Archive for the ‘media’ Category

Angry nerds

January 2nd, 2012

Today the German version of Jonathan Zittrain‘s essay “The PC is dead” has been published (which he closes by saying we need more angry nerds), tempting me to comment on it in a lengthy post. Instead I recommend you to read it yourself.

My two cents: For platform owners such as Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft, the ‘art’ is to close the door only so much that the input-providing participants don’t feel uncomfortable squeezing through it, and keep providing stuff (apps and content), because the consuming participants will only start switching once they realize the restrictions applied lead to a perceived lack thereof. Angry nerds won’t fix it. Unless they invent a different thing that restarts the cycle.

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“One day, the Web will be friggin’ empty”

October 23rd, 2011

That’s what the CEO of the German VPRT, the lobby of commercial broadcasters and tele-media, said on his keynote during the Munich Media Days last week. No, wait for the punchline! It’s also his organisation who’s commissioning the study which concludes that the web is full of illegal content (in this study, everything that was availbale for free was counted as illegal — yes, they were and still are on a mission).

What he meant to say with the headline quote was of course that the world needs his peers to enjoy the richness of online media, and he argued that the government needs to push for stricter copyright laws. Like what? Sanctioning free content because it’s harming his peers’ business? I’m sure he’d love that. It’s just that way of 19th century thinking that once you’ve set up your factory, it’s going to run forever and all the boss has to do is maximize profits. In addition, new industries would pop up and the one with more money would buy the other and so forth. And it all keeps growing and growing.

But as the post-industrial age has kicked in long ago, it should have become obvious that it doesn’t work like that any more. And it won’t help that your industry is not producing material goods but collecting and repacking information (or rather data, I can’t help but come back to my axiom again), because it’s still run like the old-fashioned factory. We don’t need factories any more, we’ve had them long enough.

What’s not working anymore is people who used to buy an issue of a magazine with at least 50% advertising in the real world, won’t do this online. They have the choice of getting their desired information one article at a time from the source they like best. With ads or without. Paid or for free. Yet publishers had a hard time adapting their question “How can I get as many people as possible to buy / subscribe to my magazine?” to “How can I offer the best content for an acceptable price?” (of course there’s also the industrial “How can I lower the quality without losing too much of the readership?”), but the new question is a different one.

This new question is “How does my stuff fit into the big picture?”. There are millions of outlets on the Web offering articles on the same topics as pay-for magazines, but for free. Not as consistent in terms of output volume and regularity, but often in terms of quality. This leads to my idea where commercial publishers seek the cooperation with authors who publish for free. The commercial publishers will then support the free authors by publishing their (commercial) articles on their (free authors’) website or blog, like guest articles (of course these article have to be paid for when someone wants to read them, and the free author whose site the thing is published on gets a small share), thus improving the experience for the audience.

Instead of trying to persuade the world to come to their place, publishers of every kind of media must start serving all the outlets out there (this is what Seth Godin refers to as curatorship). What publishers understood is they need to be on the shelf in as many stores as possible. Now, moving beyond physicality, the number and variety of stores is infinite. And infinity has always been a good prerequisite to make money for a long time to come. If you embrace it.

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The Information Myth

August 25th, 2011

Sometimes, when a term has been coined, it’s hard to get rid of it albeit it’s plain wrong. As it is the case with “Too much information!”. I don’t know where it came from (and don’t intend to research it now, feel free to post it in the comments), yet it is unimportant for the matter of the fact. So how did I come to this conclusion?

Last week, German newspaper Die Zeit published an article citing a study among managers and their biggest issues on the job, resulting in ten rules a good manager, according to the paper, should follow. Let’s just say the author would have better read some books on the topic, yet he seemed to prefer the blather. But that’s not why I’m writing this.

The study revealed that one of the most pressing problems of managers is the amount of decisions, which requires a lot of information for each of them. Obvious. To decide, you need information. Now, what is information?

I like Fredmund Malik’s definition that information is knowledge that leads to action. Now, if you think about it for a few seconds, how much of the things that enter you brain in the course of a day do lead to action? Indeed, very little. What’s the overwhelming majority then? It’s data. When you look up the definition of data and information at Wikipedia it’s all there, though I don’t agree that a book with all data about Mt. Everest automatically becomes information. Data only becomes information when it is put in a context that leads to an action on your behalf.

