I'm gonna take you on a surfin' safari

While back home over Christmas, I caught up with your friend and mine Ben Rennie to discuss Digital Strangelove, media business models and a host of other things. This is the first of three videos, I'll be sure to link to the others when they're ready (those reading this in email or RSS readers can click here to see it).

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Ben is also continuing the good work he started last year with Innovation Forums with a couple events coming up soon. The next is in Melbourne on February 23rd, and there are still early-bird tickets available for a paltry $29!

Ben will be following the Melbourne event with one in Sydney shortly afterwards.

Give me something I can write about

From the It's-been-sitting-open-for-a-week-just-write-about-it Department, this great short video called Making Is Connecting from David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at Westminster University. In it he argues tools that exist to facilitate expression of one's self are inherently more powerful than tools that exist only as an expression of someone else (think the rise of social platforms versus the dominance of 20th century media) as this connects us to the world around us.



Gauntlett backs up his ideas not with the latest digital media thinkers such as Charles Leadbeater or (my hero) Clay Shirky, but with quotes from Ivan Illich, a philosopher from the 1970's, and William Morris, a textile designer from the 1800's. The examples point to something I've been banging on about for quite some time: the rise of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. are an interesting development, but they are successful due to facilitating expression of self, and conenction with like-minded others.

As I wrote about Posterous last March, tools will continue to rise that make it easier and easier to express yourself, creating content for others to consume in the process. Making is connecting indeed, and as the world gets radically smaller on a daily basis, understanding this becomes ever more crucial.

(found via altnytterfarlig)

Tell me that you'll open your eyes

From the desk of Iain Tait, who wrote about this video simply saying "Best. Lecture. Ever." My vote there goes to Sir Ken Robinson's excellent TED talk on how schools kill creativity, but on the proviso I won't have the chance to repeat childhood and not go to school, then this is certainly the next best thing.

The speaker in question is Professor Barry Nalebuf, author of a book called Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small. I only assume the ideas in the book are the same he expresses here, it's earned a spot on my Amazon Wish List and it's probably worth a spot on yours too.

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Best. Lecture. Ever.

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Right on time

Looking at yesterday's post on Conan O'Brien's situation within traditional media, this announcement from Boxee comes right on time:

Image via CrunchBase

...users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote. The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it “on air”.

...The Internet represents a great opportunity for the major media companies and for the independent content producers to create more engaging and immersive experiences around their content and for them to be paid for more eyeballs on yet another screen.

Now Boxee itself is a service not too many people know about. And while it is now relatively easy to hook a computer up to a TV, there is a mental barrier Boxee have to overcome, as they're pioneering an open source approach to this.

The flip side of this is something I got at in Digital Strangelove - we're moving from a place where the type of media has been defined by the medium (a TV show versus a movie, which happens in a theatre) and is now in a place where we'll just talk about video, text and sound as the environment in which it is consumed ceases to have anything to do with what type of media it is.

Boxee moves that agenda along in a fairly dramatic fashion; it will be interesting to see how content producers respond.

This might offend my political connects

I notice a bunch of places where people talk about how they haven't adopted RSS readers, which I find fascinating and frustrating at the same time. I often will add new sites to my reader and forget about them, often just to stumble back across them like i have done this morning on this post from Clay Hebert on why Conan O'Brien should eschew the traditional TV model and go direct to his audience:

1) Full creative control over his own content
Now he writes a lot of his own stuff but imagine if he wasn’t censored at all. Look out.

2) Not working for Jeff Zucker3) Not working for anyone

4) Online video worked well for Gary V. and the Monty Python guys.


5) Never having to worry about ratings again
Let Leno have the “ratings” on NBC. His demographic is not Conan’s anyway, so why try to fight for it. It’s sort of like Newhart and Family Guy jockeying for position.

6) Any format, any device
Conan’s demographic consumes content differently. He could make videos of any length that his audience could consume and stream anywhere. iPhones, iPods, Droids, iSlates, other tablets. Design the content to be snackable and sharable and we will snack and we will share.

7) Watching a show at its original time slot is obsolete
I’ve seen plenty of clips of Saturday Night Live in the last few years, but never on Saturday night. My social network does the filtering and the best and funniest clips bubble to me on twitter and Facebook.

8 ) Your own channel means your own audience and unlimited bandwidth

This idea echoes some thoughts I had while back in Australia over Christmas. I recorded an interview with Innovation Forum's Ben Rennie which I will link to when he posts it, where I said the traditional TV model no longer makes sense; it is a business setup to sell advertising, not to entertain - in fact the entertainment is the expensive part of what they do! Whereas people like Conan are setup to entertain.

The NBCs of the world may still have a role to play for the time being in helping talented people find an audience, but once that happens they swiftly lose a reason to exist. What we're seeing is a revolution in ecosystems of value, where the content which has been at the periphery for so long is being pushed back into the centre.

The revolution as we all know will not be televised. But it will be everything else.

Related articles by Zemanta

• NBC Universal's Zucker on Life, Leno and the Comcast Deal (blogs.wsj.com)


• Conan O'Brien Supporters Protest NBC In Hollywood, Chicago, New York (huffingtonpost.com)

That's not the shape of my heart

Interesting video the magic that is The David Report turned me onto, looking at and thinking about the future of magazines. I am somewhat of a junkie for the form and don't doubt it will continue (in some fashion).

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/8217311]

This has me thinking also about devices as a whole, and particularly the arms race that is on in the mobile space.

Everyone is excited to have Google's skin in the game with Android, and are touting them as the challenger that can actually take on Apple and their much-loved iPhone. The problem facing Google and its partners is not developer support, of which there is plenty, but control over the hardware environment.

See an iPhone developer makes an app once, and releases it. They don't need to deal with different specifications regarding screensizes, peripherals, keyboards, cameras, what have you. An Android developer has all of that, plus chipsets from Intel, Nvidia and others. The increased overhead in supporting multiple platforms will, I believe, lead us to a place where apps exist on one Android device and not another, leading to negative user-experiences which will directed partially towards the manufacturer, but more so towards Google. Contrast that with the iPhone, which while it has well-documented flaws, is a consistent experience for every person that owns one.

I'm in the camp of people who think Android is the platform that will challenge the iPhone for dominance of the market, Google to need to invest more in the hardware for this to become a race; right now they're just running warm-up laps.