Digital Media Web 2.0

(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)

Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.

Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.

Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.

Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).

Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.

Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.

You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.

I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.

- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.

- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.

- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).

I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.


Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.

This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.

(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)

Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.

Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.

Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.

Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).

Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.

Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.

You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.

I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.

- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.

- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.

- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).

I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.


Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.

This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.

Readers of this blog will know we have been following the whole Wikileaks saga this week, and my intial annoyance with Wikileaks for (in my view) being too "gung ho" (see here) has been counterbalanced with an annoyance at the "chattering classes" - the Media and Politicians - in their attempts to misinform, misreport, and muzzle by veiled threat rather than legal action (because that they would likely lose a court case).

Misreporting and Misinformation first - I have already highlighted the "hang Anonymous" frenzy and how it is counterpointed with a near zero signal about doing similar to those hackers attacking Wikileaks, but this piece ftrom Techdirt sums up a lot more of what is going on:

While most of the news reports have said that Wikileaks published over 250,000 such cables, that's not exactly true. It has over 250,000 such cables and appears to have passed them on to its media partners, but it's slowly releasing specific cables -- with redactions -- and mostly after the press partners are releasing those same cables. In other words, it appears that Wikileaks is actually being judicious and discriminating in what it's releasing. Or, you could say (and probably should say) that Wikileaks is actually doing much of what a journalist would do in selecting which documents to pass along at this time.

But by trying to claim that Wikileaks is "just" a data dump, it's an effort to make Wikileaks look like it's not a journalistic or media entity -- thereby affording it fewer First Amendment rights. But, it appears that some in the press, such as Time, are being quite misleading in doing so. After Greenwald called them on it, Time issued a "correction," but it's a "correction that's not a correction" in that they basically say that Assange and some others disagree with some of Time's claims. But it makes no attempt to fix the factually incorrect statements.

As Techdirt points out, in fact the Mainstream media is often joining in the attack, and speculates on why.

Of course, this may come back to the view that many have: that certain elements in the press are upset about Wikileaks because it shows what a crappy job they've been doing on their own. If we had a functioning press that actually sought to hold the US government accountable, there would be much less of a need for Wikileaks. Instead, we have a press that focuses on keeping "access" to those in power, and that means not digging too deep at times.

Now you may be tempted to think that this is just another blog sounding off, but today the veteran war reporter John Pilger wrote a damning piece on how the Press went along with giving Messrs Bush & Blair their war - firstly, the powers that be are spending a lot on press carrots:

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

.....

.....in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

Looking at teh activities this week, it is not hard to believe that a similar thing is happening here. There is also the stick:

"I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked," said Jeremy Paxman [BBC] , talking about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction to a group of students last year. "Clearly we were." As a highly paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.

Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. "There was a fear in every newsroom in America," he told me, "a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise." Rather says war has made "stenographers out of us" and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists I interviewed in the US.

Those who don't toe the line are noted....

...the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety of "lobbies", those whom George Bush's press spokesman once called "complicit enablers", is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a "threat".

As Pilger (and others such as Flat Earth News author Nick Davies) notes, the fundamental issue has been the failure of the mainstream media to do its job. Some argue that this has been the case since about 2002 - Jay Rosen:

For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002. On that morning the New York Times published a now notorious story, reported by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which nameless Bush Administration officials claimed that Iraq was trying to buy the kind of aluminum tubes necessary to build a nuclear centrifuge.

........

We know from retrospective accounts that the Bush White House had already decided to go to war. We know from the Downing Street Memo that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We know that the Bush forces had decided to rev up their sales campaign that week because ”from a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August,” as chief of staff Andrew Card brazenly put it. We know that the appearance of the tubes story in the Times is what allowed Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice to run with it on the Sunday shows, because without that they would have been divulging classified information and flouting their own rules. We also know that the tubes story was wrong: they weren’t for centrifuges. And yet it was coming from the very top of the professional pyramid, the New York Times.

And it's not that the correct information was not known:

While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it [NYT] more often deferred to them. (The Times‘s editorial page was consistently much more skeptical.) Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters. The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times‘s imprimatur on one of the administration’s chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics.

The reporters working on the story strongly disagree. That the tubes were intended for centrifuges “was the dominant view of the US intelligence community,” Michael Gordon told me. “It looks like it’s the wrong view. But the story captured what was and still is the majority view of the intelligence community—whether right or wrong”…

When challenged, Miller said that reporting the truth wasn't in her job description:

Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

That’s not getting the story wrong. That’s redefining the job as: reflecting what the government thinks.

