broadstuff

There has always been a good game in boring corporate meetings or conferences - Buzzword Bingo. First person to count 10 Corporatese sayings wins (this got to be far more fun with IM, and a real hoot with Twitter). But that was soooooo 2008, dahlings.

Now Paul Carr has evolved the game to new heights, using the newest form of social intercourse - videostreaming - and the oldest, alcohol. The (un)inspiration was the fairly insipid (that's not inspired spelled wrong btw) collection of startups on Day One at TechCrunch50 (we were even prompted to write about Companies we wanted to see there):

The rules are simple – we start tomorrow at 9am (Pacific). Get up early, grab yourself a case of beer and then either sit in the room or, if you had better things to do with three grand, tune into the live stream and follow these simple instructions…

Take a sip when…
- Someone uses the word “freemium” or describes something as a “chicken-egg problem”.
- Someone makes a borderline misogynistic remark to the only female judge: (e.g. “That fashion company really made Marissa perk up”)
- Someone claims that their aim is to change the world.
- Someone claims that their aim isn’t to change the world.
- Someone says “that’s a great question” in response to a judge, when they clearly want to say “go fuck yourself”.

Take a swig when…
- Someone actually tells a judge to go fuck themself.
- The wifi works so well that it breaks someone’s pitch.
- Yossi Vardi forces everyone to give an awkward round of applause for absolutely no reason.
- Someone makes a joke about Michael Arrington in their pitch. (And take a second swig when that joke inevitably falls flat)
- It becomes clear to everyone that the success of a particular company would result in the world becoming a terrible, terrible place.

Drain your whole drink when…
- Two founders walk on to the stage wearing identical shirts.
- Someone sings during their pitch, or a lady starts to dance.
- Jason Calacanis alludes to his personal wealth, mentions Tesla or quotes a Disney movie when giving advice to a startup.
- Someone tries to bribe the entire room with cupcakes.

Drain your drink and chug an entire fresh one when…

- Someone tries to bribe the entire room with a car.

You're allowed to throw 'em both up if its a Toyota Pious. Oh, what......it was a Pious?. For UK readers, 9am Pacific is 5pm GMT, ie Pimms O'Clock, so a perfect time to start. For New York readers, take an early lunch for Manhattans.

Now why, I hear you ask, is a sober blog like Broadstuff giving airtime to debauched drinking games, instead of reporting on the TechCrunch50 companies. There are 2 answers to this:

(1) Hyp...I mean sober reporting of the TC50 is being done, in spades, all over the web. If anything, we should be filtering them as a service , albeit through beer goggles may not be your optimum approach

(2) Actually, we think this is more innovative than any of the companies - social media based drinking games will be a hot trend in 2010, once the bankers have crashed the economy again while making off with your bailout money, and the government is taxing your kids' future income till the pips of your unborn grandchildren squeak

Besides, If I recall correctly, the best way to spot the winner the last few years has been to spot the "startup" with huge amounts of SV in-crowd funding and corporate support already

Google has released Fast Flip, an interesting new way to read online news. As the NYT notes, Google believes current approaches are not optimal:

Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, tries to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: they often are slow to load, and so they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, argues that if reading news online was closer to the experience of scanning through physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.

“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”

The way it works is this - each of the thumbnails on the screen (see picture above) is actually a link to a webpage. They are organised in horizontal rows, each row represents a grouping (eg All Webpages, Sports News, etc). The horizontal rows can be rapidly scrolled left - right to get to all the selections (there are more selections than appear on screen at any one time).

In essence its just putting pictures links where once there would have been word links, the idea being that this speeds up the browsing experience. In that respect it is a very interesting step in the user interface for online news and mass information handling in general (and maps to Bing trying visual search).

But there is a cunning plan in it as well, all in the name of speeding up your experience of course.....

The articles, which are images of Web pages that have been stripped of ads and other items that slow them down, load with scant delay. Readers can zoom into a specific section, publication or article. They can often read the majority of an article directly on Google, although if they click on it, they will be taken to the publisher’s Web site.

In other words, why go to the original site, or see its Ads? Of course, this will all be done for the Greater Good:

Google plans to place display ads alongside the stories and share the resulting revenue with publishers. Mr. Bharat declined to discuss what percentage of the revenue will be kept by Google but said publishers would receive the majority.

And as for the Olde Media, are they falling for it?

“Of course there is a concern,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations for The New York Times Company. “That doesn’t mean you don’t participate.”

