Blogcritics

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

It's About the Copyright, Stupid

Haydn Shaughnessy — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:00:36 EDT

The Japanese content providers request that YouTube take down nearly 30,000 videos (who had to sit through that lot?) comes at the end of copyright week.Copyright issues have been prevalent and they've been tied up with issues of economic viability and the role of free upload/download sites that currently dominate the web, making this the number one issue in web economics. Behind it lies the viability of YouTube, Google, and independent video production.Let's try to unpick the issues.The first is this: Is the online videocast market viable? Robert Scoble (see link above) today explained that his own vidcasts are not - not yet anyway - economically viable. The cost of creating and streaming his videos far outstrips the revenue potential right now. The cost just of delivery alone outstrips revenue potential.What does this say about YouTube? That by and large its viability rests on video that is costing nothing to its participants. That does not always mean that the videos themselves have cost nothing. Pirated video undoubtedly has a cost -- borne by someone else. Hence we see a request for 30,000 videos to be taken down. So much is obvious.While that's been going on, a couple of authors, Andrew keen and Charles Cooper, have been berated by respected and careful critics for daring to say that the current wave of the web is built on theft.So let's summarise so far. Luminaries like Robert Scoble cannot make video on the web work economically, even with their advertising and audience pull. The economics are against him.YouTube is assumed to be worth $1.65 billion yet it relies on pirated content to a degree we cannot ascertain. What we can conjecture is that it is not viable without pirated content.Raising this theft issue invites ridicule -- something here doesn't add up.Copyright also emerged this week as an issue for top flight talent like the Beatles and in actions taken by the music industry against 8,000 illegal filesharers.The other side of the coin is that many media enterprises don't respect authors' copyright. Copyright abuse by newspapers in Europe is not uncommon. When it applies to freelance writers there is a wrongful assumption that a newspaper can sell and resell in the print and onlline syndication market without reverting to the content producer.What we're seeing is an exercise in power. Powerful media can squash the rights of individuals. On the other hand, when their rights are challenged, they come over heavy.We tend to take the "technology first" view of this -- we have the technology to share files so we should; likewise newspapers can exploit the technology of databases to continually resell content, so they should. But rights are trampled on in the process. There's no point in ignoring that. It's like assuming vidcasting is viable. It seems to be until you try it without a loss maker called YouTube.At the same time it's clear YouTube has a viable model open to it. It involves:Providing a high quality video hosting service for a fee or on ad revenue share.Providing ad sales and sharing enough of those sales to make vidcasting viable.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

The Affliction of The Web

Haydn Shaughnessy — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:07:34 EDT

It's nearly ten years since a study sponsored by Reuters, Glued to the Screen: An investigation into information addiction worldwide, identified information addiction. The topic keeps cropping up in informal discussions with friends, colleagues, associates. And it's relevant, very relevant to how we see the net evolving.Discovery, finding out, is an evolutionary necessity for humans; it is so necessary it verges on an addiction, a story that hit the headlines in the summer of this year."Dr. Hallowell and John Ratey, an associate professor at Harvard and a psychiatrist with an expertise in attention deficit disorder, are among a growing number of physicians and sociologists who are assessing how technology affects attention span, creativity and focus." They compare information consumption as practiced by the multitasking wired individual with the dopamine release from narcotics. "It takes the same pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure."We also habitually create new cultures, according to evolutionary biologist Professor Mark Pegal. It's what distinguishes us. And it's what is happening now.Talking with a teacher at a leading technology institute today, I learned that the very process of encouraging young people to take a point of view, to reach beyond the Google search box and form a perspective on life that can be expressed in an artistic way, is the most problematic part of engaging with a part of that age group.As we create more content, the question is has our compulsive approach to information overtaken our ability to analyse it? It's a question that people are asking without saying very much. First, the channels of communication that are opening up to us need far more content than we've yet to put in play. Overwhelmed by information, we're compelled to create more. More of those YouTube scratch videos, scratch podcasts, weird takes on our moral disorientation, and of course sport, extreme, and edgy, will be needed. Your Internet Procotol TV needs you.And more time spent working out how to use technology communally, building our networks and associations, building out creative applications in the way we now see happening from Silicon Vally to Bangalore -- what's to stop anyone in the global neighbourhood extend that blogging skill into a new publishing application like travel guides, how-to guides, experiential tracts, spiritual diversions, musings and mentions. It's easy to envisage in five years time a world where all kinds of hybrid publishing products slither onto the screen.The type of product though doesn't change the nature of the underlying personal dynamics. We need more content to fill more communications pipes and we're becoming more compelled to seek and select different kinds of content. But to what extent are our views of how the future will play out coloured by compulsion?The cliches that describe change envision a river of information, a world devoid of hierarchy, a flat earth, one where few guardians of veracity are needed because everybody is a guardian. It's a debate that raged over the weekend. The problem with these viewpoints is not just their utopian nature and the tendency to confuse a trend with a logical extreme. It is also that they preclude an imaginative play with future possibilities.The future of the web and information and content is intellectually stalled by the idea it will play out through the collective vision and perspicacity of a perfectly empowered public. Yet we have suffered a decline in critical thinking and in the transformation of social problematics into artistic concepts. We don't, like John Lennon, Imagine anymore; we extrapolate and we make claims based on universal types. And then we assume that this critically truncated culture is going to perform the miracle of transforming us into the perfect cyber-democracy.That lack of critical rigour is evident enough in the debate. We make claims about what people will do. People will always recognize a writer who's faking it for money; consumers will become producers; the reader will become the writer. Well, some will, some won't, and some will do differently, some will continue to be gullible, some will trust, some will revolt. We have compulsively assumed the web obsessive is the average. We are out on a limb anticipating a logical conclusion to behaviour.It might be more interesting to think in real terms what we can achieve in the way of diversity -- diversity of form, content, novelty, innovation, but we're seeing the future in much narrower terms. It's easier to say flat earth than it is to conjure up images of diverse populations granted access to new means of communication. It's easier to Google than it is to think, easier to hope than imagine, easier to extrapolate than to puzzle. It's easier to keep going compulsively with the flow than it is to back off a while and think this one through.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