This was the nadir. This was when the watchdog press fell completely apart: On that Sunday when Bush Administration officials peddling bad information anonymously put the imprimatur of the New York Times on a story that allowed other Bush Administration officials to dissemble about the tubes and manipulate fears of a nuclear nightmare on television, even as they knew they were going to war anyway.

There was a rather interesting paper today called "The Economics of Repression" which outlines the way states strong arm their media, and which has uncomfortable parallels with the Wikileaks issue:

Professor Jorge Castañeda—later better known as Mexico’s foreign minister under Vicente Fox—used to speak with grudging admiration about the “Economy of Repression” practiced by the long-reigning Partido Revolucionario Institucional. He used the phrase in a dual sense: It was repression carried out by economic means, as papers that strayed too far from the PRI line would suddenly find their lucrative government advertising revenue drying up, state-controlled suppliers jacking up prices, and PRI-linked union workers threatening strike. But it was also an economical (that is, a parsimonious)means of repression, operating indirectly and relatively invisibly, and allowing more heavy-handed mechanisms—the censor’s pen and the truncheon—to be used more sparingly.

That author concludes that:

It’s a sobering validation of Friedrich Hayek’s famous dictum that to be controlled in our economic pursuits—perhaps now more than ever—means to be controlled in everything. Whatever you think of Wikileaks, the idea that a controversial speaker can be so effectively attacked quite outside the bounds of any direct legal process, thanks to the enormous leverage our government exerts on global telecommunications and finance firms, ought to provoke immense concern for the future of free expression online.

So, we have established why the mainstream media is largely unable to do the job the public wants it to do (there is more - as .... pointed out on BBC 1 last night, politicians and media all tend to go to the same schools, universities etc etc). Enter Wikileaks - as Jay Rosen wrote:

One of the consequences of that is the appeal of radical transparency today.

Simon Jenkins got at some of this in a Guardian column on Wikileaks: “Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails.” But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn’t driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks

I'd put it more that Wikileaks only exists because the mainstream media has largely failed (and, reading the coverage of the Wikileaks affaire, is largely still failing). No doubt there will now be a lot of effort to crush the Open Net - as political scientist Henry Farrell, among other scholars, has observed:

[A] small group of privileged private actors can become “points of control”–states can use them to exert control over a much broader group of other private actors. This is because the former private actors control chokepoints in the information infrastructure or in other key networks of resources. They can block or control flows of data or of other valuable resources among a wide variety of other private actors.

I think Clay Shirky is on the money here:

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam*. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

Lesson though, for those who muzzled the MSM, is be careful what you wish for.... unintended consequences and all that.

*The Catholic Church tried to muzzle use of the new fangled printing press, the printers of Amsterdam rebelled.

On Thursday the London Future City series of lectures is looking at the impact of Technology in re-innovating and reshaping London. The aim of the debate is interesting:

London has historically been the home of great innovations, and now the potential is even greater than ever with the development of digital technology. But can we recognise the real innovations hidden around us or are we distracted and dazzled by the short-term allure of shiny new technologies? Does London have the ambition and vision to use innovation to transform the city or will we stick with the status quo?

That bit about the ephemera vs the real innovations caught my eye (and that fellow S. African and Big Pototo Norman Lewis is speaking), as it is something we often puzzle over at Broadsight, to wit:

- Which are the real, lasting innovations and how do you see them early

- Why do so many people seem to be lured by the ephemera, even when they are fairly obviously snake oil.

So, as a way of getting my non-talk in first, as it were, here are some takes:


How do you tell lasting Inovation early on?


Over the last 5 years at Broadsight we have been doing quite a lot of this sort of work, either for startups, VCs, or large organisations wishing to understand or launch or defend in a market space, and we have over that time developed an approach which seems to be quite useful.

Firstly, our experience leads us to believe that any Innovative technology will only have impact if it can drive some form of arbitrage on what exists today. In other words you have to look at its economic impact.

