesting comments about "a PBS panel ... on news and the tabloid culture" in which he participated at Reuters.   He concludes,

... I do my predictable rant arguing that this is about respect for the people and about listening. When we dismiss popular culture we dismiss the population. We do see Fanning of PBS and Gladstone of NPR making good use of new media to present news but I argue that is less than half the battle (and the head of PBS says that PBS — particularly Frontline — is looking to use new media to open up to new talent and new reporting): It’s about listening to the people.

Link:  BuzzMachine.  --Dennis

Three Attributes of Open Content

I attended the WGBH Open Content and Public Broadcasting conference last week in Cambridge where it was my privilege to share the first panel with professor James Boyle of the Duke Law School where he was co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.  I was asked to tee up the topic, which I attempted to do by talking about three attributes of open content: "free as in free beer," "free as in free speech," and open distribution.  To read my remarks, download the attached pdf or click on the Continue reading link below.  --Dennis

Do Public Media Believe in the Public

Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, was one of the speakers at a conference I attended this week and gave an excellent presentation about the democratization of production and distribution and the impact of same on public media.  He writes about his points in his weblog.  Link:  Center for Citizen Media.  --Dennis

Top Fastest Growing Web Brands are User-Generated Content

Ken Rutkowski writes:

User-generated content sites, platforms for photo sharing, video sharing and blogging, comprised five out of the top 10 fastest growing Web brands according Nielsen//NetRatings. ...

Link:  KenRadio.  The article includes a table.  --Dennis

Broadcasting rocked as TV viewers become producers

Lucas van Grinsven writes (Amsterdam byline):

... Amateur TV is influencing professional TV production, said   Mika who wants his programmes to have the same feel.  ¶  "There's a tonne of material out there that's free and didn't cost anything to produce. The cheaper my budget gets the better, because the programmes will be raw and edgy."  ¶  Established TV distr