Looking at all the bits and pieces we’re dealing with daily that way, it’s plain to see why making decisions is such a massive time-consuming process. It’s not information we’re dealing with on the input side, it’s data that we must put in perspective, be it an analytics report, a movie clip, the latest news. It’s not that we (as humans) were producing ever more information, we’re just producing ever more data which in turn we must filter out to obtain information.

Now, is what I’ve been writing about in these few lines data or information to you? Since we will keep producing ever more data, the ability to distill data to information will become key to future success for anyone, because all success depends on the ability to make decisions. This necessity requires not only organizations of every kind to teach their employees how to get better at this, it also requires schools to switch from teaching young people to learn everything from a limited resource (i.e., a school book) to learning the process of filtering out the irrelevant data from an unlimited resource (i.e., the Internet). For the careful reader, the previous sentence has turned data into information. Thank you for reading.

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The Basics of Spreading Ideas

June 9th, 2011

Once an idea makes it to the TV screen, it’s approved. Otherwise TV wouldn’t spread it, we assume, so we can spread it avoiding the risk of going out on a limb.

But that’s not what we need. To make it really clear: We need to spread ideas that have not been approved yet. Not only is this when innovation happens, it’s also where the money is made.

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New Rules

April 25th, 2011

More than ten years into it, formerly major players still haven’t figured out how the Web works and what they can do, especially because they’re asking the wrong questions. The question is not “How can I re-establish the old system, when I had the power, in this new medium and keep it at the same level for a long time to come to make as much money as possible with processes that have been working for me in the last 50 years?” Asking for something like this seems pretty silly, but it’s exactly what big companies do. Why? It’s the people who work there. They want to do the job they’ve been doing ever since, but we don’t need these jobs to be done anymore, at least not in the same fashion.

What every player, regardless of size or age, needs to admit at first is that not only yesterday, but also today is a sunk cost, because you can’t change it, not at a significant level. So the question becomes “How do the achievements of today (i.e., the latest technical innovation) shift user expectations for tomorrow, and how can I use what I got to satisfy or exceed them?” Example: YouTube today is not what it was 6 years ago. Today’s standards make it very unlikely someone will watch a shaky mobile phone video with your cat chasing the woolen ball over and over and tell all her friends. What we want is high definition video, professionally shot and, even more important, a good story worth our time. We’ve moved beyond the point of boredom and doing stuff only for excitement, because there’s no more scarcity of entertainment for its own sake.

No, the new scarcity is one that major movie studios could fill if they only decided to abandon their old-fashioned monetization chain. They need to figure out how to get HD video in 3D to my home, so easy, comfortable and cheap that torrent downloads or physical pirate copies are not attractive any more to everybody worldwide. What’s as important: They can help me discover more movies, just like Amazon does. But they could use a different algorithm, and only when I’m logged in. I don’t want a useless recommendation e-mail invade my inbox each day just to make me come back and spend more money.

Just like the music industry wouldn’t have had to invent iTunes, but Spotify. We have always needed and still need someone to help us discover more of the stuff we already like and buy, and only then do we need someone to actually give it to us, not the other way round.
The Internet has not ridded us of all scarcities, it just shifted them a lot. The ultimate scarcity is now time, because there is too much to choose from, and people and companies are adding ever more stuff. Today we need someone to help us find the stuff we want. And there’s a reason why there are not many people around trying to solve this problem successfully.

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Digital Natives – Digital Naives

April 23rd, 2011

Whatever circumstances you’re born into you assume as being normal, because “that’s the way things are”. When all you know is war, fighting and being on the run determines your image of life and reality. Most of us, who have never personally experienced war or other life threatening crises, assume a life of safety and comfort as being normal, and whatever “soft” revolution that we experience, like having Internet connection in every household, having a mobile phone and so forth, are conceived as normal by the next generation. Just because stuff like this exists.

And usually “normal” stuff , no matter if it’s war or a computer, is not questioned by the new generation of participants or users. Today’s kids just use Google, YouTube and Facebook like it’s always been around and a somewhat integral part of life, but they don’t really know how it works (technically) or what its purpose is (advertising, not searching). In that sense, the new generation should not be called Digital Natives but Digital Naives.

What’s a little funny about this whole thing is that it’s the first of the four stages of competence, but one can only advance through all four when he knows that he’s incompetent int he first place. And often this doesn’t happen because of the unawareness of incompetence, because the perceived ability to use a device, service or whatever makes one forget they don’t actually know how it’s done. This paradox is known in the professional world as the starting point of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and when we take this as a given, big opportunities we haven’t seen before become pretty obvious.

