Media Web 2.0

Once a year Telcoland goes away to a nice place and contemplates its converging digital navel for 2 days - this year it was Goodwood. Instead of writing a blogpost, I thought I'd Twitter it as it happened (Live Microblogging) and then thought I'd put my Twitters up as a "Lifestream experience" for you, dear reader. This is Day 1.

The Future of Networks

GEMAYA – Google, EBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL – are attacking over the top using the free ride on Telco pipes – not a sustainable play.

Bell Canada guy saying the pipes are filling up from video - have to charge for heavy usage to fund upgrade, everybody hates us

There will not be 2 mega ISps and one Google, there will be increasing infrsastruture standardisation and service fragmentation

Context search will kill Google (dominance)

Next major change is going to be sensory networks...

The Inevitable Session on Green ICT

Obligatory talk on climate change and Green IT now, but bright side is its Good For Biz apparently. Or am I getting too cynical 

Datacentres now have higher carbon output than Airline industry - never mind stopping flying, get off the Internet ?

If UK stopped producing all carbon emissions this year , it would be equal to the change in China’s output.

Green means giving up something we don't want to - we want green palliatives, not hard answers -

There isn’t enough water on earth for the biofuels projections the GreenLot want us to have.

I must log here that the "Pro-Green" platitude play got heavy pushback from a lot of people - not because people were anti-green per se, more that they felt a lot of the "Green" options were immaterial, politically correct or out of their control.

Hints for Entrepreneurs

Cognitive Dissonance - an irrational inability to take in rational input - all entrepreneurs need it or else they'd never do anything

In developing countries, mobile data is far less useful as- people are still illiterate (ie voice is key)

For UK Entrepreneurs / Startups - you have to pretend to be US or you get no action - get a 415 number and a box address.

c 95% of UK startups that do not fail are trade sales to US companies

Ex 3i guy - UK tech entrepreneurs stuff tends to be low quality, low calibre, low innovation. But who is to blame - VC, Entrepreneur, Ecosystem

His solution – de risk by only funding companies who have already got contracts with major corporates or are spinouts that get a supply contract with parents.

Panel on Mobile Innovation next - if thats not an oxymoron

M:Metrics says that sideloaded music is smaller than legal music on mobile in Europe among women. Eh - are women that honest?

Mobile vs WiFi – wifi/wimax is far better, 3G is has better coverage - interesting battle developing - cheaper to expand wifi than improve 3G?

On Internet, c 95% of PC's are standard, mobile is a total mishmash - huge barrier to mobile apps - 80% iPhone users browse Web, 24% of other smartphones

Mobile Video media - short form media seems to be the only thing that is working today.

Killer failure for Apple 2.0 - no keyboard!

The Future of Advertising

Don't expect it to fund your Web 2.0 startup as advertising itself is changing since its broken.

Ad funding for Web 2.0 companies - Ad agencies will not compensate Co's for poor economics in creation, distribution etc - need alt. funding from other streams

Two 80/20s - swop media and production budgets and create the content, and spend 20% of marketing spend on innovative stuff from web

Future of advertising - increasing personalisation of lower and lower value items - from motorcars to M&M's

The Future of the Web

Big fastest growing trends on the broadband Next web after social media - (i) Local Services and (ii) 3D Environments.

Major barrier Issues with 2nd Life et al - around IP, regulatory obligations, low volumes and metrics are hard to quanitify from

BT in virtual worlds - noting they did a lot of virtual world stuff 10 years ago, no demand then, starting now - dusting off the patents….

Discussion on "what is the point of Virtual Worlds" - one thing it does is audience shifting for musicians - but what are the volumes?

Key with New Media is to demo the use cases - "Sold more Slingboxes in airport terminals than in any other way" from

Slingbox up now - allow a fairly healthy cynicism for takeup of any media service to the mass market - Sky took 7 yrs, £40m for Sky+ now

The Future of Social Media

In a Socnet you have to "write yourself into existence" - Brands are only useful to the extent that they can help this happen.

Brands do not belong in pure social media - behavioural targeting does not work in advertising, as if its properly targeted it can't be Ads

Consumers value the telling of the story of Me – music is “referential” in that it tells the story of Me, the music, brand etc itself is not the point

Sales of music per artist in volume terms in China, India dwarfs what we are used to in EU, is at US levels or higher.

Music Industry on ScoNets - willing to try out new models outside of US, EU - too much money / heritage legal issues involved. Trying to manage their from

Most used area on Bebo is photosharing, similar for Facebook etc. Music is not consumed on site, its more a means of expression / social belonging ...

....but don't fool yourself that viral will work on its own - need a lot of DM to make it work as there is so much other noise.

