Bring in the serendipity dial – for search, music and beyond

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At the client workshop I ran earlier in the week, I raised the concept of the “serendipity dial” (something I have written about many years ago in the context of creating enhanced serendipity, and more recently asking Last.FM to introduce a serendipity dial.)

Source: sixdegrees.hu Click on the image for a very large size version including artist names.

The image above shows the similarities between different musicians, as determined by the users of Last.FM. If you like an artist, you are very likely to like other artists positioned close by, and far less likely to like artists positioned on the other side of the chart. This is an example of collaborative filtering, whereby many users behaviors can be used to predict what others with similar musical tastes will like.

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The 9 kinds of context that will define contextual search

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Yesterday I did the kick-off presentation and workshop at a strategy planning session of a major online media company. The intent was to provide some different perspectives on trends in digital media as input to their deliberations.

One of the many topics I discussed was the rise of contextual search.

Looking back over the last decade, I think it’s fair to say that the search experience has not evolved much. Sure we’ve had the shift to real-time indexing, experiments with multi-category results, predictive text in the search field, and a few other innovations, but if I was sitting in 2001 wondering how search would develop over the next 10 years I would be sorely disappointed to find out how little actually happened in that time.

Clearly it is a nonsense to always get the same search result, irrespective of who you are and all of the conditions surrounding the search. Yet for all major search engines there is currently minimal difference in the results from the same text string search performed by different people, in different conditions, very likely looking for different things.


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Predictions for media industry in 2011

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On December 30 Gulf News published a compilation of local and worldwide media personalities’ forecasts for the media industry in 2011. Contributors including Bertrand Pecquerie, Director of the World Editors Forum, Kris Viesselman, President and Creative Director of San Diego Union Tribune, and Gilles Demptos, Director of Publications at WAN-IFRA.

This was my contribution:

Ross Dawson
Future Exploration Network, Chairman
I firmly believe that the future of the media industry as a whole is extraordinarily bright. We are discovering quite how media-hungry humans are, and we can now see that business will revolve around the flow of information and ideas. Yet a segment of the media industry — notably some of the newspapers and broadcast TV companies in developed countries — are experiencing severe challenges, not least because they have failed so far to dramatically change themselves to adapt to a new world. My fervent hope is that these organisations take the often radical steps required to transform themselves and grasp the massive opportunities available today to dynamic media participants. Some of these troubled organizations will successfully make the transition. The reality is that more will not. Those media companies that are already thriving, together with a flurry of new start-ups, will participate in creating an entirely new media space, and taking their share of the value from that. Social news curation, crowd sourced journalism, multi-platform distribution, personalized advertising and tablet media will be just some of the key trends shaping the year ahead.

Our 6 favorite infographics of 2010

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I’ll try to fit in a few summary posts from the year before I head off for holidays. To kick off here are our favorite infographics that we’ve launched this year, in chronological order. Click on the images for the original posts. Quite a few of these got a lot of attention!

Crowdsourcing Landscape

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Culture Jamming

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

CULTURE JAMMING

Remix culture will surge, with everybody taking and jamming up slices of everything and anything to express themselves, while intellectual property law fails to keep pace. Every culture on the planet will reach everywhere – the only culture we will know is a global mashed-up emergent culture that changes by the minute.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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5 central facets of media and PR in China

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Last month I gave the keynote at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York on The Future of Global Media. Immediately after my keynote I participated in a panel on media in the BRIC countries. The other panellists were Ketchum executives from Brazil, Russia, and India. Since their China team were kept at home with client commitments I stood in to talk about China, given my background in the region. Details on the keynote and panel are here.

Here are notes I made to prepare for the panel session, where we were asked to share 5 key issues about the media landscape in our country.

0. Asia and China encompass very diverse media markets.

Across Asia media markets take very different shapes. The largest market by revenue is Japan, which is very different from Western developed economies, notably in the size and resilience of the newspaper market, and the depth of penetration of mobile internet. Hong Kong and Taiwan have very distinct markets from mainland China, both being more similar structurally and in terms of media relations to Western countries. The massive mainland China market itself has significantly different characteristics at the national, metropolitan, regional and local levels.

The following points relate to the mainland China (P.R.C.) media market.

1. Newspaper and broadcast markets are growing rapidly.

As many more people shift to higher socio-economic brackets and literacy increases, newspaper readership and broadcast TV audiences are rapidly developing. China is already the largest newspaper market in the world, and TV and radio advertising revenue is growing at a double-digit pace. There is still substantial scope for sustained growth in these traditional media markets.

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Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the Zeitgeist for 2011

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It is traditional at the turn of the year to look forward at what is to come.

We have crystallized our thinking on the year ahead and the decade of the 2010s in a new 3-page visual landscape.

Note on ExaTrends: Given the exponential pace of change of today we are far beyond a world of MegaTrends. Exa is the prefix meaning 10 to the power of 18, following Mega, Giga, Tera, and Peta. As such Exa is Mega cubed.

Download the pdf of the framework by clicking on any of the images. The full text of the ExaTrends and the Zeitgeist themes is below.

Map of the Decade: 2010s

MapoftheDecade_500w.jpg

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ABC News: Interview on Wikileaks and the future

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Yesterday I did an interview on ABC News about Wikileaks and its implications.

A few of the points I discuss are:

* The extraordinary social polarization emerging from the Wikileaks debate

* How many people feel strongly enough about the issues to provide support to the cyber-attacks defending Wikileaks, a first for hacker attacks

* The existing long-term trends to transparency have finally crystallized in Wikileaks and the political and social response of today

* Wikileaks cannot be closed down and new platforms for distribution will emerge

* This broad dissemination of information is a reality that will not be reversed

I will write in more detail about the broad implications of Wikileaks soon.

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.