Digital Media Web 2.0

Readers of this blog may know that we are involved with the Web Science Trust which deals with the emergence of the new discipline of Web Science, especially with the Web Observatory - a group of academics, enterprises and people who are using mathematics and other analytical techniques to understand the web, and the interaction of people on it, in a systemic way.

Web science is the socio-technical science that investigates how the World Wide Web evolves given the regulations, technology and content imposed, engineered and contributed, respectively, as an effect of human behavior and how the Web vice versa affects human behavior. An earlier definition was given by American computer scientist Ben Shneiderman: "Web Science" is a term that refers to processing the information available on the web in similar terms to those applied to natural environment (Wikipedia)

It's Big Data on steroids, only bigger.

For anyone wanting to learn more about Web Science, this week, Southampton University launched a MOOC - a Massive Open Online Course on Web Science (see video above):

Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Social Sciences, Management and the Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education (CITE) is launching its pioneering first free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) today (September 18th) on Web Science. The course is a free online study programme that will give people the opportunity to get a taste of Web Science – an innovative, multi-disciplinary area of research that explores the technical and social sides of the Web.

They can then decide if they would like to embark on a full undergraduate Bsc in Web Science or postgraduate study programme at the University of Southampton’s Web Science Doctoral Training Centre. The MOOC is run in partnership with FutureLearn – part of the Open University – and students will explore topics such as what is web science, security and cyber crime, the digital economy and networks.

The arrival of MOOCs is in itself a fascinating evolution of the web and the democratisation of knowledge. The UK has been a bit behind, but plans to catch up with the FutureLearn this week, which has far more Social features than earlier MOOC suppliers - TimesHigherEd:

The platform, which is owned by The Open University and was launched on 18 September, will compete with the likes of US-based platforms Coursera and edX, the latter of which last week announced plans to develop its open source platform, Open edX, with Google. FutureLearn – which initially will feature 20 courses from across its 23 university partners – would have a “very powerful social architecture” that will be familiar to users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, said Mr Nelson.

Alongside now established Mooc elements such as video, slides, text, audio and multiple-choice quizzes, students will have their own profile pages and will be able to “follow” others studying on the platform.

MOOCS have created fierce advocates and opponents - just read Wikipedia. However, it is probably not going to go away, and if this week is anything to go by, is growing - a list of available MOOCs globally can be found here.

So, this weekend, instead of firing up an MMPORG, how about firing up a MOOC?

An interesting article on the "Future of Print Media"in INMA, its the sort of analysis that I prefer - look at the trends with a hard eye, and build scenarios that use the facts, not wishes. Here's the argument:

- Ad revenue in nearly ALL categories has been trending down for many years, to the tune of half of the industry’s revenues in less than a decade.

- Print numbers by and large have been trending down. (Less in community newspapers than in metros for sure.)

- Readers’ habits are undeniably changing toward online, smartphones, and tablets.

None of those statements are earth-shattering; none of them can be disputed without risk of appearing insane. But let’s take a look at them in a factual way and then address the hypothetical straw man approach, as well.

Ad revenue. While the numbers certainly vary by market, it is probably safe to say that most newspapers fall in the loss of traditional revenue plan of 3% to 6% per year. That also falls in within the historic rate over the past few years, as well. Simply project that 3% to 6% loss out over five to 10 years to determine when you close your doors.

Print numbers and revenue. Traditional audience is shrinking by the same percentage per year. Yes, there are some holding their own for now, and this timeline may vary by market. But, once again, project out that 3% to 6% loss over five to 10 years to determine your tipping point with the current traditional business model.

Reader habits. I like to view reader habits in two categories: baby boomers or above and then all the rest. I have long said that once the baby boomers lose their eyesight, traditional newspapers are done. We are seeing this pattern emerge even today. However, here is another fact that actually works in our favour: We can increase prices on this group over the near future to help offset some of the other declines to effectively gain some additional time to alter our direction and battle plans.

The argument is that media owners don't like these trends and the implications, and so tend to roll out a more comfortable scenarios to believe, not so much ("straw men" as "hollow men" in my view) such as:

- The economy will turn around!

- We just need better people to work smarter!

