Job advertisement: Exceptional Executive Assistant/ Professional Support

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I am currently advertising for someone to work at the core of my team, based out of Sydney. I’m advertising online, through word-of-mouth, and it makes also sense to put this on my blog too. Please do pass this on if you know anyone you think may be interested. Blog readers are encouraged to apply! Special talents in online tech, PR, research, consulting processes etc. will have ample scope for application. Full job ad details below.

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Interview on MySpace and social media

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Yesterday I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint program about MySpace and social media, together with Sebastian Chan, the web services manager for Powerhouse Museum – the interview is available for streaming and download (listen from 39:10). I talked about how social media is unleashing our latent humanity, by providing us with new ways of interacting and relating. We now have a multiplicity of new ways of communicating, all of them additional to the existing communication channels we have. We are exploring and discovering who we become as individuals and a society through using the new tools of social media. Second Life is a powerful manifestation of this, and we can expect to live significant parts of our life in alternative worlds. MySpace is a specific manifestation of how young people’s attention is shifting. They are spending less time on TV and traditional media, and more on their relationships. Companies can reach people within the social media where they spend their time, far better than through traditional advertising. Businesspeople are finding that they can build their networks online at least as well as they can in the usual cocktail parties. Gaming is becoming a social and relationship space, absolutely not just for young people and geeks.

Impressions of Influence Forum 2006

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I’ve just got back from the Influence event, held in the lovely Hunter Valley wine region north of Sydney. A very interesting experience, and as far as I’m aware a unique event globally. Phil Sim has been running Mediconnect, doing events and an online PR exchange for some years now. These bring together Australian technology journalists with tech vendors and PR. The company is also involved in the Asian market. This year the event has been renamed Influence, and broadened to Include not just journalists, but also other influencers such as analysts and new media players. The influencers come for free, while vendors and PR pay handsomely for sponsorship and attendance. The structure is highly conversational, with a series of panels on both enterprise IT and consumer IT topics, where the panelists give a five minute intro which is then opened out into Q&A and discussion by the entire room. The reason the event is, as far as I’m aware, unique, is the scale of the Australian market. It is possible to bring together in one venue a critical mass of the tech journalist community. Most have been in the industry for a good many years, they mainly know each other, and they value the chance to get together.

I asked people there their perception of the value of the event. Several PR people said it was fantastic, as wherever else could you ever access 50 top journalists for two days? But the journalists get a lot of value and stories from the event too. The concept is great – value for everyone here as there are truly interesting discussions of where technology is today in bringing together the right people. It does take the right execution, too, of course, and Phil clearly has the network and respect it takes to pull it off. Everyone I spoke to at the event was extremely interesting. No duds. Phil also is immensely oriented to the conversational, which is a very welcome relief to all as still most Australian conferences have very traditional formats.

Just a few fragments of what struck me from what I saw and heard:

* Met William Pramana – I just found out his blog is ranked #17 on Technorati – not bad for a guy hanging out in Western Sydney… Over a lunch chat on what Web 3.0 will be like, he suggested that the ability to share site revenue with participants and contributors to the site will be part of it. Very thought-provoking.

* Duncan Riley, head of operations of the blogging network b5 media, said that 80% of their 135 bloggers are female. Great to meet Duncan at last and hear his views as a top-tier blog businessman. His first post on the conference includes his thoughts on my presentation and the Web 2.0 panel.

* In the blog world as much as in traditional publishing, people are concerned about editorial independence and credibility. This is a topic that will last forever. How is information paid for? Does that influence its credibility?

* Dan Warne of APC talked about how journalists blogging makes news more granular. Smaller pieces are more acceptable and expected. You don’t take the time to craft a longer piece until later.

* In the IT-Enabled Innovation session, Andrew Lamble of Dimension Data spoke about collaborative sourcing, multisourcing, alignment of objective, tapping innovation in high trust relationships. Hey, that’s what I talk about too. I’ll be spending a lot more time on this sort of stuff soon – good to see this is very solidly on the business agenda, as it should be. Some people in the session didn’t seem to understand the idea of open innovation. People had better get this soon – you haven’t a hope if you rely solely on your own internal innovation capabilities.

Unfortunately had to leave a bit over half way through the event to get back to other commitments. I’m sure I’m missing lots more good conversations. Great to see this sort of thing happening in Oz – look forward to the next one.

Web 2.0 and user filtered content

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Tomorrow I’m heading off to the Influence conference run by Phil Sim’s Mediaconnect. The event brings together media and other influencers (I believe I’m labelled a “new media influencer” there) and corporates, discussing current trends in key technology sectors. I’m on the Web 2.0 panel tomorrow, so I thought I’d briefly capture here my introductory comments, on my chosen topic of

User Filtered Content.