(Yes, it’s a cliffhanger.)

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Cool Ain’t For Everyone

March 29th, 2011

It shouldn’t be necessary to say, because everybody (and I literally mean everybody) has experienced this in high school: Sometimes, the harder you try to be hip and cool, the more you make yourself look an idiot. But obviously, for Germany’s Public TV weather and election show hosts, high school is too far away too remember this simple rule. So what happens is this: In their left hand, they have a small, but visible clicker (it’s black), and while clicking to the next slide, they performing a full-width swipe across their massive LCD screen with their other hand. This is so nuts. It’s a complete failure, not impressing anyone. My grandma wonders why they start swiping their screens because she knows they had remotes until last month, and now the poor fellas have to perform these ridiculous gestures. And the younger generation just feels sorry for these misguided and confused people who give the impression of never having used a touch device. Hint: they invented touch control to make it more comfortable to use, not to make it easier to impress.

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Touting the Process

March 27th, 2011

…is in most cases a lot easier than touting the result. It’s what musicians use social networks for these days, but I can’t make sense of it. Who is it about? Whenever a musician posts or tweets they’re going to the studio, it’s just another version of “Hey, I’m feeling great today.” Good for them. Not good enough for me, because there’s no value for me as a fan and potential buyer. Their well-being doesn’t lead to any interaction. And when the attention span is exactly as long as the time it takes to read a post or tweet, the question that need to be asked is: Is it worth your fan’s time? Not the time it takes to read your news, but the time it takes to start a conversation about it. Related questions are: How can I facilitate engagement? How do I connect? How can I make it sneezable? It’s easier than you think. (Exceptions apply.)

And the issue has yet another dimension to it. A process is hardly measurable (but that’s our fault, because it’s easier for us to measure outcomes), making it a good means to hide behind. No one’s gonna judge you for this, everyone is waiting for the result. And now, as always, it comes down to whether you’ve raised the bar too high for yourself to exceed expectations. And sometimes, the creators feel that they’ve bitten off more than they could chew, which makes going out there and touting the result a little harder. That’s why musicians are still sending review copies of their records to music magazines. Of course, these mags also serve a top-down connecting function within the tribe, but the top-down evaluation component is a lot more important, because a good review is yet another shield to hide behind: “It’s good because some authority said it’s good.” The problem with this thinking is the authority’s voice today is just one in a million, and it’s heard less every day.

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Everything becomes most dangerous

March 14th, 2011

…when you forget about it.

On the other hand, things that are, even if just temporarily, on top of everyone’s mind are not interesting to talk about and sometimes way off point.

Our biggest problem is for us today matters more than tomorrow.

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Why You Want a Prize (Really)

February 23rd, 2011

Why is it that even after 30, 50 or 80 years we still admire feature films that have won an OSCAR? Is it because they’re really good (by whatever measures) or because they’ve won a prize, or maybe in between? When we look at all the other films from any given year, we’re not feeling the same way, are we? You’ll always find some flaw in them, and sometimes, you’ll even find the whole thing shabby, having poor image quality, bad sound design, a cheap score, what-have-you.

But in the day the film was new, it was different. And that’s what we forget when looking at whatever product, but especially ones that are more or less art — not only are they influenced by fashion trends of their genre, but of course also of production standards at their time. Today your $99 mobile phone shoots video with better image quality than a camera that cost $50,000 twenty years back. Today your $300 PC can (technically) help you create a more lavish sound design than a full-fledged studio in the mid-90s.

This applies for other areas as well. Only eight years back, you cold earn a lot of respect with web programmers when you developed your own CMS. Not today, because it’s an unnecessary effort — there’s more than a dozen free systems out there, why start from scratch?

How about your work? Are the things you’ve done and achieved worth acknowledging by today’s standards? Has the bar that used to protect your field of expertise lowered in a way that pretty much anyone can compete with you? And has the bar that marks outstanding results raised so high you hardly come close? And which is worse?

When more or less everything becomes ubiquitous, when everything is always available in one form or another, when scarcity is not a problem to deal with anymore, you’re way better off when you have managed to earn a prize with what you done, no matter when, it won’t really lose any of its shine. Even better when this one prize has a tradition and still exists today. It helps you stand out, makes you a winner, not only of the award, but overall, and for a long time to come.

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