Ex Bebo'er Angel Gambino - major issue is helping people find the content they want in a long tailed world - word of mouth still only effective way

I asked the inevitable question on metrics etc - got the standard response that old metrics don't understand new media. No advance there then

Now its done, reading the "Lifestream" laid out like this is interesting - its not as structured as a writeup, and it only takes points that really impressed themselves rather than the whole session (ie the points were novel or controversial to me). Be interested on your take on how this impacts vs a writeup.

Another twist in the YouTube - Viacom copyright issue - from the BBC:

In court documents Google's lawyers say the action "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web.

The search giant's legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that they responded properly to claims of infringement.

Hmmm....this can be more accurately stated as threatening the way hundreds of millions of people exchange media illegally on YouTube Also, YouTube adheres to the DMCA in the sense that when there is a takedown notice it takes down that infringement, content in the knowledge that someone else will soon repost the content back up.

The real news here is that Google is going to use its considerable resources to hold up any attempt to clamp down on YouTube for as long as it can:

Google's vice president of content partnerships David Eun has said: "We're going all the way to the Supreme Court. We've been very clear about it."

In other words, this will still take some years to resolve, and in the meantime YouTube can continue to make hay - no doubt in the hope that in the interim either:

(i) Copyright Law changes to reflect the new realities

(ii) Google / YouTube find an alternative business model.

(iii) The media industry won't find a way to block the copying of content

This is - in my opinion - a rather interesting bit of game theory now. The cost of going to court to either party is not a major cost in their worlds, so both will continue on this path. The outcome has massive impact of course, but is several years off, so both sides will be thinking about how to mitigate worst case outcomes. They will thus be looking at conflict as well as collaboration in their strategies.

The best mitigation for both, however - the lowest total risk outcome - is probably to move towards some form of compromise position over time. Google knows that it will probably eventually lose with its position as things are, Viacom knows that it can't re-bolt the stable door.

So, expect lots of posturing, but the slow hammering out of a New Accord for copyright.

Update - Ars Tech has an interesting summary here, but I don't agree that Ars Tech is in the same boat - I think there is a huge difference between them and YouTube.

This article on the BBC from Jakob Nielson re Web page usability struck 2 chords with me - firstly:

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience," he said.

This is impacting the CPM rates of pages, so rates on pages where people do very specific tasks (like social network pages for example) tend to be valued at lower rates than more generic pages. Jakob notes that:

"I do not think sites appreciate that yet," he added. "They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

I think this is true of some sites, but other smart sites are doing a lot of work in testing varying site design configurations to see what works - one of the benefits of the internet is that you can try lots of options and see what works best - and get the feedback fast.

The second thing that resonated with me, though, was this:

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

I resemble that remark! I am increasingly frustrated not just with the impact of loading widget-filled sites, but once they load they have a noticeable effect on my computer's performance, and I'm thinking increasingly that widgets are at risk of being the new popups - I think sites are going to have to be fairly moderate in widget usage until bandwidth is quite a lot higher for the average user.

Some of the London Social Media crew debouched (debauched?) to Cannes and wangled a bunch of interviews with famous real Celebs (as opposed to A List bloggers) - but the interesting thing was that the questions were "user generated".

Here's UK journo Jemima Kiss for example:

Now whether this sort of broadcast based approach will work in a video conversational tool is unclear - UK blogger and musician Steve Lawson makes some interesting points here:



Now here's the $bn question for Seesmic - would you prefer to watch Steve or read his thoughts in his blog , and read the comments rather than listen to all the videos, in 1/10th the time?

Ars Tech was bought today by Wired (aka Conde Nast ) for $25m, which follows closely on the heels of the CNet /CBS acquisition.

As one wag suggested on Twitter, Wired likes quality tech journalism so much they went out and bought some

Big picture - its rollup time in the tech blogosphere, as we noted before there are too many blogs trying to do the same thing, so a shakeout was inevitable.
What is more interesting is that but a few short weeks ago all the talk was of raising funding, and Mr Arrington bemoaned this as he wished to do a roll-up apparently but the spate of takeovers implies trade sale is the preferred route (lower price, more synergies).

The race, as they say, is on.

One wonders where TechCrunch will be when the dust settles, having been the original ones to float rollup as an idea - I wonder if the New York Times will buy them . In fact their strategy of distribution via MSM is an interesting use of the old partnership "3rd way" play rather than rollup.