The Story of the Week: Classifieds

Haydn Shaughnessy — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 21:17:22 EDT

The week's really been about classifieds. It might have been about Google and YouTube or even Iran, Bush, Blair, Bertie or bungs but it's definitely been about classifieds and classifieds are what will change our lives.What's currently protecting newspapers from rapid decline - in fact what's keeping newspapers buoyed - is the fact that the majority of businesses are not yet online. That means they're not yet part of the online classifieds mix. That means the media industries are not changing fast enough which in turn is reflected in the small revenue potential, as yet, for the blogger, the podcaster, the vidcaster and the small web publisher -- even one called YouTube.Online classifieds have the potential to decimate newspaper earnings but not for as long as businesses are not online.Add in another curious fact. For the most part online ads to date have taken the wrong approach. Take job ads, which have simply emulated the newspaper experience of paid-for ads but with a few fringe benefits.They emphasise ease of use by the advertising company. Getting ads close to an appropriate audience for example, giving access to a return on investment analysis, being able to search online CVs. All very well, but in a market tight for talent, it should be geared towards the job seekers' experience.Charlene Li pointed out a year ago now that Yahoo and Hotjobs are rethinking the strategy. Under pressure from sites that aggregate all job listings, Yahoo now crawls company websites and "scrapes" their job ads to add to its own paid-for classifieds.Similarly Edgeio and Eventful are scraping ads from around the globe and providing a one-stop search platform for seekers of jobs, cars, houses, and venues.Yahoo's jobs ads strategy for the past year has been to facilitate job seekers' searches and spin revenue from the search process than charging for job ads. That kind of strategy is going to hurt newspapers as they take their businesses online because it puts an upper limit on the price of a job ad.New ideas about small ads, and ideas for getting some kind of web presence, any kind of web presence, for the majority of businesses were part of the story of the week.Jobneters launched its post-beta job referral site. On Jobneters the idea is to create a word of mouth referral system that highlights talented job seekers - the system works by paying referrers (the gossips) who contribute to a candidate's profile, if the candidate is hired. Won't that influence people to leave false praise? No, the recruitment business works through word of mouth anyway.SmallTown has meanwhile launched its webcard business, allowing small businesses to fill in a simple "webcard" and get immediate web presence. They call it building the local web. CityVoter has a different tactic aimed at the same target.Local television station websites in the USA will be hosting local “best of” contests developed by CityVoter, a company that enables local residents to nominate local businesses for prizes in up to 90 categories.CityVoter is a strategy as well as a company. They use vote-for competitions to drive businesses to the web. The idea is to stage competitions that force/encourage a business to upload a few photographs to the local city voter media partner site and if not, to get local residents to put details up there anyway. It's an ultimate user-generated content play.At the same time Microsoft is getting ready to launch a mobile ads service -- presumably with a view long term to the local classifieds market.It was also a week in which these issues came into the blogging community. Scott Karp argues that the next generation of media may simply not be as profitable as media industries traditionally have been. We're looking instead at an era where the gross cost of advertising to industry radically declines.Why will it benefit most people? Because in the rush to reduce the cost of advertising it is the blogger, vidcaster, and podcaster with a small audience that can afford to downscale fastest and furthest. Even as news media scramble to pick up free material from bloggers and TV stations hook into user-generated content, they know that their ultimate liability is their overhead, their offices, hierarchies, bureaus, pensions, expenses, and an immovable sense of being entitled to their historic privileges.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

Ten Views on Blogs and News

Haydn Shaughnessy — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:09:53 EDT

This week saw a small eruption in that corner of the blogging world where professional writers operate. It began with a post by Nick Carr, though Blogcritics preceded it with a contribution from the BBC.What the debate you're about to hear tells you is that a lot of people are learning to write headlines. Contributions in declining order of snappiness and suggestiveness were: Trust Me I'm A Journalist; Why We Needs Blogs and Newspapers; A Glass House; and the more mundane but accurate Journalistic Standards in The Blogosphere.What was it about? Nick Carr contends that Michael Arrington's TechCrunch and Arrington's own commentary are fatally flawed because of a conflict of interest -- Arrington invests in some companies that TechCrunch covers. Specifically says Carr, Arrington's support of blogging as opposed to journalism is open to criticism, for that very reason. Arrington does not respect journalistic standards but his own are compromised.So Carr wants to talk up journalism as opposed to blogging.This is the line Kent Newsome quotes: "When it comes to conflicts of interest, or other questions of journalistic ethics, the proper attitude that we bloggers should take toward our counterparts in the traditional press is not arrogance but humility."And Newsome's own endorsement: "To do otherwise is to claim a position of superiority that is ludicrous on its face. Blogs have many advantages over traditional print media. Let's not obfuscate them with illusions of grandeur."This morning Matthew Ingram reminded us: "So yes, bloggers have some things to learn from traditional media when it comes to disclosing conflicts. But traditional media darn well has plenty to learn from bloggers as well — and I for one am glad we have both."Some stock-taking is needed.1. News media operate through commercial compromises that do alter what would otherwise go into news programmes and newspapers. It's part of the game. Perhaps news media have become increasingly less critical - at least that's the theory for the rise of the radical right. Others would argue investigative journalism has died. Beyond that though, it's always been this way.2. In the 1990s/early 21st century competitive pressures got out of hand and some journalists began making things up. It happened at the New York Times, USA Today and at Carlton TV that we know about, but there was much more going on. Over the last decade news organisations have cut more staff and budgets, effectively reducing their commitment to reflecting society in the broadest possible way.3. News media therefore get it wrong through political bias, the machinations of commercial television, the pressures they place on staff and through lack of controls, and through their allocation of budgets.4. But they also get it wrong because they assume that there is an objectivity that they have a better ear and eye for, because of the training of journalists.5. Bloggers are self-interested in some cases.6. Bloggers don't necessarily have a better eye or ear from what is the pertinent line of inquiry when covering events, trends or people but they've at least an even chance of getting it right.7. Liberal voices that will forego personal advantage to state and restate unpopular opinions are a dying breed. Newspapers used to provide a home for them, and some newspaper proprietors had that streak in them too.8. There is no viable form of income yet for bloggers who have a liberal humanist outlook - your best chance of earning money is first in the field with tech news, parenting or cooking. It's a Long Tail world after all. Bloggers need to test their willingness to compromise for income.9. Blogging and citizen journalism is being used to widen the voices or information sources in some news coverage but blogging and citizen journalism are not being used to challenge the status quo. They are and will be integrated.10. How we think and what we know is at stake. Blogging is,as yet, too individualised to affect that other than when bloggers' views gel with commercial interests, as is the case with the wildly successful TechCrunch.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

