Future of media Archives - Page 15 of 39

Effective strategies for a rapidly changing media industry

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you’re interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

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Where is privacy heading and who is driving it?

By Ross Dawson

Here is a video of a very interesting interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

There are a number of very interesting comments by Zuckerberg in the interview, including on how Facebook Connect is so fundamental to the company. He said that “obviously much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook than inside,” meaning that the development of Facebook into a platform is critical.

More controversial was Zuckerberg’s comments on privacy. At around 3:15 in the video he says:

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

This prompted Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to write a long diatribe, saying:

I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

This is a fascinating issue. I and many others – including Zuckerberg – have been surprised through this decade by quite how much people have been prepared to share, given the opportunity by the rapid rise of Web 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly there has been a rapid evolution of social attitudes to privacy, as many people have discovered that they are in fact comfortable sharing some personal information.

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Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities

By Ross Dawson

I very rarely find the time to write magazine articles, but I was delighted to write the opening feature article for MediaTitles 2010, an annual publication which covers the media and magazine industry.

To see the article in the full splendor of the print version, go to the MediaTitles website, which has the full publication viewable using Realview Technologies (with the article reformatted to take out the lists of four, which I think is a pity). My article is on pages 7-10.

The (original) text of the article is below.

CREATING THE FUTURE OF MEDIA

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times. The global economic crisis, coming on top of a dramatic transformation wrought by the rise of the Internet, is creating the swiftest change in media industry structure ever experienced. Newspapers and magazines are being shut down at an extraordinary pace all over the world, journalists are losing their jobs, and broadcast media are under threat as sliding advertising revenue hit an unmoving cost base. Yet as the world shifts towards what will be truly an all-encompassing media economy, there are extraordinary opportunities ahead for media organisations.

This is a critical juncture to examine the future of media. Magazines have and will continue to be central to how we learn, socialise, entertain ourselves, and make buying decisions. Yet the magazine industry will undoubtedly look very different scant years ahead. It is our role and responsibility to create the future of media, rather than to let it happen to us. To do that, we need to examine the most central driving forces, strategic issues and capabilities in the evolving media landscape.

Four Driving Forces

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The next generation of computer interfaces will bring together the physical and digital worlds

By Ross Dawson

For many years I have believed that our everyday interfaces with computers are deeply limited, and that creating more effective interfaces is central to our future. In my 2002 book Living Networks I selected Interfaces as one of the three key enablers that would bring the networks to life.

Pranav Mistry of MIT Media Lab’s SixthSense has made his mission integrating our gestures in the physical world with the digital world. In this video taken at TED India last month, he tells his personal journey of exploration, beginning by taking apart his computer mouse, moving on to monitoring his gestures, headmounting cameras and projectors.

Some of the technologies he shows include framing photographs by holding up his fingers, projecting live updates onto newspapers, making hands into phone dials, and far, far more. This is ultimately about bringing together the physical and digital worlds, helping making us more human.

In the video, Pranav tells of his plans to open source the technologies he has developed to provide broader applications for them. The video is well worth seeing.

The future of video and man-machine interfaces

By Ross Dawson

The Institute for the Future has shared its Future of Video project using the presentation platform Prezi. This is a great way of giving access to the rich visual frameworks that are the trademark of IFTF – it’s well worth a browse just to see part of what Prezi can do.

The presentation wraps up with some nice videos from Microsoft and Sixth Sense showing visions and demonstrations of the role of video in how we interface with the external world and information. Which illustrates how man-machine interfaces – one of the primary mechanisms for the birth of the living networks – are in fact largely driven by video.

The trends that are highlighted in the presentation are:

– From scarcity to abundance of digital video

– From passive to hyperlinked, interactive video

– From keypad to gestural and tangible interaction

– From limited to ubiquitous video interactions

– From camera-captured to synthetic CG video

– From 2D to immersive HD, 4KHD, and 3D video

The proliferation of crap content and the rise of content reputation systems

By Ross Dawson

For a number of years I’ve talked about how we are effectively reaching a world infinite content, and the implications of that. That is becoming more real by the day, as in an economy increasingly driven by search and links, people find new ways to generate content that participates in this new information infrastructure.

I wrote last year about Philip Parker, who created programs that have automatically generated 200,000 books by aggregating and structuring content on the web. I haven’t read any of the books, but I’m told that they are – unsurprisingly – pretty poor, though of possible value to some people. However this is probably at the quality end of the spectrum of auto-generated content. For many years blog spammers have been auto-generating blog posts which have plausible language constructions, so they are picked up by search engines, but in fact are nonsense.

Adding to the morass of content are non-native speakers who lack background and context writing articles that are far more coherent than anything generated by computers, but which are still basically crap i.e. a waste of time to read.

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Charging for online news: applying game theory to the grand experiment

By Ross Dawson

I was interviewed yesterday on Sky Business about plans by Rupert Murdoch and others to charge for online news and content – the video is below. We discussed plans to charge for content, whether the news aggregators can be charged or blocked, and differences in the Australian news media landscape.

In the interview I mentioned in passing the application of game theory to media strategy. Below is an excerpt from our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework , which gives an overview of a number of strategy tools for the media industry. In essence, game theory is about mapping how players might respond to each others’ moves.

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Newshour: the state of Facebook and social networks

By Ross Dawson

Australia Network’s Newshour program recently ran a segment looking at online social networks, in particular Facebook.

The program features a number of excerpts from an interview with me about the online social network industry.

Here is a brief summary of the key points made in the interview:

* How Facebook has been used to promote Sydney as a tourist destination, resulting in a 276% increase in working holiday visas applications for Americans

* The popularity of social networks was foreseeable (and foreseen), fulfilling a human desire to connect

* Obama’s election campaign redefined both political fundraising and how social networks are perceived

* In building profitable social networks, there are limits to the advertising model however a range of new models are being explored

Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media

The next generation of computer interfaces will bring together the physical and digital worlds

Charging for online news: applying game theory to the grand experiment

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