Bass guitar virtuoso Steve Lawson has written two very useful posts (Part 1 here and Part 2 here) on the evolution of music and the internet, and his thoughts on the evolution of social media. (Steve's style is varied but I really like his ambient music, and his technical skill is such that it really rewards having a good sound system - he makes bass guitars do things they really shouldn't - here he is on that other very useful social media music tool, YouTube:)



Its quite useful looking at Steve's chronicling of the way use of the internet developed - firstly, the beginning:

I’ve been interacting, networking and building knowledge about what I do as a musician on the web since the late 90s via email discussion lists (I joined The Bottom Line in early ‘98, I think), forums (been on talkbass since early 2000, IM and music chatrooms. But two things have changed drastically since then - firstly an understanding, both academically and amongst users, of ’social networking’ as an enterprise in its own right, and secondly the range of tools and web resources to make it happen.

On what makes various sites more or less useful:

....when I finally realised that MySpace worked best as an interactive media, not a broadcast one, I was left with a completely unmanageable, uncategorisable list of people I knew very little about, with no way of grouping them geographically, or by their level of interest (I couldn’t tell who’d added me and who I’d added). So my Myspace page, en masse, is still a pool of hideously underused potential, thanks to the completely rubbish way the site itself makes data available.

The other social network I joined before Myspace was Last.fm - a much more focussed site, infinitely better designed, MUCH harder to spam, and built to slowly proliferate music that is considered ‘good’ by the regular users. Thanks to me getting in early on last.fm, my music is heavily tagged and associated with some fairly well-listened artists, so my music crops up on a relatively high number of people’s personal radio stations there.

Thoughts on the economics and use of social media on the internet for musicians:

For musicians, the onset of the ‘Social Media Age’ has meant an end to the tyranny of broadcast media, to our potential career and audience being in the hands of record execs, radio and TV programmers and big concert agents. We can build relationships with our audience, talk to them, ask for their help spreading the word about music they love, and also help out the musicians we love....

....The simple fact is that I’ve sold WAY more CDs to the coupla hundred people who’ve seen me play in, say, Petersfield in Hampshire, than I have to the hundreds of thousands who’ve heard me on The Late Junction on Radio 3 - a show that’s been playing my music pretty regularly over the last however many years...

...So as social media evolved, my play-approach helped me - along with a whole load of other musicians disillusioned with ‘the mainstream’ - fairly unconsciously develop a way of engaging with my audience via conversation, interaction and availability, rather than broadcast, spam and rock-star seclusion.

It also set me thinking about other forms of social media for music discovery - Everyone knows of FOAF systems like Last.fm, or music genetics site Pandora, but discovering Steve's stuff was different - I met Steve via London's Tuttle Club, which is one of the London social media networks bridging a lot of different communities who otherwise wouldn't really know each other. I listened to his stuff, now I'm a fan - but I would never have found his music otherwise.

There 's also nothing like a bit of notoriety even in the social media age - I'm South African but live in the UK, but I'm interested in the music scene back in SA and keep tabs on it - and the hoo-ha was palpable among SA music discussion internet groups (that one can be on from the UK) when SA cult band Fokofpolisiekar was the first Afrikaans language band to be played on a mainstream english speaking rock station. That they are talented helps, that they are awesome live is useful, that they sang about teen angst in small town rural SA is always good - but calling yourself "F*ck Off Police Car" (that's the translation) certainly added to the attraction - the Sex Pistol ploy (Fans call 'em FPK or Die Bende (the band/gang) )

So, without ado, from Steve's ethereal playing we go straight on to high energy, head bashing, guitar thrashing, police car Pr0wning punk

An afternoon cup of coffee, a quick scan of Techmeme, and the spluttering sound of coffee in cup as yet another rebottling of old wine into Bottles 2.0 appears - Wired this time on Broadband 2.0:

two of the largest ISPs in the United States are hoping to kick off yet another broadband renaissance, this time with home connections that promise to reach 50-100 Mbps, enabling a slew of high-definition content, better-quality video-sharing sites and even 3-D video. Call it Broadband 2.0.

Experts say this increased bandwidth -- when it becomes widely available -- will have a profound effect on everything from our social interactions on the web to the way we consume media.

No Sh*t, Sherlock, I hear you say - now who would have guessed that?

OK, what this is really all about is that US Telcos (and, one presumes, European ones) are now starting to look at upgrading their broadband pipes to get to the 50 - 100 Mb/sec mark that those backward Far Easterners have taken for granted for years. It would surely be inconceivable to look at what they are doing Back East, and think about what therefore may be applicable here?

Clearly not, or not in the the Wired article anyway - not once is Korea or Japan mentioned! No, in this newest of New New things - Broadband 2.0 to wit - quote of the day goes to Ribbit:

"Basically, people are going to do a lot of the things they normally do today, but in a better, more satisfying, way," says Crick Waters, co-founder of Ribbit, a Silicon Valley company that sells an internet-based telephony platform.....

...... "Believe me, the minute someone puts the pipes out there, people will find a way to use them," Waters says.

Heck, one day they may even work out how to pay for them !!