Content Review in the Week Before Google

Haydn Shaughnessy — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:16:43 EDT

The big news of the past week or so, in the life before Google and YouTube, might have been Rupert Murdoch looking around to buy a blogging platform, blogged by GigaOm but a story that is, in fact, nearly six months old, or indeed Al Gore's Current TV coming to Europe in a deal with Murdoch's Sky. How about the fact that online advertising will exceed broadcast advertising by the end of the decade?Perhaps it would be Geroge Lucas announcing he doesn't want to do films anymore -- not that he's bored, but because the budgets can't be sustained and because the future is about volume. Or the two new video news operators that have been set up on a shoestring, Michael Rosenblum's new project in the USA and 18 Doughty St in the U.K. Indeed, it could be the Washington Examiner's new citizen media/networked journalism project. Or the observation that American media are experiencing a decline in audience share worldwide. Worth a mention, too, is Warner Brothers' decision to shut down its online production division. Or maybe the founder of Endemol (Big Brother inventors) announcing the future is only about cross-platform projects. These snippets of news tell us a whole lot is going on, that one of the world's biggest media moguls having snapped up MySpace sees platforms as his best way forward -- to blogging and to user-generated TV. They tell us volume at low cost is far and away the most important part of the media tag race. Volume, volume, volume, which, of course, is what Murdoch bought with MySpace, and which he'll spin out across his TV and newspaper interests.For any newspaper reading this -- volume. Ramp up the supplements. Bulk out the websites. And buy up platforms -- traditionally, power has resided with platforms -- broadcasters owned networks, papers owned the printing press. More importantly, though, they show how an established media player like Murdoch sees strategy on the whole -- take up the technology platform, engineer yourself into a leading position in free content, monetise it in every way. The Murdochs make other media companies look pedestrian. But while Newscorp action is news, there's also been plenty going on at the grassroots: low costs soap type products over at Zabberbox, the emergence of ultra low-cost production company Digital Magics into European TV/web production, the news that net citizen media pioneer Netzeitung is profitable, 18 DoughtyStreet beginning to broadcast, and the progress of Floaters. This past week or so has seen plenty going on at both ends of the spectrum, where the media moguls take giant strides and the upstarts keep plugging away. Story of the past week or so, though, was this: Murdoch really gets it. Buy the platform. Buy the platform Google.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

The BBC Learns To Blog, And Why That's News

Haydn Shaughnessy — Mon, 9 Oct 2006 10:05:49 EDT

Richard Sambrook is the director of BBC global news and a blogger. Richard's blog is SacredFacts, and subtitled "Something thought to be actual as opposed to invented". The idea that something out there has such an elevated sacred status, and that it has natural owners, is what really marks the difference between two opposing views of news and in part it's what drives blogs.First let's say what news is. News, and media creativity in general, are more important than we realise for reasons we don't acknowledge.They are indeed the cornerstone of our society. The reason: the broad schedule of news and entertainment is a medium that keeps the economy going. You cannot imagine western democracies functioning without ads and you cannot imagine an orderly society without newspapers and TV companies that make the compromises necessary to keep running ads.What we invent and produce is sold via TV and newspapers. They are not just central to "free speech" but to economic order.The fragmentation of these mediators, under pressure from IPTV and blogs, is going to have a profound effect on the whole structure of an advanced economy. Corporations will have to sustain their credibility and promote their brands across thirty or more mediating content types. That means dilution across the traditional ones (which in turn will raise pressure on publicly funded media).Playing such a central role in every news organisation, including those that don't take ads, and the structure of news gathering and decision making, is necessarily a compromise. It's a compromise that has worked very well for us for 150 years. Its nature is: maintain equilibrium. News organisations cannot ask fundamental questions about how our system operates - for example, about how our food supply and pharmaceutical industries have created a moral panic over weight, eating, and health, and indeed seem to have converted the human body to a playground for officially sanctioned but potentially dangerous drugs (Vioxx, statins, chemo, antacids, SSRIs).News and current affairs can, for example, do the SSRI story but they can't do the fundamental inquiry into how and why our society has changed into one that is fundamentally drug dependent.It is also necessarily elitist. Attempts to broaden the media franchise (the BBC ran some in its community division) have never been pushed far enough or given sufficient prominence, and they're easily folded. But you cannot spread power without raising many alternative viewpoints and disturbing equilibrium.The result of both of these is blogging and vidcasting. It's the desire of many of us to make more fundamental inquiries, to object to elitism in practical ways, and to express anger at having been let down by the Fourth Estate.The question we also ask of course is how we can be objective in blogs, and how we can find things out, without the resources of a BBC, CNN or Sky.My response to the first of these is I've never been impressed by the objectivity of any news organisation. When the London Observer was owned by a metals company Lohnro, journalists complained, in the restaurants around Westminster, about the more obvious compromises like not being able to criticise oppressive regimes where their ultimate owner operated. At one time, in the 1940s, the Times of London, Observer and several US papers and magazines were owned by a tight knit group around the Astor family which simultaneously dominated London and Washington society (Vince was President F.D. Roosevelt's best mate and the London Astors owned the paper of record). We've yet to hear the true and complete story behind World War II because this cabal controlled information, and did not protest when the Special Operations' executive chief in New York, Intrepid, had many important records destroyed in 1945. 85% of the UK's SOE records in London were also destroyed. You could tell similar tales across the history of the press and TV. Whether we look at important parts of modern society or of the past, we are conspicuously under-informed.The point is, though, that these are necessary compromises and they will always happen. We're grown up enough to accept that but we shouldn't assume there's something sacred in there. The opposite of scared is not invented, it's compromised, blurred at the edges, toned down, over-expressed perhaps. We all do it and it's part of our culture. As conspicuously as we are under-informed, we did little to demand better. And then blogging came along.The question it raises, though, is not only will organisations like the BBC co-opt the reporting power of bloggers but also will they broaden and deepen their coverage of our world? That would really be treading on sacred ground.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