The user filtering landscape

+ The primary focus recently has been on the explosion of user generated content, with Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube and many others just the vanguard of an immense wave of content creation, unleashed by accessible tools of production and sharing. We are moving towards a world of infinite content, further unleashed by the vast scope of content remixing and mashups.

+ With massively more content available, we need the means to filter it, to make the gems visible in vastness of the long tail. Fortunately, Web 2.0 is in fact just as much about user filtered content as about user generated content.

+ As far more people participate in the web, as technologies such as blogging, social networking, photo sharing and more become easier to use, the collective ability of the web to filter content is swiftly growing, and will more than keep pace with the growth in content.

User filtering mechanisms

Clicks indicate popularity of specific content within a site (with many caveats).

Links are stronger and more valid votes on the value of content.

Ratings provide explicit opinions on quality.

Tags describe content with words, locations etc.

Web-wide and site-specific filtering

There are two primary ways of implementating user filtering: taking data from across the web, and from within one site.

+ Google’s PageRank is a seminal example of web-wide user filtering, where people’s aggregated linking behaviors enable people to find relevant content. Technorati more explicitly shows how many blogs link to other blogs or blog posts, to indicate their authority. Techmeme draws on the timing and relationship of new links to uncover current conversations.

+Amazon.com’s book recommendations kicked off site-specific user filtering, notably by identifying related titles. Slashdot was for several years the primary site that enabled communities to select stories and rate each others’ commentary.

+In two years Digg.com has reached over 1 million daily visitors with its core model of user filtering of content. Copycats or similar sites such as Reddit, Meneame, and Shoutwire have abounded. Finally AOL-owned Netscape launched a Digg copy, providing mainstream media endorsement of the model.

+Content sites such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Odeo all embed user filtering as core features of their services.

What’s next for user filtering

+ Effective user filtering will have increasing value, and there will be more plays in this space. Network effects will apply strongly to site-specific filtering, however this will not preclude new players with better models gaining traction quickly. The move by Netscape to hire active raters away from Digg is an attempt to accelerate shifts.

+ Social search engines such as Eurekster and Yahoo!’s Search Builder indicate the next level of sophistication of search, enabling filtering aggregation of specific communities rather than the web at large.

+ Tools such as Last.FM and Yahoo!’s Launchcast will, with permission, use extremely detailed personal taste profiles to provide content filtering for individuals.

+ New mechanisms will emerge that draw on people’s web activities, tagging, specific communities, and combine these perspectives in various ways to create more refined user filtering. This filtering will increasingly be designed to be relevant to people with particular interest profiles and individuals.

A manifesto for the newspaper industry

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Tom Mohr, formerly president of Knight-Ridder Digital before its sale in June, has just published Winning Online – A Manifesto, proposing that the US newspaper industry should merge into a single industry-wide network, at least for its digital assets. He suggests that there is $4 billion of additional revenue to be gained by 2010, primarily by gaining targetted advertising. Part of Tom’s argument starts from the fact that in the US market, all but a few newspapers are local. It is important to note that there are very different dynamics in just about every other country in the world, where the newspaper markets are dominated by national players, so this is a particularly US view. Other key aspects of his case are the combined power of the newspapers’ advertising salesforces, and the negotiating power they have collectively, for example being able to withhold their content from the content aggregators such as Yahoo!. However Tom’s last point is that this collective work will take leadership. Indeed. In a network economy, leadership is required to show the potential of collaboration, and to bring participants together to create and share collective value. Having closely studied similar situations across many industries (for example FXall, RosettaNet, XBRL, CPFR), I simply do not believe that the industry structure or the participants in the US newspaper industry will allow this plan to make any headway. Reflecting on Tom’s piece, Don Dodge thinks that newspapers and magazines will die as soon as their current readers die. No way. E-paper will revitalize them in a new form. Don is in a minority of people who are happy to read news and entertainment sitting in front of a screen or on a portable device. Once the current print publications are digital, they will have a new lease of life.