He added that Fast Flip could help showcase sites like The New York Times better than current aggregators like Google News do.

“The interesting thing about this service, when compared to search, is that there is a revenue model for us on Google,” said Scott Havens, vice president of digital strategy and operations for The Atlantic.

Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, said that the decision by Google to begin paying publishers for news content on its site is a significant change. “It is a chink in Google’s armor,” Mr. Doctor said. “It could be a path to peace and rationalization of the relationship.”

While the experiment includes some major publishers, several of the top newspaper chains, including the News Corporation, Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune and MediaNews, are not part of it.

That the Olde Media are in this position today is largely because they have been pretty incompetent in dealing with the 'Net for the last 10 years, falling for a classic strategic honeyed beartrap like this would imply they are no wiser today. Mr Murdoch, no matter what you think of his media empire, is no f*ckwit*, and he ain't on the list of participants.

(Update - Fake Eric Schmidt sends up Fast Flip with same conclusions as ours at The ToryGraph)

*Australian technical term for strategically incompetent media executive

This was all started off by Paul Carr, who wrote about 4 companies he thought should be there:

...me-focussed companies as…

DoucheBall
An evolution of the Foursquare/Dodgeball concept, designed to appeal to men who, for whatever reason, want to avoid running into any of their ex-girlfriends. Whenever a previous flame checks into a venue, an alert is pushed to the man’s phone allowing him to stay well clear until the danger has passed. Much like Foursquare, there’s a fun game element too, with badges to be won based on certain patterns of behaviour. By default, all users are awarded the “Player, please” and “Coward, grow up” badges at sign-up.

Am I Fired Or Not?
You know how it is – you have multiple freelance gigs, any of which you could lose at a moment’s notice by writing unforgivably navel-gazing columns about yourself and your friends. Combined with industry-wide budget cuts and publication closures, keeping track of who still employs you can be a full time job. But not any more! Introducing ‘Am I Fired Or Not?’ – the Friendfeed of firing; the RSS of redundancy. Simply add each new employer as they hire you, and be instantly notified when – a few weeks later – they come to their senses and remove themselves.

WhoreSquare
Sure, services like Skimlinks provide a neat way for site owners to make extra revenue by turning key words and phrases into affiliate links. But some editors are uneasy at the idea of shilling to their readers under the guise of producing impartial content. If you’re one of those editors then WhoreSquare is your perfect compromise. Simply install this free plugin and every single word on your blog will be instantly transformed into an affiliate link to my brilliant book, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore. As an added bonus, every image, including your site’s own logo will be replaced with a gigantic animated gif of me holding the book, and waving. Sure, your readers are still being sold to but, trust me, they’ll thank you for it.

BlackoutCast
Heading out for a quick drink? Want to record everything you say and do after 10pm so you can play it back in the morning and remember all of the people you need to apologise to / pay damages to / add to your avoid list on DoucheBall? There’s an app for that.

In the comments, Andrew Scott added these 4:

Cuddle.net :
A site which provides a legitimate outlet for sexual harassment in the work place

Spotify :
Advice and premium content on how to give your partner acne so that your best friend stops hitting on them

Bummble :
A search and discovery service for mobile which reflects the true pain of finding anything on your phone; reducing the user to a squinting fumbling quivering wreck as they navigate small keys, small screen and awful mobile network connection

and of course Turnvox :

A middleware platform which hires a mechanical-turkesque crowd of outsourced third world countries to implement whatever you originally designed your code to do, but couldn’t ever quite get to work properly, thus enabling you to secure $200 million in VC funding.

We have a soft spot for Twatter, which asked who you were doing, not what. Will it make TC50 this year I wonder? Others missing are:

Make a Mint :
Takes your personal financial details from you and then cleans out your bank account. Registered offices in Nigeria and luxurious 5 star hotels in the Caribbean.

Hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopla :
Startup with the most "double O"s in its name. Must work, right?

Radar O'Really :
Extremely real time search engine. Knows what you want to search for before you've typed it in

YouPhone :
iPhone style playout device plus YouPorn content. Truly a killer app.......

iPhony :
Be the person you always wanted to be! This App spoofs your iPhone so it looks like you are someone else rich and famous. Pulls data from the rich and famous' Twitter accounts to create realistic simulacra of them. Monetises by selling changing details of the Slebs you want to impersonate.

Any others we've missed?

Or pink, blue, black, etc etc......