More on The Internet Changes How We Think

Haydn Shaughnessy — Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:59:25 EDT

From an evolutionary perspective people don't change much. At the level of our DNA we're not vastly different from Palaeolithic humans. We need to eat the same diets, more or less, and should follow roughly the same patterns of exercise. We are rigid and inflexible in these genetic matters.The circuitry of our brains on the other hand is infinitely flexible. Martin Seligman's work on failure reflects the downside of this. People who repeatedly experience failure will learn how to feel helpless and fail even more. The reason isn't just a learned pattern of responses but a chemical reworking of the brain that predisposes people to giving up.The upside, as positive psychologists and cognitive psychologists know, is that if people begin implementing patterns of behaviour with positive outcomes, the brain will rewire for success.That principle lies behind many of the major changes in the communications landscape over millennia. Though we don't change fundamentally, psychologically we evolve and adapt rapidly - the evolution of the alphabet (and the development of a phonetic symbolism for experience), writing (and the evolution of abstraction), printing (and the birth of objectivity).... Computing? I think the issue has to be addressed along three main lines of inquiry and we touched on them above:� Memory and collective reflection � Creativity � What we knowAnd the principle we bring to those issues is the simple one that whatever else stays constant, the brain will always adapt. First though a few words on what is changing in communications.The Changing Media LandscapeThe 21st century has seen the proliferation of media types. If we go back over the past 500 years we can ascribe some form of categorisation to this change. The printing press gave us books, pamphlets and political tracts. It led in time, once there was adequate distribution with the arrival of the train, to newspapers.The invention of telegraphy eventually gave us the telegram and the telephone and when technologists played around with the wireless possibilities we were treated to the radio and then the TV. And in the meantime film was born.There are a few major innovations behind the evolution of a media landscape many of us grew up with. Printing presses, trains, telegraphy/telephony, moving picture capture, and radio-diffusion.What difference does the Internet make? In terms of distribution the Internet takes the cost of picture/video distribution close to zero to the end-user/content producer. If that was its only contribution to change it would be a substantial one. It also makes distribution instantaneous. It is we rather than the product that is often not available.In terms of content production the Internet and advances in processing technologies (not just the chip but also the algorithm) the current media environment now consists of around thirty innovations including podcasts, vidcasts, blogs, RSS feeds, aggregation of content, automation of content production, online classifieds, new forms of search and search result visualisation, personal TV stations, social bookmarking, social networks, Wikis, mobile content (two minute movies), SMS of course, mixed media productions, virtual worlds (Second Life), start pages.The list is so long that it begs a little understanding. What does it mean? The reality is only a few things are happening though they are happening in many ways.1. The fact is everybody (within sufficient media literacy) can create a content object that can be freely distributed to everybody. This is the flat earth syndrome. There are going to be no media hierarchies, we think. 2. Many of the people who create media objects like blogs, vidcasts etc, have them aggregated by others (so there is a new hierarchy!). Aggregation simply means a site that compiles extracts from other sites/media objects and presents that aggregation as a new media object. 3. The institutions which have mediated knowledge and credibility over the past 150 years are in disrepair and consequently what we know and our credulity are suffering. It's the counterpart to mass creativity.This is not like a revolution but in its essentials it signals dramatic change.The "media" for over 150 years have acted as a mediating power between corporations, politicians, authorities and the population at large. They are the cornerstone of the societies we have known and lived in. Nothing much could have functioned as it did, without them.Newspapers and latterly radio and then TV have explained the daily functioning of our societies to us. Books were still written of course, but their authors came to our radio sets, newspapers and TVs to explain their ideas. The world of knowledge diffusion has effectively been underwritten by brand managers. That's the down and dirty of how we have organised society. News organisations make compromises to stay in business, keeping one eye on the ad master, the other on the audience. But they have also executed their roles successfully and maintained themselves in this mediating position, reporting news on corporations, politicians and authorities, while earning ad revenue, staying out of gaol, and maintaining large audiences.We are taking that cornerstone away. The result might simply be that corporations, politicians and authorities have to go out seeking more mediating points to maintain their presence and credibility.The result might also be, though, a profound loss of certainty, a loss of societal identity, the breakdown of what limited commonality societies enjoyed. Perhaps it impacts memory and patterns of remembrance. Our appreciation of creativity and its purpose might also be changing. Memory and Collective Reflection Surely the most striking aspect of the new web is the degree to which it is given over to memory. Sites like StashSpace.com (geared for converting old videos into digital memories), flickr, new digital memory functions in Windows Vista and flock, Nokia's LifeBlog software, and blogs. If we look at the single biggest achievement of technology (it may not be the most significant - we're talking sheer size) it is memory. Some organisations already operate terabyte memory banks. And the Internet is supported by a vast network