Technology360

Community 2.0

John Hagel has a very thoughtful and lengthy essay on the challenges in building virtual communities.  Link:  Edge Persepctives.  --Dennis

Living history

It turns out that Terry Heaton and I have been in broadcasting the same amount of time.  He writes some lines about the change we've seen.  I especially like how he wraps it up.  Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMoBlog.  No one will label him a dinosaur.  --Dennis

VOX and The New Gravity

Stephen Hill writes:

... A dozen years into the Internet era, The only limitations left are the speed of broadband connections, and the ability to hit users in motion with wireless services. Both are the subject of intensive development and will be eliminated in time.  ¶   More important, the Internet levels ALL previous types of media: text, pictures, graphics, animation, audio of all kinds, and now video.  So great has been our focus on the old organizing centers of media that print, audio and video still remain largely separate online — a result of differing skill sets, craft traditions, unions, rights regimes and audience habits.  ¶  Nevertheless, we now have an emerging paradigm which still lacks an elegant one-word name. The closest would be "web multimedia."  This paradigm is now emerging on blogs. At 50 million and counting, blogs are the first web mass medium that allows individual creators to engage audiences online with a common multimedia format. ...

Link:  Spatial Relations.

Rosenblum on public broadcasting

Television production innovator Michael Rosenblum gave a terrific keynote at last week's Public Media 2007 conference in Boston and writes about his close encounter with pubcasting in his weblog:

... once you move to the web, the architecture of the web itself suddenly dictates a radical change in how you work and what your product looks like. Up until now, we have been living in a world of a broadcasting model. One signal to many people. Whether we were publishing newspapers, magazines, radio shows or TV, the model remained pretty much the same.  ¶  But the Internet is different. The Internet is about connecting communities. Ebay, one of the most successful sites on the web, is about connecting a community of sellers with a community of buyers, one strand at a time. Amazon, another success story, is also about connecting a community of sellers - bookstores, warehouses or small shops, with a community of buyers, all over the world. Google if you think about it, is also about connecting a massive ‘community’ of content with a community of users. ...

Link:  Rosenblumtv.  Check it out.  --Dennis

FCC kills Morse Code requirement for hams

I'm a man of useless talents -- balancing the end of a broom on my finger, wiggling my ears, Morse code -- but not all at the same time.  After a couple of years of studying, I got a ham license in 1965 (WAØKKR then, but N7DH since 1975) and have kept it ever since, but my last period of sustained activity ended in 1976.  However, when I was active, it was primarily on Morse code.  I got so I could copy about 50 words per minute in my head and about 40 wpm on a typewriter (remember typewriters?) if the sender knew what he or she was doing.  Over about 25 wpm, Morse becomes another language instead of dots and dashes, and it's elegant -- beautiful even.  But this week, the FCC finally killed off its Morse requirement for amateur radio licenses in order to let in the riff raff broaden the appeal of this service and make life a little easier for themselves.  I guess those are laudable goals.  Matt Largey had the story for NPR's All Things Considered.  --Dennis didididahdidah

Change or Die

I spent some time at a hospital this week (not as a patient), left for an hour or so, and returned after 8:00 in the evening to find that all the entrances were locked except for the ER.  On the sidewalk outside the ER were three couples, each including a blanket-draped patient in a wheelchair, taking smoke breaks.  I thought of that when reading the following article sent to me by Tim Eby (thanks) that talks about just how difficult change is to accomplish.  --Dennis

Alan Deutschman writes:

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren't just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We're talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon -- a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?  ¶  Yes, you say?  ¶  Try again.  ¶  Yes?  ¶  You're probably deluding yourself.  ¶  You wouldn't change.  ¶  Don't believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds? ...

Link:  Fast Company.

Hope is not lost: Radio and TV and Everything

Rob Paterson is writing about this week's sessions at the Public Media Conference 2007.  This compelling insight is from a post about a two-day pre-conference meeting for public broadcasting CEOs:

... For me, motive and hope is the key to change. As Alan Deutschman shows us in Change or Die, being told you are going to die - the substance of much of what we heard in the last 2 days - is not the great activator for change that we think it may be.  90% of seriously at risk patients do not act on their doctor's advice.  ¶  So why don't we change, even if we know that if we don't we will die? To make a big change - to think web versus terrestrial, to think collaboration versus me alone -  often means to change our identity.  If our identity and our personal story is attached to these things, then in 90% of the time we would rather die than change the identity that we had come to rely on.  We martyr ourselves for this identity.  This is what is the real barrier. ...