Secondly, this economic impact is dynamic - ie it is not enough to say "X gives Y benefit" as the other players in the space will then react to it, and thus any modelling has to be dynamic not a simple linear progression

Thirdly, even if there is a potential economic arbitrage, it does not follow that there will be uptake unless there are social vectors that will drive it (Porn being a fairly frequent early social vector for new media formats for example)

Fourthly, even if there is a social vector, there are often legal or regulatory barriers that can come into play (for example, the "digitisation" of the legal servies industry is far harder than in other professional services as it has a lot of arcane regulations around licencing, secure documents etc)

For a bigger example, take Location Based Services. Our research into Generation One services, done about 3 years ago, predicted that they would largely fail as there was just not a sufficient economic arbitrage from the technology at the time, nor a large enough social vector (aka "jumping the chasm" in their case) for them to prosper on. They by and large failed. What is thus interesting is that the 2nd generation have used Gaming mechanisms to create a different social vector, and by and large are using prize-fuelled datamining to create a bigger economic arbitrage. So far so good, but our analysis now predicts that they will start to fall foul of regulations around data protection, in Europe at any rate.

Thus, we believe that as private companies, Location Based services are still a risky investment. However, for any Future City project they will clearly be every powerful, so we believe the optimal outcome - for a city like London - is for the city's public services to make some of their data available for innovatve servie providers to build services, and ensure the economic climate is such that datamining is not necessary for these services to succeed as an economic model

Why are most people lured by Snake Oil?

We have done no empirical research on this, but in a way watching the evolution of social media - and the behaviors on social media - allows me to make some hypotheses.

Firstly, just as the devil has all the good songs, most Snake Oil is based around overpromising an impossible dream. The Gartner hype curve describes this in graphical form, and against this the rational, fact based analysis looks boring, hard and stuffy.

Secondly, you cannot fool all the people all the time, but you can fool a significant number for a period of time, and this time period - typically characterised by words such as "New X" during and "Bubble" after the event - is the period in which a fever pitch can be whipped up, excited new entrant fools parted from their dumb money, and those promoting it can make out like Ponzi bandits (Such as appears to be happening in Silicon valley startup valuations right now). "You just don't get it" is the cry to every criticism.

Thirdly and thusly, the Press/PR machine is just not interesed in The Truth during The New X event. The speculative money is going into fuelling the story and no-one likes a grumpy nay-sayer, nor does it shift copy (unless they can do it really well, like Andrew Keen). As an aside, I could name a number of "Tech Journalists" from quality UK newspapers who interviewed us on the fate of Location Based Services in 2007/8, who didn't like our message of caution, and thus didn't even bother to mention our cautionary tale in their breathless praises of Dopplr et al at the time (but I won't, so long as the requisite marked 20 pound notes find their way to Broadstuff Towers )

My point here is that London needs to be careful - there has been, and is, quite a lot of government funding being thrown at "technology innovation" projects right now, and here is a strong risk that they are hijacked by popular snake oil merchants rather than boring, useful and economically viable projects.

So, to the various committees making the innovation spending decisions we would recommend:

(i) Firstly, using some sort of analysis like we do above - what services would create economic arbitarge for Londoners and what do you have to do to drive organic adoption.

(ii) Secondly, if it looks or smells like something ascending a hype curve, run a mile. This is territory for VC investors, not government co-investment.

(iii) Thirdly, make sure your advisory bodies are composed of the grumpies as well as those leading the New X charge from the barricades. If you look round those bodies and can't see the dumb money, its you

Here endeth the lecture Now go to the real lecture.....

Speakers:
Iain Gray, chief executive, Technology Strategy Board
Adam Hart-Davis, writer and broadcaster
Dr Hermann Hauser, co-founder, Amadeus Capital Partners
Dr Norman Lewis, chief innovation officer and managing partner, Open-Knowledge UK
Oliver Morton, Energy and Environment Editor, The Economist and author of Eating the Sun
Chair: David Rowan, editor, Wired UK

Update - to the above point, I see that 4IP has been shuttered..... suffered from buying into a market awash with snake oil and high prices, perversely now is a better time to invest as the game is better understood and the customer base is larger.

Fascinating - 3 Old Media Newspapers are the medium of choice for Afghanistan war wikileaks:

The huge cache of classified papers - described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history - was given to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.

What is most interesting is why Wikileaks - a Web 2.0 User Generated Content site if there ever was one - chose Mainstream media as its organ of publication and dissemination rather than just getting it out there on the Web. If there is one thing this proves, it is that the role of the Olde Media is far from redundant. The deep throating may now be very 2.0, but the reporting is an interesting combination of Old Hacks drinking from New bottles.