of memory aids: storage, search engines, social networks and social book marking.We seem also to be engulfed by a wave we've created, individually. All that memory is ours, at least a lot of it. We're not talking about vast historical archives. We're talking the last five years of gunk. Of course, there's room for skepticism. First, is memory so important? Isn't the single most striking wave on the web the music download? Here is an opposing view: "Today iTunes makes only a slim profit, and its rivals are awash with red ink. Napster is seeking a buyer, and even with its backhaul business, Nokia's new Loudeye acquisition - the basis for Recommenders - lost $3.5m on revenue of $5.4m in its most recent quarter." Andrew Orlowski in The Register, Sept 27 2006. Yes, there's plenty going on in music but on the hardware side. One of the peculiarities of a world with dispersed forms of information is that solid rumour stacks of fast. You'd be forgiven for walking around with the impression that everybody is downloading and often.But isn't MySpace more important even than downloads. At a recent conference in Amsterdam Marc Canter and Craig Newmark agreed: MySpace is about music. It is huge but so too are, still, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Green Day, U2 and Simply Red. In other words in music it is not unusual to see the herd collect.The web, ably assisted by the hard-disk, comes down to memory. That is its unusual manifestation, the way it provides facilities for us all to place a part of our lives in archive, often for all to see, and releases us further from the constraints on time placed by needing to remember.Creativity The status of creativity in the new web world is extraordinary. Creativity is liberated, no question. Whether people are using digital cameras, creating short videos and animated clips or blogs, or mash ups, the rapid development of user generated content sites is evidence of a significant shift in the process of expression.As well as gushing over this outcome, let's also think about how it relates to purpose. Traditionally creativity has served a number of masters - memory and collective memorial being two, pleasure being another.What purpose is the current rash of creativity serving? I don't want to make a moral judgment condemning it for serving no purpose but I do want to understand if the sense of purpose is reduced or enhanced by it.As far as I can see the content industries have broken the link between creativity and memorial across most forms of creative expression. User generated content resembles reality TV in that it provides a succession of symbolic moments, none of which are particularly real, cumulative or serving a purpose outside themselves. Like soap operas which focus in, repetitively, on a small number of emotions expressed in clichéd situations, reality TV focuses in on emotive decision points. We have drama without any real reason for it, other than those decision points.User generated content seems equally adrift from reason and purpose. Or to be generous its purpose is highly individual. It does not serve memory, or a collective memorial process, but it does serve the needs of the individual creating it. That is different from past art.On the one hand there are some great acts out there on the new web, on the other hand you search in vain for a unifying theme. Again I would like to repeat that this could just be the best way to go or the worst way to go. The most generous comment you can make is that a Long Tail creative economy forces people to connect with their micro-interest group and share meaning there rather than in the broad base that was previously served by drama, comedy, news etc.What We Know What we know also changes in the web world, how we know too. It's been said that the future is search. Search and discovery. We can easily adapt to a world where sinking the deep foundations of knowledge become irrelevant because all is knowable through Google."Googlephiliacs are effusive with pledges of faith and trust: "We trust the democratic, bottom-up, blog-building, link-loving nature and integrity of Google's PageRank system" [Morville]. It's a religious thing. It binds us together, they say. "Collectively we believe in Google, it's our memory, it's the way we share." [Winer]." Andrew Orlowski.We'd be stupid if we did but we can see it happening. At the same time what we know is becoming more determined by the cross-flow of conversations and debate than by either google or libraries and foundations.A couple of months back I interviewed Henry Jenkins of MIT and an "expert" on convergence, in so far as anybody can regard themselves as an expert. This is Henry's take on what's happening:"The grassroots communities of fans, bloggers, and gamers are playing an active role in documenting, analyzing, predicting, and responding to media change, operating alongside of and in many cases, doing a better job than, traditional sites of learning and research."In other words authority is becoming diffused. What we know is passing back into uncertainty. Knowledge is in a constantly emerging condition. No bad thing.The other effect of the web on knowledge is that a quasi-religious element enters into crowd behaviour. Though experts talk about the wisdom of the crowd, the crowd still behaves sometimes like a herd and sometimes like a congregation.In each field of the blog arena, and in each area of web content aggregation, there are a small number of prophets and many disciples. In technology, TechCrunch, Techmeme; in the slightly wider sphere, Digg, Memeorandum and Netscape, in parenting, Dooce, in food Delicious Days. It seems in the midst of uncertainty people find apron strings to hold onto.In terms of accurate information delivery it's doubtful whether the emerging system cuts the mustard (though I'm a sceptic about what went before). An example, bearing in mind that TechCrunch is one of the web's most trafficked sites.Today Techcrunch reported on a new search product called Powerset asking if it would "pull a Google." The author, Michael Arrington, had not seen Powerset but still felt able to speculate.On

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

The Internet Changes How We Think, Uh?

Haydn Shaughnessy — Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:55:17 EDT