Yesterday at Tuttle we were discussing the implications of the average small business being able to deploy equal, if not better, information handling gear than large companies and what that means. Add a bit of Coasian Transaction Cost theory (the lower the transaction costs, the smaller the organisation required) and you get to an interesting place. You knew all this, of course - but its always been "in the future", without a precise "when". Its been a serious discussion for at least 5 years, and mooted for at least 15 before, and yesterday we were talking about the smartphone (especially the iPhone) as the potential "tipping point" system. Today, an interesting article in the New York Times about the shift in how a PC is sold made me think the future may have arrived, sorta:

PC makers began to sniff a change in consumer sensibilities a couple of years ago and, often influenced by Apple, went on a quest to find their swagger. Dell, for example, placed a premium on design, wrapping computers in everything from brushed aluminum to bamboo sheaths. Hewlett-Packard hired the fashion designer Vivienne Tam to construct a multicolored, purselike laptop and put a slick piano-black finish on its main product line.

Computer makers have tried to make life easier by sidestepping Microsoft’s Windows and adding their own user interfaces. Many of these changes come less from a sense of largess than a sense of desperation.

In other words the whole PC cash-o-system is turning into yet another brown goods market like TV, HiFi etc. This is pretty inevitable in any market over time - the technology starts out hard to use so geeks are kings, but over time it gets bedded down and rationalised until the technology is invisible. What is also happening is that the "pain point" in the bundle is shifting to connectivity, not computing power:

Now, many consumers desire a speedy Internet connection above all else. They are the people buying the underpowered, low-cost netbooks, providing the PC industry with its lone bright spot (though lower profit margins) during the recession.

Traditionally, PC makers relied on their software partners to build bulkier, more demanding applications that required new hardware. But that strategy has fallen apart. Consumers and businesses balked at Microsoft’s bloated Vista operating system, so the company’s upcoming Windows 7 software should actually require less horsepower and storage space to run well. The same goes for Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system.

The other fascinating thing this time is that the home gear is now better than the stuff found in the average corporate:

Workers now also want their computers at work to look as good as their computers at home.

“Back in the olden days, you had a computer at work and that informed what you might buy at home and now that has switched,” Ms. Conrad said.

A number of companies have started to give employees a budget for their computers, allowing them to pick any machine they like. Typically, these workers will pack their computers with software for work and play like social networking or watching YouTube, blurring boundaries between the home and office.

Now the article kinda stops with the observation that the customer, not the geek, is starting to be king which is the standard state in a mainstream commodity market.

But I think the big story, not touched on in the article, is the corollary angle - ie to our above discussion, the day the main pieces of gear that you use to start the revolution are available in the high street supermarket and even (especially?) a child can use it and any erk can afford it, and its better than the (insert your epithet to corporate capitalist behemothdom here) then you have really hit Marxist nirvana of putting the means of production in the hands of every worker.

Whether the digerati who believe this will be the New Utopia will be quite so happy when all the hoi polloi do get active and fail to behave as hoped is another matter, of course.......

FT article about funders lining up to fund Twitter based startups:

Even though Twitter itself is yet to generate any revenue, early-stage investors are pouring millions of pounds into small companies in the Twitter “ecosystem” in the London area.

London has produced the most popular of the many third-party tools used to post to Twitter, called Tweetdeck. Reading’s Tweetmeme, which tracks the most popular news stories discussed on Twitter, is attracting millions of visitors a month while Twitterfeed, based in Tooting, is used by thousands of publishers to post their latest headlines on to the site.

“In the UK we’ve got a real phenomenon going on,” says John Borthwick, the British-born chief executive of Betaworks, a New York company that has invested in Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and Twitter itself. Just as Scandinavia took an early lead in mobile technology, “the UK has become fast-forward in terms of social”, thanks to high broadband penetration.

In fact, reading some of the more breathless commentary doing the rounds one can see the unmistakeable signs of Bubblepsych, albeit a microblogging Microbubble. The underpinning logic is very sound, in our view:

Saul Klein of TAG and Index Ventures, which also backed Skype, sees Twitter as part of a more fundamental shift in the internet to being a “live experience” rather than serving static web-pages.

“The web has gone through three major phases,” he says. “The first was publishing. The second was more personalised and social. What we are seeing now is the growth of real-time services, such as status updates and micro-blogging. The way you find value from that is fundamentally different to anything we’ve seen before.”