(Update - there is a rather good debate going on in The Atlantic on what this all implies for Journalism)

As to the actual incidents themselves, there will no doubt be a lot of hand wringing from the self-declared sensitive types, but the more prosaic truth about these facts is that this sort of thing was ever thus (Allied exploits in WW2 do not make them out as angels at all, and just ask the average British tankie about US "friendly fire" in the Gulf Wars), its just its all come out in the open this time (A process that started in the Crimea, by the way).

And, no doubt Western generals everywhere will be worrying that they have to fight with one hand tied behind their backs while the enemy have no such limitations. But the more prosaic truth about the leaks is that this sort of leaking will become more common, and that governments and corporates everyhere will now redouble efforts to stop it.

That the best way to prevent corruption is to shine a light into the dark areas is very true, but it is also true that some areas ned to stay dark for the safety of those fighting on "our side". What will be interesting is to see how a "new contract" is formed between States and their people over the next 10 years or so - States will know the stuff wll come out, most of its citizens will realise a State sometimes has to do what it needs to. Ditto with Corporate malfeasance (where the "have to do what we have to do" carries less weight, methinks).

If I were to make a guess, its that most citizens already knew that War is a gory business, that Afghanistan was going far less well than the Governments claimed and the media reported it as going (The mediarati are going into overdrive today, but where were the investigative media before this, one wonders....) and that much of this is news, but not New news. It merely adds detail to already provable hypotheses.

Anyways, the Grauniad's page explaining the data is over here, and here is the Excel spreadsheet (They couldn't put it on Google Docs as it can't handle files that size)

PS - I loved this comment on Slashdot - pretty much sums up my view of the whole sorry episode:

According to the CIA World Fact Book: [cia.gov]

Population: 29,121,286
GDP (Per capita:) $800 (2009 est.)

So now, expenditure over six years (Jan 2004 - Dec 2009) is $300,000,000,000.00 divided by six is around $50,000,000,000.00 per year

Per capita is $1,716.96 or more than double the GDP per capita of the country!

I would think that the US would get better resultsif the money was simply given to each inhabitant, the $800 they already make plus $1,700 from the US, would triple the GDP per capita, no small feat.

Just smile for the camera and show that you have not handled explosives or fired guns in the last week (paraffin test) and you get your weekly expenditure; you don't show up for a week then you lose the privilege, i.e. you knew you couldn't pàss the test.

Who said "You Can Rent an Afghan But Never Buy One"? It would rent the whole lot of them for a long time!

Nick Carr, in pimping his new book (which I clearly should not link to ), argues that Links are Bad Things:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they're also distractions. Sometimes, they're big distractions - we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read. Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

Nick argues that he doesn't want to over-egg the cognitive load of linking, and then goes on to do just that....

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.

So is this the death of the Web 2.0 stalwart, the Link Economy? No, that was dead already along with all the other FreeConomic cr*p that was in the same memeset and died when capital funding dried up (unless you link to an in-text Ad of course....). As I point out in the graphic above, your view on linking is a function on how badly you think you need them. To me this is just a maturity/familiarity thing - I don't charge all over the web when I read a piece, just as I don't keep on going to the back of a book to read the footnotes. One suggested approach is actually to group all links and stick them at the end of one's post, simulating the notes at the back of a book:

Collecting all the URLs into a single block of text at the end of the article works very well. It illustrates Carr's point, and it improves the experience of reading the article. It also shows more respect for the reader - it assumes that we've actually thought about what we've read. (Which is not to say that all readers merit that level of respect.)

The big question of course, is do I link to Nick's post - of course, but maybe I should do it a the end of my piece as suggested, so here it is. Here too is Stowe Boyd's argument that its just a case of learning to read online media to maximise flow

The Tory and Labour parties colluded in forcing through a piece of draft legislation today - the Digital Economy Bill - which is one of the most barefaced examples of Olde Media trying to protect it's position via legislative muscle.

No-one (rational) was ever suggesting that there should not be a Digital Economy Bill and a debate - everyone was welcoming it - but most people wanted to debate it fully and get all views sorted, as well as iron out its inconsistencies, errors and incomplete areas.

The fact that these two major UK political parties forced it through (despite its incompleteness, erroneous areas, clear public resistance, and strong arguments by those in the parties who know something about this area) implies both are in effect in thrall to these vested interests - and, one therefore wonders, who else's vested interest are they (jointly and severally) in thrall to?