Every major transition in communications has an effect on the way people think. Proof of the pudding is easy to cook up. For example when people began to write, they lessened their dependence on memory. Imagine the early civilised human endlessly reiterating directions, recipes, truisms and names, just so nothing of value would be forgotten – well we see that in rhymes, epic poems like the Iliad, and the begot and begat lists of the Bible. Language at that point is imbued with mnemonic devices like alliteration and rhyme. That argument was first presented by people like Eric Havelock (The Muse Learns to Write) and Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy).Once people learned to write – or at least when writing became pervasive within a social group - the purposeful inner dialogue changed. The mind was released from its copious and continuous memory tasks and began its slow transition into the variegated potential we’ve seen realised since classical antiquity: literature, maths, objective science, philosophy, pragmatic technology. A mind bedevilled by remembering cannot spare the time for these activities. But once you have a computer, which does all the memory work for you, what then? The question isn’t just confined to how you and your memory might possibly change when you are further liberated from memory tasks. Memory tasks are deeply social as well as personal. Collective memories usually led to some form of memorialisation, the 'Lest We Forget' type symbols of past struggles, sacrifices, and heroism that are dotted around cities, the countryside, and Mount Rushmore, among other places.And they are social in the sense that oral uses of language are generally pertinent to a society’s political life. Shakespeare was a great writer in part because he reflected the conflicts of the society of his day by writing about old Denmark, Rome and Egypt. Language used to be so allusive, symbolic and ambiguous and therein lay its power. It had many masters to serve and rarely has the task of exposing corrupt political relationships been a welcome one.A point that Havelock makes astutely is that epic poetry was used to reveal corruption in oblique ways. The pleasure of the Homeric performance was seeing the well-to-do exposed, but discreetly.A further feature of memory is creativity. Because memory is so closely allied to traditional forms of expression it has been viewed by many experts as the seat of creativity (the thesis is explored in various books by Stephen Bertman, particularly his Cultural Amnesia). How does the memory-creativity link show itself? In a world with no pervasive forms of recording, for example, the quality of language is paramount as a mnemonic device. You simply don’t remember unimpressive prose.Shakespeare not only wrote beautifully but also memorably. His characters are larger than life – which is a reasonable definition of any good traditional drama. Many memorials are made exactly like that: larger than life, so they will be remembered. Memorability is both a criterion of quality and a characteristic of art.Creativity, traditionally, took us beyond ourselves in these exaggerated ways, painting life in caricatures in order that we remember the characters and their relationships. The sculpture of Winston Churchill outside the Houses of Parliament in London is hardly realistic. It is huge. But then art is never realistic because its purpose, like Churchill’s statue, used to be remembrance in all its forms.And finally knowledge. It should go without saying that in those days when recording was piecemeal and when we relied largely on oral mnemonics – remembering by what we say – when language and the purpose of creative activity was deeply ambiguous and difficult to arrest in time, we had a tenuous grip on knowledge, as we define it now.The corollary of this is that in a world of allusion it is ok to know things intuitively. And since there are few records it is ok to change your mind on matters of apparent fact. These are important differences with the formal life of modern society. We tend to believe we know facts and in so far as there are public records then there is a documentary base for what we know. Nonetheless the solidity of knowledge is over-rated. Even written records are open to interpretation.Unless you have written records knowledge is somewhat in the mix, a fact that Law Courts are often faced with. Even in the presence of written records, what we know is not as safe as we would like to believe.The significant change is not that we are more certain now but that we are more concerned about certainty.We should say that the past hundred years have been marked by a degree of certainty that we wouldn’t previously have been bothered with.So what’s changing?

