Digital Media Web 2.0

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

Interesting essay by Rolf Dobelli on the behavioural issues with news, especially in the light of the "future of quality news" angst I heard at the Financial Times conference this week. Essentially he argues that News is to the mind what sugar is to the body, and that our human conditioning to react to Scary! Now! is the opposite of what the world needs now, but news is sugar for our cave-brains, feeding us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. He argues that unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can "swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind." He argues that the following are the main problems (I have summarised for you short-attention spanned news junkies....):

No 1 – News misleads us systematically
News reports do not represent the real world. Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias. News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.


No 2 – News is irrelevant
Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.


No 3 – News limits understanding
News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes. Both news organizations and news consumers mistake knowing a litany of facts for understanding the world. It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them. What we really want is
to understand the underlying processes, how things happen..... ....[But this is] complex, non-linear and hard for our (and the journalists’) brains to digest. Why do news organizations go for the light stuff, the anecdotes, scandals, people-stories and pictures? The answer is simple: because they are cheap to produce.


No 4 – News is toxic to your body
News constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocordicoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocordicoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. News consumers risk impairing their physical health. The other potential side effects of news include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitization.


No 5 – News massively increases cognitive errors
News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. We automatically, systematically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions in favor of evidence that confirms our beliefs. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” That is the confirmation bias. News consumption, especially customized news intake, exacerbates this human flaw. The result is that we walk around in a cloud of seemingly confirming data – even when our theories about the world and ourselves may be wrong. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. News not only feeds the confirmation bias, it exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. And news organizations are happy to deliver those fake stories.

No 6 – News inhibits thinking
Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time (see reason 8 ). This is about the inability to think clearly because you have opened yourself up to the disruptive factoid stream.
News makes us shallow thinkers.


No 7 – News changes the structure of your brain
News works like a drug. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary story lines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore.
Why is news addictive? Once you get into the habit of checking the news, you are driven to check it even more often. Your attention is set on fast-breaking events, so you hunger for more data about them. This has to do with a process called “long-term potentiation” (LTP) and the reward circuits in your brain.

No 8 – News is costly
News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant costs. News taxes productivity three ways.

- First, count the consumption-time that news demands. That’s the time you actually waste reading, listening to or watching the news.
- Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost. That’s the time you waste trying to get back to what you were doing before the news interrupted you. You have to collect your thoughts. What were you about to do? Every time you disrupt your work to check the news, reorienting yourself wastes more time.
- Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later, constantly interrupting your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

No 9 – News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
Reputation affects how people cooperate in society. In our ancestral past, a person’s reputation was directly linked to his or her achievements. You saw that your fellow tribe member killed a tiger single handedly and you spread word of his bravery. With the advent of mass-produced news, the strange concept of “fame” entered our society. Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives. The media grants fame to movie stars and news anchors for scant reason. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement. The tragedy is that pop notoriety crowds out the achievements of those who make more substantive contributions.


No 10 – News is produced by journalists
Good professional journalists take time with their stories, authenticate their facts and try to think things through. But like any profession, journalism has some incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time – or the capacity – for deep analysis. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional report and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece article by a writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news. My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once every 50 years do journalists uncover a Watergate


No 11 – Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
Sometimes, reported facts are simply mistaken. With reduced editorial budgets at major publications, fact checking may be an endangered step in the news process. The New Yorker magazine is legendary for its fact checking. The story goes that when an article mentioned the Empire State Building, someone from the fact-checking department would go out and visually verify that, in fact, the building was still standing. I don’t know if the story is true, but it highlights a point. Today, the fact checker is an endangered species at most news companies (though still alive and well at The New Yorker). Many news stories include predictions, but accurately predicting anything in a complex world is impossible. Overwhelming evidence indicates that forecasts by journalists and by experts in finance, social development, global conflicts and technology are almost always completely wrong. So, why consume that junk?


No 12 – News is manipulative
Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation, clues that go beyond the verbal message and include gesture, facial expression, and signs of nervousness such as sweaty palms, blushing and body odor. Living in small bands of people, we almost always knew the background of the messenger. Information always came with a rich set of meta-data. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energy consuming. Why go through that?
Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers (advertising bias) or the owners of the media (corporate bias), and each media outlet has a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone (mainstream bias).


No 13 – News makes us passive
News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world. Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically every bit of news. Our evolutionary past prepared us to act on information, but the daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It saps our energy. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.


14 – News gives us the illusion of caring
Kathleen Norris (even if I don’t share most of her ideas) said it best: “We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.”


No 15 – News kills creativity
Things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. They are oblivious to much that has been tried before. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas.

He notes that The public relations (PR) industry is as large as the news reporting industry – the best proof that journalists and news organizations can be manipulated, or at least influenced or swayed, and also writes that "I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs."

So What to do - how do you wean yourself off News? Dobrell suggests the best approach is Do Without, go without news, go cold turkey. However he relents a bit, and suggests a methadone method:

If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on it.
Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.

And as with all changes of diet, the first week is the hardest, but persevere:

Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain’s built-in tendency. Initially, you will feel out of touch or even socially isolated. Every day you will be tempted to check your favorite news Web site. Go 30 days without news. After 30 days, you will have a more relaxed attitude toward the news. You will find that you have more time, more concentration and a better understanding of the world.

And the Good News?

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is relevant in any society. We need more hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth. The best example is Watergate. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Often, reporting is not time sensitive. Long journal articles and in-depth books are fine forums for investigative journalism – and now that you’ve gone cold turkey on the news, you’ll have time to read them.

I must say this resonates quite a bit with my experience (and practice) - I hardly bother with "daily" news unless something major (like the once - in - a century events in the Arab world) is happening, and have drastically curtailed the blogs and real time stuff I read, and focussing on the more strategic writers. I think it isn't practical to totally cut it off though, so I tend to scan Twitter a few times a day (typically over a caffeine-filled beverage) and Techmeme and Hacker News likewise, as they are efficient aggregators of news with (some) less bias than curated news. I do find blogging about something forces me to focus on my thoughts about it, rather than just consuming it.

The irony though is that a blog like this probably counts as a "News" blog - but I hope that, by always trying to get to the "why" and the underlying the trends/threads/twists of the things I write about, is more than a simple news-mash regurgitation