Internet

Location-based Mashups – Old News And A Bit Out-Dated?
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I would say so. I remember when I attended the first Where 2.0 conference in San Jose 2006. Location-based products and sites were just about to boom. The hype was really on. The conference was not the best ever, but became a milestone of a recognition of location-based mashups as something innovative and new. Since then it has been an explosion of services out there and several venture funded startups have come. The underlying tools such as GPS, Google Maps, Google Earth and Virtual Earth to mention some have been drastically improved, so have the concepts of mashing up. The amount of tutorials out there in location-based mashups is enormous. Just Google it and you will find page after page telling you how to do cool overlays in Google Maps in minutes or create and import pretty awesome KML file overlays in Google Earth.

However, we should now start to recognize this as a maturing concept and start to look for new angles in the coming and emerging new media arena. For instance I have looked at the Knight News Challenge. I find it a bit ironic they still have as a requirement that the project needs to benefit a specific geographical community. In my eyes that is not very innovative and a bit misplaced as a specific requirement. Preferred characteristic sure, but requirement no.

When the Knight News Challenge first started a few years back, the location-based mashups were new, exciting and interesting, but now in many ways pretty out-dated as an innovative aspect of a new media project. The media scene has moved on, and we should raise our vision. We will see more of content-based mashups where location will play a role, but will not be the sole differentiation. Of course there is room for more explorations in location-based services and mashups. However as a requirement in an (supposively) innovation stimulative news challenge, I would say it is narrowing the scope for possible projects down too much. For instance, if you would like to create a global borderless social network, based on interaction around news and opinions, it would not fit within the scope of the challenge as it doesn’t benefit a specific geographical community.

Does that really make any sense? I do not think so. Especially since the whole media industry is becoming more and more globalized. Is there room for local news and projects that aim to benefit specific geographical communities? Of course, but will they really benefit more of a niche geographical community? In a way probably. Taking out the constraint of a specific geographical community would enable the local issues are heard on a national, regional and even global level. Yet with the proper execution you can still benefit niche communities within the global one. Think of this as how much sense it would be to constrain YouTube to only one specific type of videos as for reach. Makes no sense there, so why would it make sense for geographical communities?

I would say we should have the guts and actually need to raise our eyes to see local issues in the context of other bigger issues. It is for sure an interesting balance not give the proper room for the local issues if you still consider the bigger picture. Yet that is the only way of really recognizing the local issue and give it the support it so often needs to have. In my eyes that is how you do create a substantial and sustainable change for people around the world who needs it. Especially in the media arena where the weak voices need to be amplified, not constrained.

Let the consumer be the judge whether an issue is “local” or not. They should be the true champions of that, not us creators of the projects or funders of the same. The important part here is really to realize that the more sustainable and incredibly successful projects around the world have been multipurposed ones, not the niched ones. It is about defining the right as vertical. A vertical that is as broad as possible.

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The Human Story
150 150 eriks

I thought of something this morning. Every morning when I walk to the train along University Avenue listening to music I see a few homeless people in the streets. Usually they sit in the sun to warm up. One has always caught my attention as he usually sit and write on a notepad. Sometimes he is numbering the sheets, sometimes he is writing. I am not sure what he is writing and what his story is. It however makes me curious. I want to know more. I also want to know how he ended up where he did.

This is really what media should be all about. For all topics. The human element. The human story. The personal, tangible, relatable touch from another person just as you and I. For all stories. With the context the story lives in presented. It is about presenting that human element of the story… It is about turning the concept of media upside down. Show the individual story with the context around it. Showing the diversity, yet giving it a voice. Giving room for humans, yet using traditional media aspects to provide the context.

Think of concert with Bono. Think of a demonstration on the squares of Minsk, Belarus. Think of the stories from Kenya during elections. Think of the stories from the streets around the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad. Think of the stories from China during the olympics. What really makes a difference is to hear those individual voices. That regular voice. Hearing the whispers on the streets. Feeling it. Think of it as being in the ultimate reality show where you participate, observe and experience it through the eyes of the people there. Only better as this is really real. Now that is cool.

To tell these human stories we will have to turn to multimedia, in particular photography and video. Why? Visual story telling is possible even for illiterates. The main issue with audio is the language barrier. If you do not know the language, the message is lost. Text is not a suitable medium of obvious reasons – langugae, illiteracy and also notoriously hard as most of us are not great writers. Sorry, guys and girls. I know we all want to be, but we are not. There are a few masters out there, but most of us are not. However, I am not saying that photography and video story telling is easy, but it is better media for the common person to tell their stories. The visual language is universal, more relatable and tangible for most people.

The really cool thing is that we have all the pieces – for instance cheap cellphone and digital cameras, 3rd party sites for videos and pictures, cheap and simple editing software and a cascade of publishing platforms. The pieces are there. The opportunity is there. Now let us see who will be the first to capitalize on the opportunity.

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PageRank – The Natural Choice?
150 150 eriks

I have been thinking of the concept of content ranking lately or specifically the constant struggle between diversity and singularity. Maybe the paradox is us as humans. Singularity is simple. It is transparent. Diversity is not. It creates this twilight zone reality where you do not really know what is the true or false. The easy, simple answers disappear. PageRank… The amazing algorithm that disrupted a whole business and market. It gives us what we need. Or does it? Really? PageRank works (simplified of course) very much like biological evolution. The strongest (or here most reputable) survives. The strongest win. They concur the weakest. The alternative voices such as the extinction threatened species are not heard. They are lost in the noise. Is this right? Or is it “just” the natural choice? Hard question right. Maybe we all are programmed to obey the nature of the evolutionary laws. In every aspect of our lives.