And then:

... Ideas do not change us. Only experience changes us. Changing experience has to be deep and repetitive to change the habits of a career. ...

Link:  Rob Paterson's Weblog.

In a later post, Hyperlocal - Saving the World, Rob addresses mission directly:

One of the powerful trends that I am witnessing is the growing recognition in Public radio and TV that There is a huge opportunity for public media to secure a viable future by serving the hyper local community. I will post more later about what I have seen and heard about how this can be done for very little money. Please take it on faith for now that the how is now known.  ¶  The big idea is that in a hyper linked global world - the hyper local becomes the most important place. If the 20th century was about nationalism and the nation statee. The 21st will have to be about a shift in power back to the small local community.

Link:  Robert Paterson's Weblog.  Bingo.  While we're all scrambling to see how we can make money on the web, mostly by monetizing repurposed legacy programs in new ways (and there are ways to do that), the truth is that the real power of the web is to help us be more significant institutions in our community.  It's way better than our time-limited hit-dependent broadcast delivery.  For non-profits, it's about mission.  Show me the money! the mission (and the money will take care of itself).  --Dennis

Why Do You Want Interactive TV?

Interactive TV has turned into the electronic media version of Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot.  Baris Karadogan writes perceptively about why the big media players have never been able to bring it off, even while it's happening on a different platform all around them:

... So while we were waiting for interactive TV, a massively interactive device, your PC, has found its way right next to your PC, and it's game over.  You can get HD content on your laptop.  You can get, or will soon, all kinds of on demand content on your PC, and over time the quality will get better and better and better. ...

Link:  AlwaysOn.  And be sure to read the comment by Ray Podder appended to Karadogan's piece, which includes the following quotable bit of wisdom that goes far beyond this [emphasis added]:

I don't think there is much use for still thinking in terms of "reach" and "consumers".  We are all participants in an increasingly thought-based reality (as opposed to a thing-based reality) who need to express, seek and co-create meaning from our ideas both collectively and individually.  We interact with platforms that keep us connected, keep us relevant, and help us build a stronger sense of self where attention competes with our existence. ...

Thanks to Stephen Hill for the link.

Updates, 16 Feb. 2007:
I emailed this article and Podder's comment to David Liroff who pointed out (thanks) the congruence of this with the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and provided a link to a fascinating 1995article on Teilhard de Chardin by Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain.  Link:  Wired.

This post also has a comment (below) from another old friend, Kim Hodgson, who added a link that's partially obscured in the comment space so I've inserted here.  Kim says:

Re video content via the Internet: Better and better, world without end? Maybe not. See this bit in that appeared recently in the Washington Post:  Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV. 

The Post article is by Lucas van Grinsven and is worth reading.  --Dennis

The world is flat

My son is an exchange student in Stockholm and we talk to him a couple of times a week by Skype.  We even have one of those nifty little Belkin Skype phones so we can talk untethered to a computer (we could have bought a lot of phone calls to Sweden for the cost of that phone, come to think of it).

This morning I was about to make the connection when I noticed that my brother's ID was showing him available.  Rob and his wife are the co-country directors for an NGO's Sudan operations.  They recently moved to Juba in southern Sudan from Nairobi to be closer to their work, but when I called him this morning they were in Khartoum on business.

He said that he had just finished buying a snow blower in the Twin Cities that he located using Craiglist and negotiated the purchase on Skype.  Their home in a St. Paul suburb is rented and the renter had reported to him that the old snow blower was kaput.  In Khartoum when that happens?  No problem in a flat world.  Link to Rob's blog.  --Dennis

Not seeing the urgency

Rob Paterson's post about HBO On Demand and why public radio seems slow to move in this direction got me thinking about why so many people aren't seeing the urgency in responding to the disruption we in the media face today.  It strikes me that change can be either too slow or too fast for people to see.  Too slow:  Yes, global warming seems to be happening but here on the beach the water doesn't seem any higher than last year.  Too fast, as from the quick-draw artist:  Wanna see it again?  It's tempting to think it's the too-slow explanation, but if it's the too-fast explanation -- and that's my theory -- then that certainly underscores urgency. --Dennis