The rise of mini-blogging in 2011: Tumblr will continue to soar

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogging.

Here are a few further thoughts on mini-blogs. I have written another post on the rise of social shopping, including 7 examples.

Here is an excerpt from the article on mini-blogging:

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The rise of social shopping in 2011: 7 examples of where it is going

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogs.

Here are a few further thoughts on social shopping. I have written another post on the rise of mini-blogs.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Shopping itself is also developing a social element thanks to services such as Shwowp, (www.shwowp.com) that lets a user keep track of their shopping history and then share it with others.

Social media researcher Ross Dawson expects strong growth from social shopping services.

“You can browse together what’s on the websites, look at different things, and comment on them,” Dawson says. “So you can go shopping with your friends, but do it in an online context.”

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Video highlights of Regional TV Marketing conference

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Last week I wrote that The Future of TV is community, reflecting on the content in my keynote from the ‘Commercial Break’ conference run by Regional TV Marketing conference held in Byron Bay a few weeks ago.

I have just found the videos released from the event – below is an 8 minute highlights video of the conference including from my opening keynote.

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What TV will be like in 10 years: 7 opinions from media leaders

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German magazine Screen.TV recently asked 7 prominent media figures for their views on the future of TV:

“What will you watch on television in ten years, and what do you imagine your TV will look like?”

Here are our responses – links are translated by Google from the German:

– Jane Barratt, President, Young & Rubicam

– Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia

– Chuck Deckeris, CEO, Mediacom

– Chuck Porter, CEO Crispin, Porter & Bogusky

– Samir Husni, “Mr. Magazine“

– Ross Dawson, Futurist (this link to the German version as the original English is below)

– Eric Day, Director Brand Strategy, Microsoft Advertising

Here is my contribution in the original English:

The future of television is really the future of video, in which moving images from existing broadcast and cable TV merge with thousands of new channels, all intermingling across a plethora of devices. The power of television and great programming has been evident for decades, and is becoming even more pronounced as we shift into an all-embracing media economy.

At the same time an extraordinary growth of video content, ranging in quality from the abysmal to the transcendent, will add to create a potent mix for users.

In the home space we will have screens in most rooms, with our main media space generating a fully immersive experience that includes 3D without glasses and the ability to act out our own roles in TV programming. When we are out of the home, video glasses will sometimes be used to create a full screen experience, with rollable screens allowing pocketable devices to generate a rich video view.

While much television and video content will be time-shifted, the best video content distributors (remember this is a post-channel world) will build communities of viewers around live programming. Much of the future of television, and especially its revenue models, will revolve around community.

See my post yesterday on The Future of TV is community for more details on the last point.

Australian government releases Government 2.0 Primer

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The Australian government is gaining momentum in its Government 2.0 initiatives, marked today by the launch by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) of a handy Government 2.0 Primer.

The Report of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce was submitted in December 2009. Although the Taskforce chairman Nicholas Gruen had earlier noted that Australian Government 2.0 initiatives were significantly behind countries such as the US and UK, the report and the government response impressed Gartner sufficiently to say “if the Aussies walk the talk, they have a very good chance to be the real leaders in the Gov 2.0 / Open Government race.”

Since then, the Declaration of Open Government by the Finance Minister (with comments enabled!) has pushed the ante up.

The primer is exactly what it says, a compact guide to Government 2.0 for neophytes, in the spirit of Gov 2 released early to be subsequently refined.

Gov2_PSI-dataflow.png

Source: Department of Finance and Deregulation

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The Future of TV is community: linking social media with big screens

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A few weeks ago I gave the opening keynote at the annual conference of the Regional TV Marketing association, held in Byron Bay, Australia, on the topic of Creating the Future of Media.

As I started preparing my keynote I realized that many of my usual messages about media fragmentation and re-aggregation weren’t the most relevant to this audience, and certainly not what they wanted to hear. As I spent time looking into and considering regional televsion, the more I realized that this is an extraordinarily promising media sector.

The first thing to consider is the power of big budget video production and big screens.

“Television” is close to a legacy concept, in a similar way to how “newspapers” are becoming news-on-paper and then simply news over multiple channels. However even while broadcast and cable TV erode and we shift to a world of multi-channel video, big productions and big screens will remain compelling.

This chart from Ofcom’s communication survey shows how big screens are becoming increasingly important, most of all to young people.

Ofcom_TVviewing.jpg

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How do you make talent shine in a world of distributed work?

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I caught up for a beer with old friend Tom Stewart, currently Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer at Booz & Co, when he was in Sydney recently. We chatted about interesting topics such as business cycles, talent, and where media is going.

Afterwards Tom wrote a great article titled Why There’s No Such Thing as a Talent War reflecting on some of our conversation and his other meetings in Australia, where attracting and retaining talent is top of mind for many corporate executives.

I had told Tom my thoughts on the global talent economy: in a world in which knowledge workers can work anywhere, the most talented can pick and choose choose who they work for – on projects or sometimes in long-term employment.

Critically, the work choices the most talented make are rarely about money, but more often about how interesting the projects are, who they will work with, and how enjoyable it is working with their client.

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Future Minds: the map of how screen culture is changing how we think

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My colleague Richard Watson, building on the success of his book Future Files, has now launched Future Minds, which explores how screen culture is changing the way we think today, and how it will shape our future.

When I read the Contents and Overture to Future Minds, my first thought was that Richard and I should organize a public debate. In contrast to Richard’s tone of caution I think there are immense opportunities in having our brains shaped by digital culture (though certainly also things to be wary of).

Here is the map that Richard has created to acccompany the book. I saw early drafts of this as long as a year ago, so this has definitely not been cribbed from other recent maps with a similar look and feel.

FutureMindsMap.jpg

Click on map to view as full-size pdf

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Twitter network analysis of events – what’s possible?

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I recently connected with Daniel Knox (@djkn0x) on Twitter – which is where it seems most of my connections are happening these days. Among other interesting entrepreneurial activities Daniel is playing with a new venture that does analysis of Twitter activity around events.

To show me Daniel created a visual network analysis of the Twitter activity around Future of Crowdsourcing Summit (#foc10) that we ran a few weeks ago in Sydney and San Francisco.

foc10_twitter.jpg

Here is the explanation of the diagram that Daniel gave me:

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Corporate blogging: not easy but a powerful way to connect with customers and stakeholders

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The current issue of Australia Post’s Priority magazine has a feature section on ‘Blogging… Friend or Foe’, comprising four brief articles offering different perspectives from a lawyer, an academic, a digital strategist, and myself as ‘business advisor/ futurist’.

Here’s my piece:

Recent data shows Australians spend more time engaging with social media than any other nation. And yet few Australian companies have tapped the power of blogging and social media.

Back in 2002, I started my own business blog – Trends in the Living Networks – and, at the time, it was evident to me that these new platforms for communication could change the way that companies engaged with their customers, business partners and investors.

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