In general this is an apolitical Tech Strategy blog, but one of the things we predicted in our work on Web TV is that the Olde Media would use legislative means to curb the growth of the New, and that the role of a government is to balance these interests to the greater good of the country's best interest.

They failed, miserably. But they failed in full possession of their faculties. And both failed, ie whoever is in government next time will fail to uphold the interests of the future in deference to the past.

We did this in the past, in 1865 Britain passed laws that meant that New Technology (powered vehicles) had to have a man walk in front of them with a Red Flag:

The Locomotive Acts (including the The Locomotives on Highways Act 1861, The Locomotive Act 1865 or Red Flag Act and the Highways and Locomotives (Amendment) Act 1878) were a series of onerous measures introduced by the British parliament to control the use of mechanically propelled vehicles on British public highways during the latter part of the 19th century.

.....

These new Locomotives, some up to 9 feet (2.7 m) wide and 14 tons, could also allegedly damage the highway while they were being propelled at "high speeds" of up to 10 miles per hour (16 km/h).[1] However, there is evidence that the steam carriages' better brakes (which did not lock and drag), their wide tyres, and the absence of horses' hooves striking the road allowed them to cause less damage to the roads than horse-drawn carriages.

It was a scam then to protect the incumbents, its a scam now, and a pox on both houses that passed it.

Update - I wrote this last night, and already this morning one of the major UK ISPs is publically looking at ignoring the bill. Let the Digital Defiance begin!

Update to my update - it appears they are bravely defying it until the next Parliament comes in after the election to enforce it. Heroic resistance, what!

Techmeme has launched a new vertical, the fascinatingly recursive* Mediagazer:

Today we're launching our first new news vertical in almost four years: Mediagazer, which will focus on the content production and distribution business, organizing topics as wide as journalism, blogging, video production, e-books, and digital distribution technologies.

Meedja types given a mirror to look at themselves with...hmm, I recall a Greek Myth on the subject - ended in tears of course . Anyway, the venture will still have the Human Editing function:

Mediagazer incoporates all these lessons. We've taken great care in its construction, have outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor.

That editor will be Megan McCarthy. While Megan's career in media has focused more on the technology space (both at Gawker and at Techmeme), she's long developed an interest in media industry buzz and should feel very much at home at Mediagazer.

It was perhaps inevitable that such a thing aimed at The Meedja would happen, its is an interesting gambit, and I wonder if it will need more human editing than Tech. The sheer number of Media news magazines suggests it will work (I've always seen Techmeme etc as the equivalent of magazines rather than newspapers per se), with this most self-absorbed of sectors. What fascinates me is which other verticals will be launched - and survive.

*look it up

Worrying message for the Future of Web Porn - Apple is pulling the Adult apps out (theough a rumour surfaced that they may let some back in) back in, while Walmart is pulling them out of Vudu:

An email is currently being sent out by Vudu letting its After Dark (the adult portion of its service run with adult publication AVN) partners that the section will be discontinued in the “coming days.” Find the full email at the bottom of this post.

Vudu has the distinction of being the only major streaming service with an adult section which includes hundreds of titles (including many in HD) from the leading porn studios.

What with all the free sites like YouPorn, its hard to see where a moneymaking model for Web Mass - Videoporn is.

In theory - in theory - if there is no money in the market then eventually new content will disappear and the market collapse. Will this happen for Porn - probably not, because this seems to be the one area of user generated content where the cult of the amateur still has a large part (as it were).

Gave a talk last night at the Online News Association session "Who cares about the page views, show me the money!", along with William Higham, writer and trend forecaster, Next Big Thing (@williamhigham) and Katie King, Creative and Development Editor, MSN UK (@ktking).

This post details shows the slides (above) and the commentary (below).

The Communication Value Chains of Yesteryear

Castles on the Rhine and Fleet Street office blocks are frequented by tourists today, but in days gone by were the headquarters of powerful barons of communications businesses, made powerful by their control of a par of the distribution system. They remain as witness that in communications and media value chains, things do change.

The Value Chains of Yesterday

TV, Print Media, Radio, Music and Film empires all existed as aggregators because they had control of their supply chains - either licence granted, or owned a very expensive to reproduce distribution network. That these would end was predicted at least in the mid 90's - in excruciating detail, to my personal knowledge - so the only real surprise is that these behemoths have sat on their a*ses for so long.