The gradual rise of music collaborative filtering

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A piece just out in the New York Times covers the current array of music collaborative filtering services (though it doesn’t call them that), including Pandora and Last.FM. I’ve written about these numerous times in my books and blog, including my initial thoughts on discovering Last.FM in 2003 (still love it!) and a comparison between Last.FM and Pandora. The article refers to a report by Gartner that predicts that by 2010, 25% of online music sales will be driven by collaborative filtering engines. That’s a high figure, given that social networks and personal recommendations will always be at the heart of individual musical discovery, but I do agree that much of the way new music will become visible will be through these kinds of tools. To review, the concept of “collaborative filtering” is that we collaborate to filter the virtually infinite possibilities we face. This is largely done through tools that compare our tastes with those of others, so we can benefit from what people with similar taste to us have discovered. The magic of this is that it becomes far easier to find what we like (be it entertainment, information, or anything else) in a world of infinite choice. One of the most important impacts of technology has been to uncover creative talent, since access to either high-quality production or distribution is no longer a barrier. This means we have far more entertainment choices than ever before. The growth of the “long tail” is vastly enabled by software that provides recommendations for things that we love, that we would never find otherwise. These collaborative filtering services are fundamental to the way the future media landscape will unfold. Progress on these for the last decade has been slower than I would have hoped, but it is picking up, and the promise is there for all of us to find far more music that we love.

The slow pace of change in distribution channels

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BusinessWeek reports that Apple is readying release of move downloads from its iTunes site, pitched at $14.99 for new movies and $9.99 for back catalogue. At the same time, it says, WalMart is actively lobbying Hollywood studios not to allow Apple to provide these downloads. Wal-Mart’s actions are said to have included threatening not to sell Disney’s High School Musical for a period, subsequent to Disney releasing it initially exclusively on iTunes. Disney is apparently the only studio signed up for the iTunes movie releases, with the others on the sidelines for now. Wal-Mart has clout with the studios, since it accounts for 40% of DVD sales in the US, which is one of their most important revenue sources.

This is an oft-told tale, in which the shift to new and more efficient distribution channels is blocked by incumbents who have the power to slow progress. In this case Wal-Mart’s actions seem to be on the border of US anti-trust legislation. However its ability to generate revenue for their wholesale providers gives it enormous power to influence. Notably, Wal-Mart is also said to be readying its own movie download site, so it recognizes that the shift to the new distribution channel is inevitable. It just wants that shift to happen on its own terms. Of course Apple and Wal-Mart are hardly the only players in this market, with an array of pretenders to the online movie distribution market, notably Amazon.com. The primary bottleneck here is that any distribution rights have to be approved by the studios, and it really has to be all of them for a download site to become predominant. Apple has the Disney relationship and access to a ready market of buyers, Wal-Mart has existing distribution channels, others have different offers. As in so many other cases, the incumbent will try to shape change to its favor. Yet there is little reason to think that Wal-Mart has what it takes to be a big success in the online distribution market. One other thing to note is that Wal-Mart only stocks the very top selling DVDs, so studios can gain revenue from their hits but nothing else. Online distribution, such as on iTunes, enables them to generate revenue from their entire list. As the Long Tail story tells, there is gold beyond the hits.

Funds management and investment in the modular economy

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Last week’s 25th anniversary issue of BRW focused on the future 25 years forward, so not surprisingly included interviews with both Richard Watson, Chief Futurist at Future Exploration Network, and myself. The extensive interview with Richard was a fun and broad-ranging discussion on the future of technology, which unfortunately is not available online. I was interviewed for an article on the future of superannuation (the British/ Australian term for retirement plans). One of the points I made was about living longer healthy lives, the shift to flexible working structures, the blurring of the age of retirement, and the need for legislative structures to adapt to these changes. What I think was the more interesting issue I raised was about how investors will need to seek new investment vehicles.

“The fact is that listed companies represent quite a small proportion of the economy. We will need increasingly to look outside the stockmarket for investment opportunities,” Dawson says. “Private equity and venture capital are going to become far larger. Even today, private equity funds are pushing valuations up.”

“There will also be a growth in companies that are less capital intensive. They will need less money and so will not be so attractive to investors. Over the net 25 years we will have more services companies and flexible, loosely arranged organisations that do not need investment funds,” Dawson says. “Whole new layers of investment companies will build up around smaller sectors, such as micro-caps. In 25 years, althought it will have taken a long time, there will be pretty large segments of portfolios going into sectors that are currently classified broadly as alternatives.”

There is no question that we are shifting to an increasingly modular economy. Technologies such as web services and Web 2.0 are creating an intensely modular online and application environment, in which elements are combined at will. These technologies, together with the modularization of business processes, and easy flow and integration of processes across organizational and national boundaries, are creating a truly modular economy. The ultimate unit of the modular economy is the individual. Certainly there will be many reasons for organizations to exist in the future, not least in those industries that require significant capital. However as the economy inexorably shifts to the intangible, an increasing proportion of value will be created by aggregations of individuals or small organizations providing knowledge-based services, that mesh with other organizations large and small in economic networks. In many cases they will require little capital, and thus there will be no or little need for investors. Stockmarkets can only function effectively with large, highly capitalized companies that have highly liquid shares. Already the proportion of the economy that investors can reach is limited to fairly large companies, at most one third of the economy. It is likely that an increasing proportion of the economy will fall outside the listed sector, and thus be not directly available to investors. Much is made of private equity companies, but these focus on an extremely small subclass of opportunities. Venture capital also works within quite defined parameters, though it plays a very important role. There is a massive potential market in providing capital and services to very small participants in the modular economy, while also providing opportunities for investors to participate in this burgeoning sector. Mechanisms such as sharing in defined ways in future cash-flows of individuals or very small organizations could prove to be viable for both entrepreneurs and investors. While it is hardly a representative situation, Tom Cruise’s recent deal to fund his production company’s overheads suggests the kind of model that could be implemented on a smaller scale.