We'd agree that the Web is moving to a realtime Web, and in fact will evolve from there (we believe that real time will by necessity demand a filtered, predictive web). But to put one's eggs in the Twitter basket is a big risk, as you are essentially handing power over to a proprietary environment owned by a 3rd party that itself does not yet have a route to making profits - in fact in our view its most likely route to profit is a charge on those same services using its ecosystem. There is also, in our view, very little barrier to entry for newcomers so it will be hard to ensure a competitive advantage.

Wordpress adopting widepread RSSCloud, Google adopting PubSubHubbub, and the relative ease of building a Twitter API system via open source components implies to us that the "real time" ecosystem landscape is going to get much more competitive, and quite fast, so good luck to Twitter and all who sail on her - I think they will need it. And just in case, as the FT notes:

....even though their names betray their origins, many of these businesses are expanding to include other social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook – just in case Twitter turns out to be a fad after all.

Very sensible - build a brand and early user base on Twitter but be ready to move across other ecosystems. Or even better, plan to be across all from teh start - the risk is other platforms will build on these other ecosystems too. From a funding point of view, a flutter on Twitter is a great idea - but betting the nest egg probably isn't!

Interesting article on Johnny Holland about the tribes that follow radical innovations:

Research by anthropologists and sociologists has found that the introduction of an idea or innovation into a society creates two groups: utopians and idealists. The idealist has a conservative world view and is content with the status quo. The utopian on the other hand has a revolutionary world view and want to transform society with new ideas. Recent research has shown that this concept holds true for the introduction of new products and services.

Not sure that the term "idealist" quite captures a conservative, change resisting sort of bod, but hey thats soft sciences for you . Anyway, moving on......

This concept of utopians and idealists comes from Karl Mannheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology. Mannheim saw that the utopians wanted to make the world a better place by innovation and new ideas, while the idealists where worried that the world would deteriorate, if untested new ideas where introduced. His book ‘An Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction To The Sociology Of Knowledge‘ introduced the concept of sociology of knowledge.

He saw that if you shaped an idea to suit the needs of an idealist it would discourage the utopian, because the utopian wants change and their view of the idealists is that they are a barrier to change.

Mannheim studied the political movements in 1930’s Berlin, but more recent research has shown his concept holds true for products and innovations. An example of two products fitting into the utopians and idealists camps is the battle between Mac and PC. A general perception is that the PC user sees no need of paying more for a computer. The PC is good enough, and if they changed to Mac they would have to learn a whole new way of doing things, and it would be a waste of time. Equally, there is the perception that the Mac user belief is that the PC users spend far too much time dealing with technical issues, computer viruses, and many other things, and their life would be better if only they used a Mac.

They then argue that Macs are for Utopians, PCs are for idealists:

The battle between Mac and PC may not be as alarming as the battles between the Communists, and Nazis in 1930’s Berlin. But Apple through its marketing makes it just as revolutionary to some. Research by WPP’s, (the advertising conglomerate), BrandZ shows Apples brand messages actually puts off the idealists [PDF], but encourages the utopians. Apples adverting ‘call to action’ are a Revolutionary message to buy an Apple. The first Macintosh TV ad ‘Why 1984 will not be like 1984’ emphasised this message. This was continued with the ‘Think Different’ campaign, followed by the ‘I am a PC vs. I am a Mac’.

The argument is that if you are introducing a new product (applies to service, idea, etc too I think) into a new market, it is more suitable to identify and research the needs of the Utopians.The only problem is that there is a limit to the number Utopians - Apple typically tops out at c 15% of a market, even though it is a revolutionary early entrant (Microcomputer, mobile music, mobile 'Phone.......).

In fact, I'd hypothesize that the number of Utopians is a fairly close map to the number of Early Adopters that one gets before hitting The Chasm. As evidence I'd use the Hype Curve - there is very little "bad news bear" talk going in the early days of the New New Thing's rush up the hype curve - in fact, if you are a voluble sceptic (Cue Andrew Keen, stage left) you get vilified. Its only when the chasm between the promise and the reality manifests itself outside of the Kool Aid Drinking sect that reality occurs, and it all falls into the Slough of Despond.

Article on TechCrunch about iTunes needing a simpler mode for many users:

Facebook integration. Tweeting my music interests. AppleTV. Full-screen album extras. App management. An entire online store. Smart playlists. CD burning. Ringtone creation. Tips the scales at 88MB. All this in what is essentially the only music player on OS X. At some point enough is enough, and for me it was enough years ago. For god’s sake, Apple, all I want to do is play my music.

