What the future of newspapers looked like in 1981

By

This delightful TV news clip from 1981 shows how people could access newspapers such as San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times on their computer using a dial-up line.

It took 2 hours to download the text of a newspaper, with a $5 cost per hour. One user marvelled at how you could not only read the newspaper online, but also copy it into a document and print it out. It’s particularly interesting to contrast the interface available in the day with, say, a contemporary iPad.

“We’re not in it to make money,” the newspaper people said of their experiments with online newspapers. Evidently.

Five frameworks to build strategies for the future of media

By

We are big believers in the power of visual frameworks to help people understand complex landscapes and build effective strategies. One of the domains we have been applying these frameworks to is the future of media.

For those who haven’t been following our work through the years, here is a collection of five frameworks we’ve created to help companies understand and act on the future of media. These are frequently used in strategy workshops, and also in more structured strategy development processes.

We have also created a number of custom future of media frameworks in the course of strategy consulting projects for clients, to address the particular issues they are facing, however unfortunately we cannot share these publicly.

Click on the title or images for links to the original posts, which contain full explanations as well as large versions of the frameworks.

Future of Media Strategic Framework

Future_of_Media_Strategic_Framework.jpg

Released ahead of our Future of Media Summit 2006, this has been one of our most popular frameworks with over 500,000 downloads and extensive use by media organizations and governments in forming strategy. It is still as relevant today as when it was created over four years ago, and its perspectives such as the symbiosis of social media and mainstream media have certainly borne out.

Read more →

Better ways to help readers filter and edit the news

By

fomframework_content.jpgBack in our Future of Media Framework we showed some of the dynamics in content creation, as in the image on the left, where both users and traditional media were engaged in creating and filtering content. User content creation, in the form of blogging, micro-blogging, sharing on social networks and more, has of course surged exponentially.

User filtered content, which I’ve talked about for many years now as an alternative to human editors, has recently progressed primarily through tools that aggregate the links shared on Twitter, such as Tweetmeme and Topsy. This is because Twitter (and Facebook, though the data is not readily available to third-parties to use) has become the dominant platform in how people share links and content of interest.

These Twitter-based content filters are very crude, not least having no good way of sorting by interest profile. As such they are filled with the trivial rather than what would be interesting to any one person.

Read more →

What Yahoo!’s purchase of Associated Content means for the crowdsourced (crap?) content industry

By

Writer.jpg

Yahoo! has just purchased Associated Content, with price variously reported at $90 million (by All Things D) and slightly over $100 million (by AdAge).

Associated Content is the second largest player in crowdsourced content after Demand Media, which is looking at an IPO which is likely to be valued over $1 billion. AOL, which was originally considering buying Associated Content when it wanted to get into the space, decided to grow its own business called Seed, which is already a strong player. Other players include Helium.

The model is primarily of advertising arbitrage – identifying where advertising returns from search visitors can exceed the cost of content. Since online advertising doesn’t pay much, content costs need to be very low. As a result the quality is not always earth-shattering.

I wrote last year about how the proliferation of crap content, and how the rise of reputation systems will make it easier for us to identify content quality and reliability. However we don’t have these yet.

Read more →

Discovering the most interesting and inspiring phrases

By

I’ve long said that newspapers and books will become digital when they have all the qualities of the existing media – including readability, portability, and the ability to highlight and make notes – as well as all of the capabilities of digital media – such as searchability, compactness, and remote access.

The Amazon Kindle allows people to highlight passages and take notes – a basic functionality required for a e-book. What this also allows is to discover what others are highlighting, providing a form of collaborative filtering. Amazon has just released a list of the most highlighted books and phrases on the Kindle.

The most highlighted books are:

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

The Holy Bible

The Shack by William P. Young

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

A selection of the most highlighted phrases:

Read more →

There are TWO possible attitudes companies can have to social media

By

Last week I gave a presentation on the future of business to the top executive team of a large fast-moving consumer goods company at their quarterly offsite meeting.

One of the issues they were keen to hear about is the rise of social media and how they should respond.

I told them that there are essentially two possible attitudes a company can have to engaging with its customers in an open world.

One attitude is to EMBRACE the fact that customers now have a voice that the company – and others – can hear, and to do whatever possible to help its advocates to form communities and talk about its products. That doesn’t mean its executives aren’t concerned that things can go wrong in social media. But the belief is that fundamentally it is a GOOD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.

The other attitude is to HATE the fact that customers have a voice that can be widely heard. While the executives realize that their fans can communicate their love for their products, they are far more afraid that bad things will be said about them, merited or not, and they think they will have no recourse. The belief is that it is fundamentally a BAD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.

I used one example for each of these attitudes.

Read more →

Five steps to effective content distribution strategies

By

When I wrote the book Living Networks the content distribution landscape was in the early stages of unfolding. Yet the strategies I prescribed then seem to be just as valid today.

Here they are, excerpted from Chapter 8 on Next Generation Content Distribution: Creating Value When Digital Products Flow Freely.

POSITIONING FOR CONTENT DISTRIBUTION

1. Build evolutionary business models

2. Define and refine strategies for standards and interfaces

3. Develop and implement aggregation strategies

4. Enable versatile syndication models

5. Rework your product versioning

Read more →

Mediagazer becomes the reference source for the media industry

By

I have long watched technology news aggregator Techmeme, first mentioning it in 2006 as an example of user-filtered content and then writing about how it helps to find interesting conversations, and later discussing how it’s sister site Memeorandum was the best place to watch the US presidential elections (and US politics in general). We were also delighted to get Gabe Rivera as a speaker at our Future of Media Summit 2007.

Mediagazer was launched early last month to provide the same insight into the most prominent discussions on the media industry. This Compete chart of Techmeme’s and Mediagazer’s traffic shows that in its first measured month the site has achieved 112,000 visitors, a fantastic start from scratch.

Read more →

Is 3D TV dangerous?

By

This morning I bumped into neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce at our local cafe. He was on interviewed on the 7pm Project last night about the dangers of 3D TV (see the video here) so we chatted about that.

Mark has been involved in 3D for close to two decades, most famously in creating Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), and before that helping Sega to develop a head-mounted display in the 1990s. When it was sent for testing by Standord Research Institute, problems arose for users. Yet the research was never published.

In an article titled Keep doing that and you’ll go blind, (which was taken up by Boing Boing among others), Mark writes:

Read more →

The rise of robot journalists

By

I have an abiding interest in robots and the role they play in our future. I am also a keen observer of where journalism is going. As it happens, the two domains are intersecting.

Robotic journalist conducting interview. Pic source: Singularity Hub, Charlie Catlett

journalist-robot-recent.jpg

Singularity Hub reports:

Researchers at the Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab (ISI) at Tokyo University have developed a journalist robot that can autonomously explore its environment and report what it finds. The robot detects changes in its surroundings, decides if they are relevant, and then takes pictures with its on board camera. It can query nearby people for information, and it uses internet searches to further round out its understanding. If something appears newsworthy, the robot will even write a short article and publish it to the web.

Read more →