- People still like the newspaper in their hands!

As the author points out, the first is a faint hope, the second is observably wrong - there are already smart, hard-working people in the industry and yet things are not getting better - and all those people who prefer a newspaper in their hands are in fact buying large numbers of smart tablets and e-readers, or getting older and shuffling off this mortal coil.

The hard thing is to build realistic scenarios, step one is to calculate a "worsr case" - which here is something like a business with:

- Ad spending reduced (to very low, maybe zero) - so revenues need to come from elsewhere
- No print option (except maybe a self print)
- Web, Smartphone and tablet editions only

Take a blank sheet of paper, and design a media business that operates in this milieu. Oh yes, its's been done already.....but, can even this last?

Anil Dash on what we have lost in the stampede into large, corporate walled garden social networks (abridged and time-structured by us):

Five Years Ago you had:

- Most social photos uploaded to Flickr, where they could be tagged by humans or even by apps and services, using machine tags. Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds. And the photos people uploaded could easily be licensed under permissive licenses like those provided by Creative Commons, allowing remixing and reuse in all manner of creative ways by artists, businesses, and individuals.

- If you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren't subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.

- In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company's site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.

A Decade or so ago you had:

- Technorati let you search most of the social web in real-time (though the search tended to be awful slow in presenting results), with tags that worked as hashtags do on Twitter today. You could find the sites that had linked to your content with a simple search, and find out who was talking about a topic regardless of what tools or platforms they were using to publish their thoughts.

- You could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a few hundred thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between these weblogs. If your software was clever enough, it could refresh its information every few hours, adding new links to the database nearly in real time. This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has created with his amazing Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000 weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played with Technorati, you’re missing out.

- You could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn't yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren't about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.

- In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone the service, you'd be described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act. There was such distrust of consistent authentication services that even Microsoft had to give up on their attempts to create such a sign-in. Though their user experience was not as simple as today's ubiquitous ability to sign in with Facebook or Twitter, the TypeKey service introduced then had much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data. And almost every system which provided identity to users allowed for pseudonyms, respecting the need that people have to not always use their legal names.

- If you made a service that let users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other competitive services, with no restrictions. Vendors spent years working on interoperability around data exchange purely for the benefit of their users, despite theoretically lowering the barrier to entry for competitors.

- When people wanted to support publishing tools that epitomized all of these traits, they'd crowd-fund the costs of the servers and technology needed to support them, even though things cost a lot more in that era before cloud computing and cheap bandwidth. Their peers in the technology world, though ostensibly competitors, would even contribute to those efforts.

Dash believes there are 2 great fallacies with the current Walled Garden approach:

The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks

.
His worry is that a whole generation of web users are growing up with no other mental model than walled garden content farming, and this needs to be remedied:

The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks.

If only - after 5 years of highlighting these issues, I am convinced that you can fool most of the people most of the time, and that there is truly a sucker born every minute. One of the other commentators on this post, Giles Bowkett, made this chilling point:

I'm sorry to say that my take on this is more fatalistic; in my opinion, many of the functions of the venture capital system actively thwart the production of good software, but perform marvelously if you view them as a bridge for transferring the population of an aristocracy from positions which control the social and economic systems of the past to positions which control the social and economic systems of the future.

I'm not as negative on this as Bowkett, in my experience these models work until they don't, and all the fooled sheep wake up, jump over the wall and go someplace else. Being older still than the Web generation, I have seen more than one cycle of the game, and they always seem to run in a 4 part sequence

- massive experimentation (Web 2.0 in the 'noughties)
- locked in vertical stovepipes (You are Here)
- open standards emergence (Within 5 years, I reckon)
- commoditised de facto or de jure standard layer bedding into the infrastructure (A decade hence).

We are now in the "locked in vertical stovepipes" phase, (we are in the same phase with smartphones) but it is usually a necessary phase as it builds the first integrated, end to end services. Yes, they don't have all the anarchic freedom of the earlier phase but they are easier to operate, by more people, and so attract the mass market. To illustrate, there were multiple PC operating systems once, multiple "OSP's" (AOL, CompuServe et al), multiple mobile smart phone OS's - then they were stovepiped - but it all opens up and/or commoditises eventually. That is, so long as you can stop vested interests locking things up into cartels (cf ITU and Internet, as we speak). Anti Trust regulation is also a key tool here.