Yet more on the future of PR

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This week I was interviewed by Nicholas Scibetta, Global Director of Ketchum’s Communications & Media Strategy Network, on The New Media Transformation, looking at the implications for the PR industry.

The full interview is below. Click here to read the interview on the Ketchum site.

NS: What companies do you feel are doing a good job of playing in the ‘new media’ space and why?

RD: News Corp. is the media conglomerate that has done the best job among its peers in getting into new-media forms. This has been not only through its highly discussed acquisition of MySpace, but also its less-visible purchase of IGN [a gaming network], which recognized that video games are now part of the media space.

In the start-up space, I like Edgeio, which competes with eBay and other classified services. It enables people to publish listings on their own blog or Web site, which are then aggregated into one space so people can search for and find what they are looking for across all advertisers. One of the most important questions in the media space is whether classifieds will remain associated with traditional media. Edgeio is a very interesting experiment based on the assumption that they will be separate.

NS: What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about working with new-media outlets and what are the three things you think all PR professionals should know before reaching out to them?

RD: Many people associate new media with blogs and podcasts. These are part of the emerging media space, but any Internet presence that has significant reach can be considered new media. Three things for public relations professionals to keep in mind when reaching out to new-media outlets are, one, PR professionals should always be completely transparent and open in their communication with new media; if they don’t, it will swiftly boomerang on them. Two, every message should be targeted based on an understanding of their interests — you will get no respect if you contact people with irrelevant information, but you will be respected if you know what they will be interested in and why. Three, the way to engage new media is to build relationships — people in new media believe in relationships and conversations, not in press releases.

NS: What is the future of media and what is the role of both new and traditional media in PR programs, given the current media landscape?

RD: Mass media will not die — what we are seeing emerge is a continuous spectrum from traditional mass media through to small community-based conversations. For any particular client or campaign, PR professionals will have to consider where across this spectrum of media they should be investing energy to achieve results. In some cases, accessing only traditional media will be appropriate, while in others, new-media channels will be the primary target. Usually these will be complementary, especially given that traditional media increasingly takes its cues from key bloggers, and their stories can have little impact if they do not generate a discussion among bloggers.

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Microsoft’s Zune player enables social networks for music

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News is just out that Microsoft’s Zune mp3 player, due out before Christmas to compete with Apple’s iPod, will have social networking capabilities, in addition to its core features of a 30GB disk and a 3 inch screen. Zune users will have the option of using the device’s inbuilt WiFi to send and receive music, playlists, videos, and photos to up to four other players. They can either broadcast these to any Zune player within range, or only to those of their selected friends. If they have the broadcast feature switched on, anyone permitted within range will be able to listen simultaneously to what they’re listening to.

This social networking feature, together with the device’s WiFi capabilities, is the only really significant feature difference to the iPod, and it is one that actually could shift users to the Microsoft player. Particularly for young people, music is fundamental to their identity and relationships, and sharing music is truly at the heart of their social networks. Sharing around musical preferences was the initial premise behind MySpace, and while it has gone quite a bit beyond this, it was the seed and still is at the centre of the largest human social network ever to exist. However I have a few concerns about how the feature is implemented on the Zune. One is that broadcasting to four people is not enough to really enable true social networks. It makes it a little bit more a gimmick than a feature to have it so limited in scope, though it can still act as a social glue for smaller groups. Another issue is probably related, in that WiFi is very energy-hungry. I have not seen any figures on battery life with WiFi turned on, but I suspect that the device won’t be able to last very long while it is broadcasting music, making it far less mobile. It may take, sometime down the track, the use of fuel cells or alternative wireless technologies for this kind of music social networking to be a broadly used application. A final issue is that, given this is Microsoft, we know that there will be solid Digital Rights Management (DRM) in place. In fact the release specifically says that people will be able to share “promotional copies” of songs, which will be just a fraction of what people have available on their players. Given these factors, the question remains whether this feature will prove to be a key differentiator for the Zune here in an extremely competitive marketplace, but I don’t doubt that mobile musical social networking will get massive uptake at the right time, when it’s done right.