For years Apple has been adding to iTunes, and while some improvements have been welcome, many have simply added to the bloat. It’s time — way past time, really — for Apple to put out something lightweight and basic. I understand that iTunes is a wedge (and weapon) for Apple, and I don’t propose gutting it, but considering there are no credible alternatives to the program, it’s at the point where I feel Apple has stopped simply adding to the feature buffet, and has started force-feeding users.

I was immediately reminded of the concept of "Low End Disruption" mooted in Christensen's Innovators Dilemma:

"Low-end disruption" occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance. Therefore, at some point the performance of the product overshoots the needs of certain customer segments. At this point, a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market (see above chart).

- via Wikipedia

A fertile field for all those MP3 player makers and mobile operators methinks - but can they replicate the music deals?

Yesterday, 15 German bloggers published that must-have of all intellectual movements, a Manifesto (see notes on the 100 year old Futurist Manifesto here). Seth Godin demands it as a first step to recruiting your own personal Tribe, and many a Wannabee has followed, whether it suits or not. Thus we were a bit sceptical - Yawn, Yet Another Media-grubbing Manifesto, usually a thinly disguised attempt to set oneself up as chief swami and tithe-taker. This one is different from the bulk of 'em, as (i) it is written by a team, (ii) it deals with a very real subject, to wit the future of journalism, and (iii) it is clearly trying to help the debate rather than self-aggrandize.

As the Grauniad notes, their reasons for doing it were classical honest whistleblower motives:

We were tired of the fact that the discussion about the future of journalism doesn't take the reality of the internet into account, but revolves around the wishes of how the publishers think it should be," said one of the initiators of the manifesto, Sascha Lobo.

.........

Most of the time when mainstream media take a stance on the future of journalism, they report, with some exceptions, the positions of the powerful, not of the innovators. The paid-content debate, for example, was mostly triggered on the pages and websites of major newspapers and largely suited their traditional opinion.

That point about the mainstream media only reporting the voice of the powerful is one of the most frequent criticisms of serious MSM (and in our view has been one of the major points of information arbitrage that allowed blogs to get so far, so fast - the others being interactivty, economics and 24/7 sleb stalking). Anyway, its over here if you want to read it yourself - I've copied it and annotated it with my thoughts [in square brackets and italics]. Ignore the manifesto-ese its written in and go for the meaning:

Internet Manifesto

How journalism works today. Seventeen declarations

1. The internet is different.

It produces different public spheres, different terms of trade and different cultural skills. The media must adapt their work methods to today's technological reality instead of ignoring or challenging it. It is their duty to develop the best possible form of journalism based on the available technology. This includes new journalistic products and methods.

[Bankruptcy is a function of not doing one's duty to journalism - nice twist]

2. The internet is a pocket-sized media empire.

The web rearranges existing media structures by transcending their former boundaries and oligopolies. The publication and dissemination of media contents are no longer tied to heavy investments. Journalism's self-conception is, fortunately, being bereft of its gatekeeping function. All that remains is the journalistic quality through which journalism distinguishes itself from mere publication.

[Actually, we believe that the gatekeeping role is merely shifting as the industry is in flux - to Google currently, but it will shift again to trusted guides to the content one wants - and those will be the new areas of value capture and will be investments]

3. The internet is our society is the internet.

Web-based platforms like social networks, Wikipedia or YouTube have become a part of everyday life for the majority of people in the western world. They are as accessible as the telephone or television. If media companies want to continue to exist, they must understand the world of today's users and embrace their forms of communication. This includes basic forms of social communication: listening and responding, also known as dialogue.

[We partly demur in that any student of media evolution - especially German! - must know Riepl's law which shows that new media washes over but doesn't totally displace the old. In fact we observe there is usually an initial overcorrection, and later a comeback of the old media (eg Vinyl records). What is true is that there is no longer enough value in the old media to maintain current cost structures.]

4. The freedom of the internet is inviolable.

The internet's open architecture constitutes the basic IT law of a society which communicates digitally and, consequently, of journalism. It may not be modified for the sake of protecting the special commercial or political interests often hidden behind the pretense of public interest. Regardless of how it is done, blocking access to the internet endangers the free flow of information and corrupts our fundamental right to a self-determined level of information.

[The freedom of the internet can feasibly be blocked, as the Chinses have proven. That it by and large is not in the West is a critical freedom that must be fought for, and probably paid for. Pipers call tunes.....]

5. The internet is the victory of information.

Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centres, public institutions and other organisations compiled and classified the world's information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into a wealth of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.