Just spent the last hour or so following a rather interesting story involving some of the BBC'ers recently suspended post Director General Hara-Kiri Scapegoat Event - El Reg

A list of attendees at a climate-change seminar the BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds trying to keep secret has been unearthed on an internet archive. The listed names emerged after the publicly-funded broadcaster fought off requests for the list under freedom of information (FOI) laws. This surreal story is only tangentially about climate change: the disclosure raises questions about the evidence submitted to the information tribunal by the BBC and Helen Boaden - its director of news who "stepped aside" this week.

It would appear the BBC has been less that transparent about how it came to its editorial policy about Man Made Climate Change - El Reg again:

The seminar whose attendees the Beeb sought to keep secret was birthed by three organisation. In 2004, the International Broadcasting Trust - a lobby group funded by a number of charities, including many involved in campaigning on climate change - devised the first in a series of seminars on development issues, where the lobbyists could address broadcasters. One event on 26 January 2006 was a "brainstorm", in the IBT's own words, "focusing on climate change and its impact on development". The BBC sent 28 senior staff, and 28 outsiders were invited. The event was also organised by CMEP, its second parent - a now dormant or defunct outfit operated by BBC reporter Roger Harrabin and climate activist Dr Joe Smith, and once funded by the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and pressure groups.

....The third parent of the seminar was the BBC.....

Normally such a talking-shop would have no great significance. The 2006 seminar, however, subsequently became very important indeed. The following year a thoughtful BBC Trust report on impartiality cited the discussion there and said it had settled the argument - as far as the BBC was concerned - on climate change.

Filmmaker John Bridcut wrote:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts [our emphasis] and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

The BBC is under a statutory obligation to remain impartial, so this gave the "brainstorm" a historic significance: the BBC has not previously abandoned impartiality in peacetime.

You could just imagine the hoo-ha if something like this had been done for oil and gas company lobbyists!

The FOI request has been pursued by a blogger, Tony Newbery, who had smelled the original rat. Anyway, the net effect was that the judges agreed with the BBC to quash the FOI request, despite it being a request for data about a meeting funded by licence payers money that determined editorial policy in an area which is (to say the least) under some debate, and has already been shown to have some dodgy email stuff going on. (And it appears the judges were hardly impartial...)

Same Old same Old, the cynics among you may say....but in this case the Internet came to the rescue, as it appears that the data was once put on said 'Net, and of course was therefore findable by the Wayback Machine. And, quelle suprise, it reveals that this "panel of experts" could more accurately be described mainly as a "panel of lobbyists who we like" - no wonder the BBC was not keen to disclose the names. One wonders whether the BBC's army of lawyers had ever heard of the Wayback Machine, would've saved a lot of licence payer money in court! One also wonder what happens now - the FOI request has been quashed by The Law, but the Wayback Machine shows the information was - and still is - in the public domain anyway. But the ramifications of fighting FOI requests like this are...interesting. One immediately wonders now how many other editorial policies have been decided like this, behind closed doors by "Lobbyists we Like"?

More evidence, methinks, that a Director General of some 54 days tenure heroically falling on his sword is a total diversion from the real issues at play...

And the lesson - yet again - is that the only directly accessible protection or support that We The People are going to get from those people who want to hide things and do stuff away from public scrutiny is this here Internet thingy, which allows alert individuals to dig away and shine a light in murky areas. Protect it, its very precious.

Day One, Part 2 of the FT Digital Media Conference on Wednesday, as per the trusty Olde Tech iPad 1.0 - in these posts I'm noting any changes of emphasis from the daily mill and what is seen to be the New New Thing - or what I call Digital Ketchup, the thing which, if slathered over your Old Thing, will make it look so appetising today.