Just to make it a bit more tangible. The best user interfaces are singular in their nature. Take Google for instance. One search box. That’s it. You can say the same thing about the essential objectives behind YouTube and Flickr. They do perform one task and they do it really good. It is one objective really. Making uploading of videos and photos respectively dead simple. Nothing else shadows the major objective. I do not want to go into greater detail, but I will assume you at least kind of get what my point is.

Maybe humans are after “the” answer. They want that ultimate, simple, neat little answer. The this-is-how-it-is answer. That neat little package of how things are and especially how they are not. But are things really that simple? It makes life very easy. All search engines I have seen have been designed that way, and even worse most media companies. But the matter of fact is that the reality is not singular. It is diverse. It is complex. It is human. It really is diverse. It is the twilight zone where you do not really know what is the answer. You just have to accept it for what it is. I love it, but I gather most don’t.

There are so many tangents we can go into. The concept of an ever increasing universal entropy. Or the fundamental concept in quantum mechanics were there is not a concept of a neat little single answer. The answer only lies in the future there.

However…

Ever since I saw the movie EPIC 2014. ( Yeah, I know. Get over it, Erik! I promise I will someday. :-) ) The key question from that movie is whether what we (believe) we want really is what we want. That is a hard one as no single person can answer it. Even more mindblowing. If it is not what we want, why do we want it? How can we shape a media where we get what we want, yet provide the diversity we seek but not seek? How do we shape it so that we see all issues yet do not feel like we get things stuffed down our throats? That is in my eyes one of the biggest challenges for the media industry as well as our society in the future.

Specifically for the media business: Is PageRank type solutions really what we want or is it what we believe what we want? I do not know. What I do know is that we collectively have to decide. Maybe we reach some answers, maybe we do not. But we should think some of it.

Again. The time for media is amazingly exciting these days. The possibilities are endless. Welcome to the party!

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The Media Arena of The Future – Key Characteristics and Participants
150 150 eriks

The state of the news industry resembles the music industry when file sharing emerged. The social media sites are creating a disruption that makes the traditional players all fumble when it comes to how to merge the traditional news coverage with citizen coverage and opinion. Undoubtedly we are in a place in time where the media industry is as exciting as ever, yet we will see new players on the market constantly come.

The essential characteristic of media right now is content packaging and promotion, not content distribution or content creation. The trend towards such will only increase as we move forward. The main disruptions here have been the open-source content management systems and blogging platforms. Putting up a website now is as simple as a few clicks. You are up and blogging in no-time and can start to share your opinions. There are an enormous amount of sites providing possibilities for social bookmarking, multimedia upload and integration with your own site which will help you in the promotional part. In all honesty I would have to admit that learning content promotion is the toughest part and the biggest challenge for any blogger, photographer, video maker or any other content creator.

The main issue for user generated content is validation, quality assurance and trust (especially for unknown and alternative voices). I will not here get into too many details here as it is a pretty broad and slightly complex topic, but the main issue are:

  • Digg voting type of solutions leads to group fractioning. I have also seen too many solutions where you give the power to a few selected users, why you still have an issue to get the less strong yet very valid voices heard. The super editors in Wikipedia is another example here of a model that has proven insufficient, as one of their super editors turned out to be a fake. The issue is not that he was a fake but that it has been claimed that all super editors are prominent member of field of expertise they cover there. It creates a distrust of the system which projects over the quality of the content on the long term.
  • PageRank type solutions lead to the survival of the strongest and/or reputable. The hierarchy has been set which makes it very hard for new entrants in the space and for new, unknown voices to be heard. It is perfect for information seeking, but is non-functional for news and opinion.
  • Reputation of the single user is an interesting factor to build trust, but not solely sufficient. We have seen examples in the media industry before. For instance the tampered photos of the bombings of Beirut in Lebanon 2006 of a well-known Reuters photographer and the made up news stories by the New York Times journalist Jason Blair. You need to have a counter force here too.

It is obvious that the right, sustainable solution will be a combination of these three ranking attributes. Such a combination will be much more scalable, much more robust, completely technology based and still adequately resolve the ranking of user generated content than any human based solution. This is especially true for the long tail market where the amount of content is just too big for humans too handle – both practical and consistently. Think of it as a simulation of the traditional newsroom process. That is pretty cool, right?

The media arena today is highly competitive why the shrinking profit margins calls for a technology based solution with community support to cover a bigger piece of the cake and monetize that part. Keeping the cost structure very low, yet keeping the quality high with an increased engagement and entertainment value for the consumers. This tendency we have seen in another parts of the web already – YouTube did it for videos. Flickr did it for images. Facebook did it for social networks. (Ok, MySpace has played some role here too, but I still think Facebook has a better and broader solution here.)

The key skill sets of the participants of the new media arena:

  1. Consumers
    • Information snacking
    • Broad interests
    • Geographical breakdown
    • The question “why” is increasingly becoming more important
    • Engaged, and entertained
    • Relatable and tangible presentations necessary
  2. Creators
    • Multimedia more important
    • Text as a medium is dying, or at least becoming less important as the story telling media type.
    • In-the-field reporting increasingly important
    • Knowing and closely interacting with their readership very important
  3. Producers
    • Fast consumption calls for a fast medium of distribution
    • The globe as a market calls for a web solution
    • Diverse distribution mechanisms
    • Multiple reporting entries (cellphone, web, email)
    • Multiple media types (text, audio, pictures, video)
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