The Value Chains of Today

Cometh the 'Net, cometh the disintermediation of the distribution networks, and new aggregators interposed themselves on the new distribution channels. The first generation of these were the "Portals" - Yahoo etc - but the winning game at present is Google, a search function serving low rent classified Ads (but maximising their value via auction) at very low cost.

Bear in mind that Yahoo et al ruled the roost for about 7 years, Google is in its year 6, so its quite likely that by 2015 it will be something other than Google in this space - we are already seeing attacks on their aggregation model by competing search engines and new aggregators suc as social networks.

Media Value Chains - Future Scenarios

In our work for the Telco 2.0 Initiative, we identified 3 sets of players going forward:

- Old Media - they will suffer a collapse in their existing revenues, mainly because....

- ...Pirate World is giving away things for free today, by playing fast and loose with other people's IP and being funded by VC's and Other People's capital, and...

- ...some New Media Players (eg Google, Apple) are making money at one point in the value chain and using it to subsidise and disrupt others (eg Google funding YouTube)

The issue the New Media Playesr face is that in the early days they don't make a lot of money, event though they disrupt the Old Media (especially if they indulge in pirate tactics). The risk they face is that after the "Freeconomic giveaway" stage, if there is not a viable cashflow positive business there then they die when VC etc funding stops (or in the case of something like a YouTube, if they grow too large to subsidise).

Media Value Chains - Predicted Actions

The Old Order will use its muscle to maintain control of its stream of value:

- Re-establish content rights
- Maintain control on sources of funding (Ads, Subscription)

The Pirate World will attempt to push its advantages to teh Max

- Argue for No control of rights, Free wins
- Obtain as much Offset-based funding as possible

The New Order will try and reset the game in its favour by lobbtying hard for things like:

- New copyright model allows pricing control by new aggregators / creators
- Migrating control on sources of funding (Ads, Subscription)

FreeConomics must #Fail

"Free" is a great way to grab market share and disrupt incumbents, but its a lousy way to keep a sustainable business going. Those that rely on FreeConomics but are then unable to wean themselves off it must fail when they get too large to support, as noted above

The Apple Play....

Apple, with the iPod and now iPhone, uses control of the customer distribution device to control the upstream players and dictate its terms. Planet Mobile did this but was cr*p at giving its customers what they wanted, allowing Apple to enter. Planet Internet cannot do this as the CPE devices are relatively open by comparison. Not only that, but people are used to paying for Planet Mobile content but not for Planet Internet content.

....and the Bandwagon

Of course, every media and technology company on the planet saw this and now we have devices in profusion, from Kindles to iPads, all praying that they can be the next iPhone and persuade the punter that they are really mobiles and that said punter should pay again for the content and services.

The problem with this is it dilutes value to the customer - if I have to have a Netbook, Kindle, iPhone, iPod, Whatever to get bits of content then that is a lousy value proposition. That is the flaw in teh Planet Mobile argument for example - because there are so many incompatible platforms, content production is costly, ergo there is little delightful content.

Winners will thus be the ones who can aggregate and integrate across a number of these channels (did someone say Apple?)

Endgame, This Game

The Print Media is now attempting to re-establishing control by erecting gateways to its content. Some will success, some will not, depending on the content and what value can be added

So what about Print Media?

This is the standard 2x2 of our view on media future - essentially value is created in media in 2 ways - either content is inherently valuable (read: unique) or the organisation can add value to the data in some other way (archives, speed, metadata etc). So, the 2x2 says that:

- Generic, No value add - the data the only real choice is to grab a large audience (typically by aggregating a smorgasbord of stuff, as Newspapers and Portals do) and try and make money by a combination of Ads, Datamining and attracting offset funding.

- Generic, but value can be added - in this scenario some benefit can be gleaned from the added value and its probably here that Freemium models will work (ie a small % pay a prtemium for teh added value content). Typical of this is a social network giving higer levels of access or permissions to paying users (FriendFinder and other dating sites do this), or a newspaper giving access to archives.

- Unique, but No Value Ad - I would class teh WSJ and Financial Times basic reporting here - it is unique, its worth something, so some sort of paywall for some of the content will exist but it can't be too high as the stuff is not that valuable. One could argue its the same as a Freemium model but I think in this case the proportion of free-payers is much smaller (eg FT only gives 10 articles a month for free)

- Unique, with Value Add - this is the world of subscription economics. The Lancet is in here, as is Bloomberg etc - but these are few and far between.

The real skill going forward will be to create valuable services from less rareified data. Thanks also to Skillset for hostiing it.