Fake Steve Jobs is an inspiration to any Corporate Drone who wants to avoid a life of quiet desperation:

He explained that as he saw traditional media organizations getting their lunch eaten by bloggers, he wanted somehow to join the new generation of media players.

So he said that he asked Forbes.com, the Web venue of his employer, Forbes magazine, if he could start a blog. They said no, he reported.

Instead, he began his own blog, and began--with impersonating Steve Jobs as if he was really saying what he felt instead of being little more than a PR voice like many corporate bloggers--being Fake Steve Jobs.

And did so well his own company wanted to hire him before they found out he already worked for them - he should have kept shtum and taken the 2 salaries

Best thing I've seen come out of the Web 2.0 Expo so far.

.....by none other than David Byrne, a real Talking Head, over here.

(We have analysis of our own, but this is the level of authority that really goes down well - hence the link love )

Thanks to Confused of Calcutta for the link - interesting article too.

Steve Rubel wrote a post last Sunday about 3 professions that may disappear.....well, the warning shots are being fired on another one - A List Tech Blogger;

There have been rumblings on this from last week, with Mr Arrington of TechCrunch bemoaning the fact that other Tech Blogs are looking for funding (rather than letting him roll them up, it would seem). And this week came a post on ridiculous valuations - which, I note, none of them moved to question, some even letting it pass unchallenged

However, last night paidContent threw the gauntlet down bigtime, showing a switch to a "pro" organisation structure. This isn't prosumer blogging or citizen journalism no more, this is the starter gun for a straight race for market leadership of a media game.

And the issue at the core is simple - the only reason there are c 10 or so "A List, cover most everything in tech" blogs is because by and large they are using offset economics, ie they are publishing at under a sustainable economic cost. However, that means there is just a glut of people covering the same small set of stories to the same small, geeky audience - i.e. there is oversupply, and that means consolidation - there are very few commodity industries where more than 3 majors can make a living. So one thing is for sure, in a few years there will be far less of them.

And they won't be "bloggers" anymore either - one of the noticeable features of the big blogs is that they look less and less like blogs, and more like broadcast media they grew up to be an alternative to - the whole collaboration thing is winding down - linking is now strategic, there is less negative analysis, more PR stuff is going through to pimp up da volume, more journo staffers rather than tech idealists, etc etc

So not only will there be less, but those remaining won't look like the A list bloggers of yore anyway.

The issue they will face, though, is if they look like big media, talk like big media etc etc - will they be able to keep their audiences longer term?

One of the interesting lessons I took away from "Flat Earth News", Nick Davis' analysis of the failure of mainstream media over the last 20 years or so, is that its not a "single transaction" game - ie winning the battle of getting mo' content out there fastest, day after day, actually slowly leads to a drop in usage over time - you just can't fool all the people all the time with subpar content, and thats what you get with volume and low cost.

In fact, that's what gave blogging its "in" originally over Olde Media - it was seen as more authentic, because by and large it was written by enthusiasts with expertise and a genuine desire to tell it as it is - and talk to their audiences.

And those sorts of people are still out there, so the issue the New New Media may find, as they start to look more like Old New Media, is in this long tailed, low transaction cost world (Also, the arrival of aggregators of all sorts means that that "B, C and D list" blogs are increasingly easy to find and package), all that happens is that the fickle readership just follows the (socially mediated) crowd to the next tranche of genuine voices...

Update - as well as their comments below, Mike Butcher and Adam Tinworth pinged me on two other points:

- Mike thinks that the professional blogs are 'freer' as they end up hiring ad sales people so they don't have to run editorial and ads

- Adam thinks that my assumption that the tech market is near-saturated is wrong.

I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with Mike so much, more that I'm saying the blog media will have to differentiate themselves from the existing web 1.0 tech comment sites...and that sort of leads into Adam's points - ie is there a market that the existing tech websites don't occupy, and what will the A-List blogs have to do to differentiate themselves from the incumbents. Mike also brought up the intersting thought of Co-Opetition, which may occur (sparks thoughts of a post on Free-conomics) - though my bet would be on consolidation via acquistion after a shakeout, as that is a more common pattern.

Update 2 - an article in the NYT which is not saying things a million miles away from this post, albeit with a more tactical rather than strategic angle. Two quotes:

Mr. Arrington suggests he may well try to play the John D. Rockefeller of the blogging world (without the thugs and arsonists, presumably). “A lot of things will happen this year,” he said declining to offer more detail.

I think that's pretty much what my post is saying...and this from paidContent:

“Our focus is not page views,” Mr. Ali said. “Our focus has been laserlike on the C-level executives in the industry. That’s why we get triple-digit CPMs. That’s nearly unheard of in the industry.”

Now is that $100 CPM or $1.00 CPM