Session 5. Profiting from Social Data
It is (finally) being said in fairly mainstream (albeit early mainstream) Conferences like this that there are huge amounts of social data, and it's like a microscope for human behaviour

- social graph
- search
- logged interests etc
- real time behaviour

Its an arms race for statisticians, marketing is the new finance, moving from an art to a science, web analyst and data analyst are high demand roles, tools are still quite complex
etc etc - but you've read that on this blog over the years, you've heard it before, we apologise. So, the snippets I took away were:

- Chad Hurley (yes, that one) bought deli.cio.us as a data analytics sandbox, to analyse the data it already had and to "to create a better experience" - my takeaway is they wanted a big social graph database to play with and it was quicker to buy one

- Chad Hurley (again) on social selection and data analysis and "Beware The Simple Algorithm":

- "hard to find out what we are looking for",
- also need to introduce fuzziness (serendipity, variety)

Others on Data Analysis

- many pieces of straw look like needles
- correlation is often not causation
- hypothesis bias - easy to see what you want to see if not rigorous

But you knew all that, dear reader. And after the social layer comes the Gamify layer, capturing even more data. What has changed is that the company with the most data no longer wins, it's about what data you have. Quantitative has moved to qualitative.

And what is in it for the poor datascraped consumer - why, a Better Service of course. Only problem with this plan is the Customer is increasingly Not Happy (Pew Research, 2/3+ of people do not like Big Data watching them)

6. Technology Innovation Panel
This had the beneft of the irascible Josh Bernoff in fine sceptical form - some soundbites.

- The reason media co's are struggling is that they confuse the customer with the consumer, but now the consumer power is increasing, and media co's domination of distribution channels is reducing - so old ways don't work

- Challenging for media Co's because the device and distribution channels are splintering, (splinternet) all look promising but money and user time is still bounded by iron laws of physics and phinance

There was also BBC Future Media and Pearson on the panel, nothing new there except the foollowing emphasis shifts:

- Pearson - killer device is the browser (back to the future).
- BBC - the Internet is a channel which mainly repeats content from other media (still).

The other echo picked up from the morning is the realisation that the owners of platforms in the New Value Chain are getting into positions os monopoly power, or at least Castles on the Rhine tollbridges:

- If the end device and content is controlled by a company (that'll be Apple then) they have a lot of ower - eg cartoon satirist blocked (Mark FIore) by Apple until he won Pulitzer prize. Media Co power used to comes from content and brand, but they lack connection with viewers because the new media brand is on teh device in their hand and in its Apps store.(because they are conflicted?).
- Facebook is now controlling the social graph, and extracting 30 - 40% rents - but are continually reinventing themselves, so it's not stable

7. Multichannel World Part 1
Not much new here, the song has remained the same. In the UK most people still don't pay anything for content (40% only Pay TV), very static owing to quality of BBC, and people tend to use the 2nd screen for metadata about TV programming - "social TV" is still in its infancy.

So - shaken from the bottle were Big Data, and Social of course...but this afternoon, the realisation that New Monopolists were emerging in the New Media impinged on the party mood.

I was at the FT Digital Media Conference yesterday and on Wednesday, and it was very interesting comparing and contrasting it to the 2010 and 2011 ones which I also attended, as a sort of Zeitgeist sampling exercise (of which more, later). These days I am not so much looking for stuff I haven't heard before, but more looking for change of emphasis and what is seen to be the New New Thing - or what I call Digital Ketchup, the thing which, if slathered over your Old Thing, will make it look so appetising today.

This is my impression of the Wednesday morning, in point form, taken on that conference tool du jour, the iPad (if Microsoft's Macromanagers saw the number of iPads there, they would have heart attacks....):

Session 1. Jimmy Wales - Harnessing the Power of Social Media - Or why we are a Charity

Old media models money making games are over ( eg windowing), but new models not yet evolved, Apps library is interesting new low cost evolution. Teenagers will always find ways to copy music but they are not the problem, the law needs to support the way people use content. Go after the criminals, not the users. The one sided "every few years the industry increases it's copyright" is over, the public now has a voice. Quality - getting better, but WP is far more comprehensive than anything else. Simplifying the Wiki UI to get higher diversity of contributors, but Wikipedia in classic tech trap of having to support power users at the same time.

So far so good, then this:

"You don't want to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel" has changed to "page views by the million"

Shazam! - the story of these last few years and the next few - the transfer of power and influence in one pithy statement. Click. The picture falls into place. The dominoes fall. That is why "Murdoch, Now" happened.