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

At Last! The Last Content List

Haydn Shaughnessy — Wed, 4 Oct 2006 10:41:17 EDT

In the past content meant TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. I thought this area needed a kind of stocktaking exercise, so three weeks ago I set out to categorise where content is now.It's taken me all of those three weeks to complete the list of new types of content sites we now have available to us, and to advertisers. Right now it's just a list - it's worth a read but I hope you'll find it more useful as a reference. Comments are most welcome.Later today or tomorrow I'll post the whole list, and then over the next few days go on to ask questions about it. These content types are, by and large, unique to the web, so as an example, newspaper online sites don't make it into here but citizen media online newspapers do, podcasts make it but TV programmes on the web don't. To be here a site has to be offering content made possible by the web and where possible be unique to the web.1. Accidental Content SitesI was struggling for a label for this one but I had in mind eSnips and cruxy. These are content upload sites that have an e-commerce element.In the case of eSnips you could see it as storage, at first, but that chance to sell a little bit of your digital life is difficult to resist. Cruxy is more to the point. It's a website built out of your content but it is a marketplace where you can buy and sell that content. Given the corner shop nature of the web nowadays, I expected such sites would proliferate, but they're slow coming.2. IPTVIPTV needs a little explanation. Television over IP networks usually refers to telecoms companies who are adapting their networks, then using an Internet protocol to distribute audio-visual content. That means a relatively closed network (within the boundaries of the telecom companies' immediate control) as distinct from the vast Internet.Companies that distribute audio-visual programming over the Internet though also claim to be in the IPTV business. The distinction for many of us is irrelevant until you consider that the telecoms companies will be offering more interactivity around content, for example offering buddy networks, instant messaging, and recording and replay of any content feed.In Europe, KPN of Holland is experimenting with OPTV, an IPTV system in Limburg, Telekom Austria, France Telecom, Italian and British Telecom, Magnet (Iceland, Ireland, Poland), SMART all have IPTV systems up and running, and ready to roll out beyond their trial base.The first instinct of the telcos is to bring in Hollywood movies and regular TV channels as their major content offering. Then they realise this does nothing to differentiate them from cable companies. And soon the same will be on offer on the Internet. How to be different? Get close to people, close to individual content producers out on the street and in the back bedroom.There are plenty of IPTV ready channels out there -- I mean the type that will end up on regular TV sets over the next three years. The multi-channel future can’t come soon enough for some of these guys.Photoshop TV is one of them. They’re now into their 50th broadcast. Three guys with their Apple laptops exploring Photoshop techniques. This kind of stuff is invaluable for anybody doing imaging work.Then there’s DL.TV (or Digital Life Television, that looks at all kinds of gadgets), technolotics (media, politics, etc from three Dublin students), and as they say on the telly, many, many more.There are already thousands of small TV channels like these. Critical to their future success will be good aggregation and showcasing. I went over to Akimbo to see what is available there -- Akimbo has accumulated 13,000 shows now.It started out with the ambition of becoming the top IPTV aggregator and has some competition from Roo and of course Brightcove, who seem to be stuck between a strategy that will take them into the corporate TV market and one that will lead them to becoming a partner for the higher end of independent professional video (they work for example with MediaStorm.org and with Tribeca).Roo seems to have suffered from the YouTube effect and it’s hovering now around the upload market. One big ticket contract they have is aggregating video shorts and movie trailers for Verizon’s entertainment portal and another is for Citysearch (which is a model for how countries can put together their city break tourism offer). Just got to mention Vodeo too, who I think are evolving nicely.Sadly there is no search function on Akimbo -- at least not one I could find. Top shows on Akimbo right now are Anime Network, Ripe TV (girls in bikinis), and the BBC. Ripe TV I could not believe but fully understand -- girl TV presenters with few clothes on. On the other hand The History Channel and Discovery Channel are also up there. No sign yet of Photoshop TV.In the same space as Akimbo and Brightcove, etc, are Narrowstep and GDBTV. Narrowstep and GDB TV operate through the Internet and each has its own technical platform.Whereas Akimbo is programme or show based, these two English initiatives are channel based, with Narrowstep hosting around 100 channels and GDB seemingly many more. Both have a strong line-up of themed and local channels. The latter would seem to be an area for one company to seize as its own territory - be the world's local aggregator - but as yet there is no kind of local a-v content.3. Personal TV and Citizen TVAll the IPTV operators have as their ambition the development of personalised TV services, and personal TV channels. Arguably all you need to foster that is to offer podcast production and aggregation services (like clickcaster, xolo, pluggd). Rawflow's self-cast service seems to have gone furthest (using a p2p streaming solution that cuts down bandwidth costs).In the same space is a growing number of mini-channels like Taste TV, TV Scuba, High TV and others, not quite personal TV but real channels operating with a staff of friends and enthusiasts.4. Channel AggregatorsAkimbo and Brightcove, Narrowstep and GDB, have all been initiators in the field of IPTV whereas Jump TV and Greengrass are aggregators of what's already there while Free Internet TV, and channel chooser are access points for conventional TV on the web. IPTV Boards on the other hand is more of a listings service for true IPTV channels and ought to develop well as an information resource rather than a channel aggregator.5. Online NewspapersA fascinating area with a small list so far of initiatives to propagate citizen media. YourHub is an attempt to create citizen media at the local level, run by the Denver News Agency. Backfence does the same for a different region of the USA. Agoravox is a French citizen media project that also runs an English langauge site. Netzeitung, from Germany, is already profitable, Ohmynews of course is the best known CM initiative, and Cent Papiers is trying to do the same for Canada. Associated Content is another initiative though I've made very little use of it.A special subset of the online newspaper is the type of online magazines that are made up almost entirely from user content. I'm thinking here particularly of travel sites (Yellow Arrow, Hotelchatter, Jaunted, Tripadvisor.6. Content Re-useDigg, Newsvine, Kick, Netscape are all sites that encourage their users to refer articles from other sources. These sites are so well known I won't say much more, except to point out that niche products are now emerging, such as Hugg for environmental news, and local versions like Kick (Ireland).This is also where buzz trackers and meme machines like Memeorandum, Personalbee, Techmeme and Chuquet belong.7. Social BookmarkingI've been slow to realise the value of social bookmarking as a form of discovery and as a unique content category. Yes, it should have been obvious but sorry, I am still learning. I recently became a deli.cio.us browser, haven't had much time for Magnolia or the many others out there.8. User Content TVDigital Magic is one of the few examples I've seen of industrial strength user content TV. Plenty of TV channels want to do it but these guys have succeeded and often by taking web content and making it T-viewable.9. Corporate and Political TVCorporations like Budweiser, Land Rover, The State of Massachusetts, the Spanish Socialist Party, and many more are setting up their own TV channels. London and Glasgow have also done it. Running a TV channel is going to become a must-do for those types of organisataions.10. New Search EnginesDabble is an example of what search engines will become, strong on content that evolves when people co-discover and recommend audio-visual content. John Battelle is experimenting with a similar concept, aggregating the searches of users to drive content on his blog. Clusty by way of contrast has what I think is a great content concept - group search results and present them as clouds - visual content from search. What Clusty does for visualisation, Eurekster does for communities, adding your social network to the search mix.11. Live Performance Fab Channel comes to the web from the Clubs of Amsterdam. It's not always live but it is always an on-demand version of a live performance. More lively still is Karaoke TV, though to date it's been a favourite in Korea rather than Kingston. TV stations have increasingly taken to broadcasting events via the web (horse racing, music), but real live performance web is an original product adding original elements to the performance. Underground TV nearly gets there, though as yet you can't say it is using the medium to innovation in the performance. We can expect many more experiments going foward.12. WikisOf course its classical incarnation is Wikipedia but I've been surprised to find of late that I'm looking at a regular website that's Mediawiki powered. There's a list of sites in English here.13. Games and VirtualityGames would not be my strong point so I'm filching here. Massively Multiplayer Online Games seem to be the big category for future development, taking players ever deeper into a virtual life. Of note for content fans is Second Life's inner world where people make content In World (gigs, cafe performances, art ,and no doubt soon, games). Of the talked about developments are deeper characterisation and greater freedom to combine the features of character sets.14. ClassifiedsYes, the very very last category -- classifieds. Of late web commentators have been waking up to the truth that classifieds are deeply engaging. I used to find myself forever browsing through newspaper job classifieds, particularly when I was out of work. I can see the compulsion. Craigslist is the biggest classifieds community and Craig Newmark often talks about the company's success in terms of talking with their users. It's a community that's grown together and to some extent determines what Craigslist can charge for.That's it -- it's done. A first draft of the list of new content types. Will be back later to compile it into one big list and then starting next week trying some commentary.But I forgot -- 15. Adult. Adult sites are something I might want to by-pass for the sake of decency and I will. Except to say I think and hope it may be possible for sites to evolve that take a mature view of adult sexuality and are not hardcore porn. One area is female sexuality and in particular yaoi literature and art. Here is a genre where women can create sexually adventurous content without giving any offence and it seems to me a model for what might evolve in other attempts to create sexual content that's free to air.Now we're done.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