[They can indeed, but in our view only about 10% will (based on behaviour on social media to date). The rest are quite happy to exist, sheep-like, on the recommendations of trusted others. That 10% however are the main drivers of the shift away from old media, and will capture the other 90%. That is the risk old media face in not shifting]

6. The internet changes improves journalism.

Through the internet, journalism can fulfil its socio-educational role in a new way. This includes presenting information as an ever-changing, continual process; the forfeiture of print media's inalterability is a benefit. Those who want to survive in this new world of information need a new idealism, new journalistic ideas and a sense of pleasure in exploiting this new potential.

[And a large savings account to fund it - At Broadstuff we have the "circulation" of a fairly successful print magazine but there is no way we could get those revenues today. But over time this will change, as the money chases the eyeballs, albeit with a lag]

7. The net requires networking.

Links are connections. We know each other through links. Those who do not use them exclude themselves from social discourse. This also holds for the websites of traditional media companies.

[Interestingly, some of the biggest trends right now are in using the Net as New Broadcasting Media - the Slebs on Twitter don't talk, they use the asynchronous linking to simulate a broadcast media. The key lesson for Old Media is that New Media will do the broadcast as well as interactive roles]

8. Links reward, citations adorn.

Search engines and aggregators facilitate quality journalism: they boost the findability of outstanding content over a long-term basis and are thus an integral part of the new, networked public sphere. References through links and citations — especially including those made without any consent of or even remuneration of the originator—make the very culture of networked social discourse possible in the first place. They are by all means worthy of protection.

[True overall so far - but see the above point on how linkage is being used for broadcasting. Also, one of the emerging issues of "link economies" is that it gives status to the most linked to, rather than the most relevant, and the most linked garners more links in a "positive returns" dynamic as search engines put these links up highest. It is also becoming clear that these links can be bought, so social capital - aka "whuffie" - is at the mercy of those with financial capital. The risk here is the 'Net merely shifts power from one set of the powerful to another.]

9. The internet is the new venue for political discourse.

Democracy thrives on participation and freedom of information. Transferring the political discussion from traditional media to the internet and expanding on this discussion by involving the active participation of the public is one of journalism's new tasks.

[Also, there is no value left in this in old media - charge for Op-Ed when there are thousands of blogs dissecting every issue minutely by the minute?. Pur-leeze, as they say. In our view one of the major differences is that New Media know the impact of every article by every writer to the last millisecond of attention, Old Media too often still judge their journalists' ability by the approbation of the chatterati cocktail circuit. Guess which is more closely tied to economic reality?]

10. Today's freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.

Article 5 of the German Constitution does not comprise protective rights for professions or traditional business models. The internet overrides the technological boundaries between the amateur and professional. This is why the privilege of freedom of the press must hold for anyone who can contribute to the fulfilment of journalistic duties. Qualitatively speaking, no differentiation should be made between paid and unpaid journalism, but rather, between good and poor journalism.

[Freedom is a precious thing - its not a given on the Internet - and as well as some "less free" countries demonstrating what can be done, it is increasingly being sucked out by insidious datamining. The next battleground will be user pivacy]

11. More is more – there is no such thing as too much information.

Once upon a time, institutions such as the church prioritised power over personal awareness and warned of an unsifted flood of information when the letterpress was invented. On the other hand, pamphleteers, encyclopaedists and journalists proved that more information leads to more freedom, both for the individual as well as society as a whole. To this day, nothing has changed in this respect.

[I like Leisa Reichelt's view - companies think more is more, users think less is more. The issue has moved from information access to information filtering. There is significant future value in being a trusted filter this, in our view]

12. Tradition is not a business model.

Money can be made on the internet with journalistic content. There are many examples of this today already. Yet because the internet is fiercely competitive, business models have to be adapted to the structure of the net. No one should try to abstain from this essential adaptation through policy-making geared to preserving the status quo. Journalism needs open competition for the best refinancing solutions on the net, along with the courage to invest in the multifaceted implementation of these solutions.

[There is currently a lag between attention on the 'Net and money being made there. This is skewing the 'Net business models as well as destroying Old Media' profits. It happens in every new industry, especially those funded by (conservative) advertisers. The best thing Old Media could do for itself is show how its own advertisers' can transfer value to the 'Net so they can transfer their assets and make money]

13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the internet.

Copyright is a central cornerstone of information organization on the Internet. Originators' rights to decide on the type and scope of dissemination of their contents are also valid on the net. At the same time, copyright may not be abused as a lever to safeguard obsolete supply mechanisms and shut out new distribution models or license schemes. Ownership entails obligations.