Also, on Privacy, heightened sensitivity - Wikipedia will not let Facebook see what you are reading on Wikipedia, they are increasingly concerned about a closed world. Wales sees a need to move from "Net neutrality" to "Privacy neutrality", devices are getting more locked down and privacy more intrusive and roadcasted.

And also this - Apps stores have a risk, bottlenecks in software distribution from a small number of major players

But the really, really piquant moment was when the UK CEO of Encyclopedia Britannica asked a question* - why did Wikipedia use a charitable biz model, not a commercial model? JW says charity allowed enthusiastic volunteer content production PLUS finessed micropayment problem for content snippets. There endeth the lesson.

2. The Obligatory Future of Newspaper Navel Gazing Panel

Nothing particularly new, except that it continues to highlight the different strategies necessarily being followed between mass and specialist media (essentially is your customer an Advertiser or a Subcriber - that makes all the difference in the path followed), and hybrid vs purely digital models. Data analytics is supposedly the next big thing, as you can now tell which 50% of ads work. Evgeny Lebedev noted that the Moscow election has sent some major shock waves, a real time lesson on how citizen journalism is changing game in serious issues.

3. The Investment Landscape VC Session, aka "Is Facebook really worth $100bn"

Predictably fairly cagey on The Facebook Question, but fairly faint praise methinks:

Dharmash Mistry (Balderton) - depends on your view of sustainability and defensible (Clintonesque, no? )
Leonid Boguslavsky (ru-Net) - depends on belief on whether facebook can capture the social graph and defend it
Neil Rimer (Index) - Facebook has not yet exploited money opportunities, if it can it could be more valuable than Google given amount of information people are uploading to it.

Note One - when they say "Mobile" today, they don't mean "mobile", they mean "tablet" and all who sail in her - Neil Rimer said the obvious (but oddly largely unsaid in public fora till The Tablet) - that no one could invest in Planet Mobile for a long time owing to huge market scatter, and the convergence into a small no of platforms and a viable applicationss market now making it viable. And of course, as the pendulum swings away from Planet Mobile, it swings to..... Planet New Telco - as Mistry pointed out - all screens from TV to smartphone now have converging computer platforms, so the risk is too much convergence shifts power to the new platform owner.

Note Two - when the inevitable question about Facebook, Privacy and impact on FreeConomic business models was raised, there was a palpable....... pause.......of about 4 heartbeats before the answers started:

Neil Rimer - "have to believe FB valuation won't be affected"
Dharmash Mistry (Balderton) - will impact many, and if consumer is the product then debate will start on how much consumer gets paid
Boguslavsky - the rules won't drive valuation, power of distribution channel will drive value

Very telling. I predict 2014 before conferences will be told "well, of course privacy impacts the business models of free-to-consumer social networks" Because that is when the man in the street will have bought all shares...

4. The Soundcloud Story - Frühling im Berlin

We predicted podcasting would crash out in our 2005 analysis, and it did. We haven't seen the "sons of" catch fire either, and our own client work in the audio area has told us that navigation/sampling remains a pain. So what has changed? Eric Walhforss, Soundcloud CTO argued that the New Audio is different due to:

- better mobiles now, smart phones do a better job with navigating audio
- sound is now "social" - at most kindest, a new distribution channel, a new buzzword to hang it all on

We shall see....good luck to them, I think Audio is still a very tough game, even with Social splattered all over it like ketchup.

What interested me most in this talk was the following snippet - they moved to Berlin, although they are Swedish, as the city is "amazing - like early Silicon Valley, but more punk meet geek than hippie meets geek". Now that I can easily believe - although their move was prompted largely by where their angel investor is, Berlin - especially Olde East Berlin - has a "cool" vibe that London's Siicon wotsits just don't have. As Wahlforss noted, London's bid to be a Silicon EuroCentre has to deal with a mobility in the VC world, so is not a slam dunk.

(In)Conclusion

Big Data and Privacy Friendliness got a big shake-out, but Prime Ketchup of the morning was...Social! (just Social - there is no verb nor noun attached anymore).


