Web TV / IPTV / DTV

Interesting piece by 1938 Media's Loren Feldman essentially signalling he is thinking of logging off from Technology videoblogging as the sector is starting to bore him. Feldman has stirred things up just a tad in the year or so he has been tweaking various tech beards. He was an early adopter of video as his blogging medium and this differentiated him in his entrance into tech sector blogging - a delicious irony of its own, really..

The "so what" here is more that this is one of the signals of the zenith of the "Hype Cycle" 2.0. When smart media rats start leaving ships, its time to pay attention, as after the zenith of the hype cycle comes the slide into the slough of despond as people realise that the early predictions are not going to be fulfilled. (See hype cycle below).



The internet is no stranger to that cycle, and while Loren is right when he says that Twitter or any one Web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever product won't change the world, I think he is wrong when he says the Web / Net won't change the world. The 'Net is a fundamental comms revolution, and those have in the past changed the world fairly radically.

This is alluded to in one of the comments on the piece:

Yeah, time to use the tech to talk about something *else*. Like race, politics, culture as you say. Keep dissing the tech and pricking the pricks’ balloons but use the tech to go further otherwise you are like Scoble interviewing your iPhone and not the person.

In other words, the current generation of "2.0" technology is becoming settled - reliable, predictable etc - and, well, boring. That layer of bedrock is done, and people are using it for the next layer. As another commentator notes:

The media game is a vast territory open for the taking, and now that you’ve honed your skills and proven your mettle with tech and the “zero commenting” crowd, think about how this can be just another arrow in your quiver, bro.

To paraphrase Churchill, this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but its the end of the beginning. In a nutshell, transaction costs of communication have gone down 2 orders of magnitude in c 10 years, and that shock is only starting to be felt. The broadband media industry proper is just starting ( "Web 2.0" is just one of its early evolutions ), and that as a game dwarfs the changes in the print and music media markets seen to date.

YouTube users are the losers in the carve up between YouTube (Google) and Viacom. The NYT is one of many reporting the issue, but this says it well:

the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or could unexpectedly fall into the hands of third parties....

....Google’s lawyers asked their counterparts at Viacom to agree to allow Google to remove information from the data that could potentially be used to identify individuals.

The legal judgement is a red herring - this is the fundamental issue: there is no good reason for Google to collect the amount of user data it does, or retain it for as long as it does, in order to serve a YouTube video. By doing so it puts its own users at risk (not just from legal challenges but from all sorts of rogue behaviour), and thus if it is not yet Evil, it is far from being a Good Thing.

For a variety of reasons* I was unable to attend 2gether08, but I have been able to be a Virtual Participant so far via a number of channels:

Firstly, the Mogulus Web TV feed - even when I can't watch it as I'm on other tasks, I can listen in. A switchable TV/ Radio service

Secondly, the Summize service taking feed from Twitter picking up the hashtag #2gether08

Thirdly. my personal backchannel - via Twitter, email, Skype - there are friends of mine there and we are batting comments back and forth.

What has been quite interesting is the experience of being able to not just consume the streamed media, but to comment and chat online to some of the people there in real time by using Twitter etc - it's been like passing a comment to the person sitting next to you.

This afternoon and tomorrow morning I have leaving ceremonies at my kids' school to attend, somehow I think that will be a major challenge to listen to 2gether08 live - not because of the technology, mind you - more the expectations in the situation. But of course, the media has persistence so I can time shift it.



* Work etc