[Hear Hear - there have been egregious abuses of copyright on all sides. The more attempts to use it to lock in absurd prices and lifetime timescales, the more it will be pirated. The iTunes lesson remains relevant - provide good service at a good price, nmost people will buy into it.]

14. The internet has many currencies.

Journalistic online services financed through adverts offer content in exchange for a pull effect. A reader's, viewer's or listener's time is valuable. In the industry of journalism, this correlation has always been one of the fundamental tenets of financing. Other forms of refinancing which are journalistically justifiable need to be forged and tested.

[The value in old media was never in the journalism alone. They forgot that as the business model became "baked in" and status transferred to the journalists while value stayed in the smalls. Craigslist was the alarm but few woke up. One trusts they are paying attention now]

15. What's on the net stays on the net.

The internet is lifting journalism to a new qualitative level. Online, text, sound and images no longer have to be transient. They remain retrievable, thus building an archive of contemporary history. Journalism must take the development of information, its interpretation and errors into account, i.e., it must admit its mistakes and correct them in a transparent manner.

{We see real value here in being a trusted source to give a "qualified" view on an otherwise constantly shifting sandscape of cuat and paste opinionating and a continual "torrent of cr*p". Even the 'Netz most devoted adherents cannot deny that its signal to noise ratio is pretty poor at the moment. A corollary to this is that those embarassing rat-arsed drunk photos you put on-net will be there when you are 20 years older, you may not want to build a detailed archive of your contemporary history .]

16. Quality remains the most important quality.

The internet debunks homogeneous bulk goods. Only those who are outstanding, credible and exceptional will gain a steady following in the long run. Users' demands have increased. Journalism must fulfil them and abide by its own frequently formulated principles.

[The "bulk good" point is important - one Man in Havana is useful, 10 saying the same thing are not. Filter. Edit. Curate = Trust]

17. All for all.

The web constitutes an infrastructure for social exchange superior to that of 20th century mass media: when in doubt, the "generation Wikipedia" is capable of appraising the credibility of a source, tracking news back to its original source, researching it, checking it and assessing it — alone or as part of a group effort. Journalists who snub this and are unwilling to respect these skills are not taken seriously by internet users. Rightly so. The internet makes it possible to communicate directly with those once known as recipients — readers, listeners and viewers — and to take advantage of their knowledge. It is not the 'know-it-all' journalists who are in demand, but those who communicate and investigate.

[I would argue the above is true, but with "social lags". You can fool some of the people some of the time etc, but eventually you will be found out - and, as Article 15 implies, the Internet doesn't forget]

I came to praise the Manifesto, not to bury it in bon mots and layers of lacunae, and otherwise quibble! But it is the role of all Manifestos to raise their standards on the sunny high ground, and the role of all followers to try and pick their way through the rocks and mud on the lower slopes

By the way, I dug out a whole lot of Douglas Adams' views on media from 1999 over here - it makes a fascinating read along with this manifesto. If I may be so bold, I would argue we are living in a transition - a Schumpeterian Creative Destruction cycle in fact - as one economic model of media replaces another. The last time this happened was when TV took over from Newspapers....... This Manifesto is a guide to the endgame, but it written from the deck of a ship in turbulent seas and future sightings will also need to be taken. But its a bloody good start, nonetheless!

I was fascinated to find that a friend of mine, working in the field of Innovation and Change Management, wasn't aware of Niccolo Machiavelli's (1469 - 1527) view on the subject (yes, that Machiavelli). So here it is:

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger."

By the way, Machiavelli's Bad Rep is largely because he just wrote down what the reality of the day looked like (and much is relevant today, cf Prez Obama's health reforms). But for some odd reason people don't like gritty reality exposed too far, and he was vilified by both those who found the realpolitik of human relationships all too painful to accept and those who didn't want it all exposed. Honesty, best policy?..... Ask any whistleblower..................

Some things are ever thus.

09/09/09 (this post was started at 09:09 GMT as well) is one of those dates which is supposed to herald an End To The World As We Know It, and this time I think it may actually have some truth to it.