*Added 5 days later - even more piquant, Britannica has just announced they are no longer printing when stocks run out)

Demand Media is trying to censor blogs that record its suckiness* - Forbes :

There’s something perversely flattering about having an entire website devoted to your supposed terribleness. But Demand Media is evidently not enjoying the attention from Demand Studios Sucks, a blog maintained by refugees, malcontents and other critics of the so-called content farm. This week, as Demand’s market capitalization fell below $1 billion for the first time since it went public in January, the company’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the proprietors of Demand Studio Sucks, and temporarily succeeded in getting its internet service provider to take down some internal documents it didn’t want posted.

We thought the Demand Media business model sucked pre IPO, and still do, but its nice to see these sort of shark practice businesses get their own remora-blogs.

One of the lessons of the New Media is your critics are always with you......... and like remoras,they won't go away easily.

*Suckiness - a business that sucks at sucking suckers'

This week I had a client engagement in Wales, about 3 hrs from Broadsight's London base. Got there and, with sinking feeling, realised I had left my laptop back in London. Presentation to client COO early the next day, lots of last minute work to do.

Why is this significant? Well, the sinking feeling was from remembrance of times past - I've done this sort of high stress "forget the laptop" once about every 10 years - here is how it went:

1991 - Arrived at hotel near client (in Wales) at c 12pm, had a few final touches to make, no problems as meeting is at 10 am next morning but then found I had left correct "luggable" computer (with the files on) at office - in those days you didn't have your own laptop. I got up at 3am, drove 3 hours back to office, got computer, drove 4 hours back to client (more traffic by then) and then rushed into meeting and present without final touches. There was early Internet in the UK (I used it) but virtually no companies were on it, and as for storing files in the "cloud"...

1999 - Arrive in Kuala Lumpur in afternoon, meeting next morning, PC dies. Borrow another PC, spend all night desperately trying to download 2Gb of stuff we needed over a PSTN line, colleague in London and I took about 5 hours trying email, FTP etc etc - big files and PSTN modems do not get on well! Finally done, walk into key presentation with no sleep and jetlagged.

2011 - The solution? Simple, the hotel gave me one of their desks and a PC, I pulled the files I wanted off our Internet server, used the Excel and Powerpoint on their computer, updated them, emailed it to my colleague and client for the morning. Hotel even have a Costa Coffee in the foyer so I could keep my caffeine habit going. Sorted. (A shout out to the Hilton Hotel in Newport, Wales here - they were magnificent in my hours of need)

Of course, you know the end don't you - the meeting was postponed till next week .

Now, in about 1993 I wrote an article in Management Today stating that the impact of this new fangled Internet would be to replace physical travel with digital travel. It hasn't done that yet, but it has replaced the sinking feeling with a sympathetic latte from the hotel staff.
One wonders what will happen in 2021 - will laptops be disposable commodities (5 more cycles of Moore's Law means a £300 machine today will be a tenner by then) or will my laptop be hardwired into my brain, so it cannot be forgotten unless I forget my head!

Bit of free time, so writing up my notes from Morning 2 of the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference 2 weeks ago. Big takeaway is that everyone expects the near past to look like the near future:

Firstly, that old chestnut, Books - Engaging readers in the digital age had Chris Cleave, New York Times #1 bestselling novelist; John Makinson, Chairman and CEO, Penguin Group and Richard Palk, General Manager at Digital Reading Business Europe, Sony on teh panel. My notes abiut Things I had not heard before are:

- iPad adoption speed incredible, no one is sure what it eans but unlikely to be bale to charge silly prices like you can on e-Readers. 70% margisn are going to come off Amazon/Kindle.
- Stormclouds are gatehering for current eBook pricing model, as free downloads start to take off.
- DRM is not the answer
- iPad creates a new media cohesiveness that Kindle, laptop cannot match easily
- Increasingly not enough for author to write have to pre-market, post market, engage with audience
- the "Novel" is a recent phenomenon - Dickens was serialised for example (yes, you knew that) but everyone thinks the serial lends itself better to interactive media.
- Music is different, in that songs are different to chapters, but not different to short stories - but people don't really go for short stories - but if properly written would read instead of newspaper on way to work