More Views On What's Next In Media

Haydn Shaughnessy — Mon, 2 Oct 2006 18:24:49 EDT

John De Mol is not a name those outside the TV business associate with revolutionary change. In fact let's be honest, if you're not Dutch or in the TV business, you may never have heard of him. But De Mol has already changed your viewing habits forever. It's worth getting to know his plans.The BBC is better known and it too is contemplating the future. Here's how they see the future.Many top executives in television in Europe, and probably in the USA too, owe their careers to John De Mol. Whichever country you're watching from, you're going to hear a great many people take the credit for launching, producing, commissioning or otherwise bringing Big Brother, and its many derivatives, to our screens.Commissioning executives and executive producers in the reality TV genre, creative directors of independent production companies, awards committees who hand out BAFTAs and Emmys -- few shun the possibility of being associated with a reality TV success.It is the enduring genius of Dutch business that a man like De Mol is happy for these guys to take the glory while he pockets the cash; when he sold the production company he co-founded with Joop Van Den Ende, Endemol, the price tag was over $5 billion.That puts DeMol in the front rank of media entrepreneurs, gobally. In 2005 De Mol founded a new TV channel Talpa.tv. It operates in Dutch and its first major coup was buying the broadcasting rights to Dutch premier league football. That, though, is not exactly a creative step -- some would argue nor was Big Brother.Though Talpa has provided De Mol with a channel for a variety of new reality TV shows, it has become clear that filling a whole channel even with low cost content hardly constitutes a strategy. Although he is able to sell programme formats to other TV channels once they've proven their worth on Talpa, you can see that he's got the bear of broadcasting bosses off his shoulders only to be faced with the lion of a schedule that needs filling.In the on-demand world, you might describe that as a wrong turn. At Cross Media Week though, De Mol rallied the audience to a new vision of the content future. De Mol's was the best attended session of the conference. It was standing room only. Except he didn't say very much. In fact what it came down to was one message. In the future all projects will be cross-platform projects. There will be no TV programme that is not a web or mobile or print project.Did the BBC fare any better in the business of surprising an audience? In a time when Linden Labs are creating a new world, when xolo.tv are providing the European ads market with the funky vidcast, and Mary Hodder's Dabble is becoming a magnet for creative people seeking content sharing and exchange for new content products, when a guy and gal can break the Technorati top 100 with three minutes of drivel a day, when YouTube, MySpace, and Bebo came from nowhere.The BBC sees the future in four ways: Content will become increasingly atomised, ie taken out of the long from narrative.The BBC will increasingly host content -- for example from viewers contributing to TV and radio programmes.The BBC will become an aggregator, its Radio 1 website already acts as an aggregator of bands' music.And they will venture into new domains like Second Life.Here then we have two of the most creative, established, and powerful media organisations in Europe saying very little. In fact what's remarkable about their contributions was the lack of contribution.In both cases we might start to raise fears -- if the BBC is to be an aggregator what does that mean for all those people trying to set up aggregator businesses? What about hosting -- should that really be a job for a public broadcaster? Is Demol just going to become a Murdoch clone?The reality is these large organisations have no clear idea of where they're headed. Their strategy is to see what other people do and then follow. It's a pretty poor strategy but it's also one that has practical issues attached. The main quesetion it raises is: what stops large media organisations from innovating? In newspapers we know it's because they simply don't yet believe they need to invest resources and decision making powers into people who understand mixed media environments. They believe if you know newspapers you know media. The nature of television though is it is a mixed media environment, and we can assume there are people in these organisations who understand what's going on. I have to confess myself puzzled by their lack of edge. Could it really be they just don't feel compelled to innovate?Or is there another barrier preventing these organisations turning their powerhouse resources loose on the future of content? My own observation in recent weeks is that the BBC, over recent months, has consistently failed in its core objectives. Its news and current affairs programming is not only outdated in subject matter, it has lost sight of, and the ability to implement, its core journalistic values.In successive weeks the BBC has broadcast programmes that lack core objectivity checks, like searching for a second opinion, using two or more sources of authority, overtly displaying core journalistic values. The programmes included one last night on child abuse by priests and previously one on financial kickbacks in soccer.In neither case were experts or insiders who knew and could explain the case of the subject of those programmes interviewed. Basic rule of journalism: let the accused have a say and make their case strongly.While the BBC struggles to rediscover its core skills of course De Mol launched his new empire with a very old trick -- live sports.I'll venture an opinion only on what's happened at the BBC, for now. In British Broadcasting for the past twenty years, more and more content has been sub-contracted to independent producers whose first priority has to be economic sustainability.At the same time the BBC has driven down the cost of programming. That means an independent producer has less money to make programmes but still wants to make a profit, taking even more money out of the actual programme. Resources are made up by employing people who want to be in television rather than those who have outstanding journalistic skills. Yes, runners, researchers and other staff who will work for nothing or for very little. In contrast the BBC rewards managerial staff highly.[... employers rely increasingly on new intakes of inexperienced workers, backed up by freelances and small independent businesses. The problem for employers is that there may be little quality control in these arrangements. Journalism's traditional values of integrity, accuracy and balance take a back seat, while there is no guarantee of competence underpinning the work of freelances and independents. -- Extracted from a report by the UK National Union of Journalists.]That in turn has a double impact. Journalism-led programmes increasingly do not ring true. But at the same time there is no groundswell of talent looking for alternative forms of expression. In my view many European broadcasters face the same problem -- they've driven talent out; like newspapers they've ignored key areas of skills development, and now when they need to innovate they're stuck. In the world of new media what will sink them are the sins of the past twenty years. They have no real idea of where to go from here.

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.