Last night on the BBC2 program Newsnight, I was intrigued to hear that there is a part of Her Majesty's Government modelling a 20% reduction in Government spending. This is the extreme case we modelled earlier this year as part of some Collapsonomics pre-prep for a NESTA pitch - it wasn't used (We reckoned they found it too contentious then ). What was also fascinating in the overall Newsnight discussion was the total unwillingness of all speakers to cover any facts about Government spending. If you look at the chart above, you can see why politicians are trying hard not to let the public connect the facts to the rhetoric. About 50% of spending is on Welfare, Health, and Education. Those cows are sacred to various (very powerful) lobbies. The next 25% is spent on Defence, Local Government, collecting your Tax and paying off the interest on money borrowed already. The last 25% is on a large number of relative tiddlers (I stopped counting at £4bn spends)

The underlying issue is that we have essentially given one entire year's worth of tax revenue (aka Government spending) - and then some - to bail out the banks (£700bn and counting) without extracting any structural changes in return, apart from putting nearly all the risk into public ownership while still privatising the profits. We are told we will get much of it back. But the banks, predictably, have chosen to continue to spend the money in much the same way that they did to bring about the whole Crunch*, with the prudent exception of making virtually no loans to consumers or small businesses, ie to the people who largely funded the bailout.

Anyway, to make ends meet now the piggy bank is empty, The Govt has to find money to pay for itself - and one of the ways they may do this is to actually cut costs rather than just tax the population some more. (I say may, it has only recently been acknowledged that they will have to reign in spending some time in the future).

So here is what we imagined in the scenario planning (in summary):

- You can't tax the population much more - taxes are already at the top of the OECD range, and in a year or so's time it will be clear that the money from the bailout is being frittered on bankers' bonuses, cheap M&A money and good old stock market speculation while at the same time strangling SME loans and mortgage spending. The public won't (possibly can't) pay up without wanting that all sorted.

- The Gov has to go for significant spending cuts or the interest rate of its debt is cranked up to nearly double, then triple, with an outlier of No More Money Loaned

- They need to cut somewhere between 10 and 20% of spend. Easy scenarios are 10% (£60bn), 15% (£90bn) and 20% (£120bn)

As you can see, 10% is painful but do-able - don't fund Scotland and Wales anyomore for example (let 'em taste real independence) and cut all spending on fripperies like International Aid (Charity begins at home) and Sport and Media. Cancel the Olympics. Sell Ch4 and the BBC for a bit of spare cash. As you can see, all those would be fairly uncontroversial and easy to pass politically

(I semi-jest - these were just tongue in cheek examples, but you can see the emotional issues - and what would you do for your 10% off then ?)

But when you get to 15%, and 20%, you are talking serious stuff. As you can see, getting out of Afghanistan is a small sum in these scenarios - heck, closing the entire Defence Complex isn't nearly enough.

So your eyes swivel inexorably to those Big 3 - Health, Education and Welfare. Health is a toughie - the UK spends 8% of its GDP on health vs Europe's 12% average and the US 16%, any cuts and you are worse than many developing countries. Education - well, that is the country's future competitiveness you're talking about. Its like corporates cutting R&D in times of crisis. (Whats that you say - all corporates cut R&D in times of crisis?). And then there is Welfare...... which gets a tad emotional, to say the least. And the "Tiddlers" are a land of Sacred Cows and Quangos that will fight to the last gravy boat to keep themselves entrenched.

As you can see, we are in for an "interesting" time of political media manouvering as both major parties try hard not to let these basic numbers and their interconnectedness soak into the public mind. But thanks to the wonders of the Internetz, here they are for your enjoyment.....

Oh - one more thing - in most countries, spending cuts greater than 10% bring massive public disorder, by 20% you often get - well, historically anyway - "regime change".

Now, we have been spending a lot of time since then working out ways of getting the UK out of this, but that is for another post. One thing is for sure however - the behaviours that got us in are the wrong ones to get us out, and we will have to see some radical structural changes to get out. Which is, of course, the last thing any political party moulded in the current system wants to hear...... and which is why the changes will be wrought by radicals. (In fact, we are of the opinion that the next few years may change the political landscape radically if these scenarios come to pass)

Contentious stuff, but that doesn't make it unlikely.

Afterthought - like many others' I've been reading the "Government 2.0 stuff" - but to its more utopian proponents, I'd say this - you need to think through how its going to help in a 10% to 20% cost reduction environment.

(*Here's a semi-prediction for you by the way - unless changes are made soon, we will have another Crunch when the banks have blown the bailout money too, but next time there will be no bailout money available, owing to above issues. You then get to a situation not dissimilar to what happened in the 1930's after the Great Crash, and led to a rash of despotic regime changes and a ing great war. Why will it be different this time..... ?)