Then came the obligatory New markets, new models session - with Tony Chambers, General Manager, Emerging Markets, The Walt Disney Company, EMEA; Mark Read, Director of Strategy, WPP and Caleb Weinstein, Senior Vice President, Discovery Networks, Emerging Markets. New Points noted are:

- Where is the growth? - not BRICS et al, they can't pay western prices so piracy is endemic - long term game. ROI > 5 years
- US, Europe has people and money in next 5 years
- We will see lots of "wiggling" of business models

Then comes the even more obligatory "Next-generation advertising and marketing" featuring Jeff Levick, President of Global Advertising and Strategy, AOL; William Eccleshare, President & CEO, Clear Channel International; Matt Brittin , Managing Director, Google UK and Guy Hayward, CEO, JWT UK Group. New points made:

- There has been very little innovation in Display ads over last 10 yaers, the system was built by technologists in dotcom era but marketers are starting to change it now
- Digital outdoor media is something to watch over next 5 years
- Smart clients are using mixed media
- Mobile - still small, growth potential probably overstated - needs further smartphone penetration and single standard - also a good payment device (estimated 2-5 years out).
- 1 in 3 use location on mobile vs 1 in 5 on web.
- Still darned hard to work out what happens with Social Media - to quote:

"Advertising that interrups people when they don't want to be interrupted doesn't work"

The Google chap said that they had not given up with Google TV, but will iterate from what they have learned.

My summary - After 2 days at the conference, I think apart from the more rapid growth of the iPad, and the entrance of a 2nd wave of "adventure capital" into Video, the heavy duty work we did in this space in 2008 stands up pretty well - ie it was all largely predictable. I sat down this morning with my notes trying to scry trends and threads and connections just "below the surface", or anything that looks truly disruptive. I know wveryone want to believe in "mobile", but I just don't see it in the short term as the essential economic limits in the mobile broadband value chain - too much variety, too few standards, cr*p cost structure - just haven't changed much since 2005 when we first looked at this area. What will happen is "Big Smart Mobiles" - ie Tablets - will take the broadband media content load (and payola) as quite simply a mobile screen is just too darned small.

The New York Times paywall learns about work-arounds the hard way - Nieman Labs:

The paywall is costing the newspaper $40-$50 million to design and construct, Bloomberg has reported.

And it can be defeated through four lines of Javascript.

......

Canadian coder David Hayes has just released NYTClean, a bookmarklet that, in one click, tears down the Times’ paywall.

“Released” is probably even a little strong — it makes it sound like there was an extended development process. All NYTClean does is call four measly lines of Javascript that hide a couple

s and turn page scrolling back on. It barely even qualifies as a hack. But it allows you access to any New York Times story, even when you’re past the monthly limit. (I just tested it out with a Canadian proxy server — works just like it says.)

I met Arthur Sulzberger at the FT Digital Media conference a few weeks back*, and pointed out that I read he NYT online from the UK as its too bl**dy hard to find never mind buy the paper here, and so I read it online, but for me to pay for it I have to know that I can't get it free more easily. (We have done a lot of research into free vs paid-for online services recently, and a big thing coming back at us is that if Paying was less hassle (and prices more reasonable), more people would do it - but only if others don't get a free ride of course). As Nieman labs points out:

Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles. One represents all the people on the Internet who might be convinced to pay for nytimes.com. The other represents all the people on the Internet who (a) know how to install a bookmarklet or (b) have read a Cory Doctorow novel. Do you really see a big overlap between the two? If someone is absolutely certain to never pay for the NYT, then it makes sense to squeeze a little extra advertising revenue out of them on the rare occasions when a link sends them to nytimes.com.

The problem with that model, though, is that it assumes inefficiency. It assumes that the happy-to-pay crowd (or the grudgingly-will-pay crowd) never find out about the workarounds — or at least that the workarounds remain complicated enough that they won’t want to bother. One click, though, ain’t all that complicated.

Now that was predictable. Back to the drawing board, chaps......

* I realise now that if I had known what they were up to, I could have spent 5 minutes and saved him a fortune - virtual impact, eh