Very interesting development. At the moment, webcasting is great but requires significant resources (server and bandwidth) to do it on any scale. This could put it within the reach of just about everybody. It’s not ready yet, but should be out by the Summer.
Category Archives: Media ecology
It’s Groundhog Day on the “sources going direct” question
Acute blog post by George Brock.
Rupert Murdoch rarely says or does anything which doesn’t cause dismay somewhere. So it has been with his appearance on Twitter.
The octogenarian’s pithy provocations, unmediated by spin-doctors, have been enough to start yet more worries about the future of journalism. People were apparently in all seriousness sitting around at a seminar in the Columbia Journalism School considering the question of “sources” who “go direct” (to the audience, that is). The language itself is unintentionally revealing: how dare these people cut out the middleman and communicate directly with people? The seminar anxiously wondered if this would be “good for journalism”.
That will depend on how well journalists adapt to a transformative change.
Yep. George’s Inaugural Lecture laid out the argument nicely.
An Ecology of Mind
This is the trailer for Nora Bateson’s intriguing film about her father, Gregory, which my OU colleagues are screening on February 13 at 19.00 in the Berrill Theatre at the University’s campus in Milton Keynes. I hope to be there.
Guess Who?
Amazing the gems one finds on YouTube. Thanks to Brian for this one. The intro is baffling, but the rest of it is a hoot (or an hoot, as Alan Bennett might say).
Where good ideas come from
I’m reading Steven Johnson’s new book
Blackout
It’s strange how shocking this is. It’s a reminder of how dependent we have become on our networked environment. As a sardonic colleague put it this morning, some of his students are going to be mightily discombobulated today when they realise that (a) an essay is due and (b) Wikipedia isn’t available. But that’s too cynical. He and I use Wikipedia every day, and it often saves us a lot of footnoting and explanation.
The blackout served a useful purpose — that of drawing attention to the SOPA and PIPA Bills now before the US Congress. I wrote about these on January 8. Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, has posted a really good essay explaining why he — and the Lab — oppose the Bills.
Wikipedia: many happy returns
Wikipedia turned 15 yesterday — so it’s now a fully-fledged adolescent. On the other hand if you count it in Internet years, it’s 105.
Either way, it’s a significant milestone. Here are two ways to celebrate it.
Is YouTube really a threat to conventional TV?
From my piece in yesterday’s Observer.
The big question is whether YouTube poses a strategic threat to the traditional television industry. Up to now, most observers have been sceptical about that. They see conventional TV and YouTube as inhabitants of parallel universes. TV is all about marshalling scarce and expensive resources, exerting tight editorial control and charging for content. YouTube is all about the absence of editorial control, not charging for content, harnessing the abundance of free, user-generated (and sometimes copyrighted) material and extracting value from it by attaching personalised advertising to video clips.
The parallel-universes theory appears to be supported by comparisons of how people use YouTube and conventional TV. While a lot of people visit YouTube every day, they stay, on average, for only 15 minutes. Conventional television viewing, on the other hand, at between four and five hours a day in the US, seems to be holding up quite well. On the basis of these numbers, can TV executives continue to sleep easily?
Maybe. But Google, which owns YouTube, has plans to increase the “stickiness” of YouTube by getting into the content-creation business…
The ideas man
I’ve long been an addict of Edge.org, the website/salon founded by John Brockman. I finally got to interview him for the Observer.
To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it’s true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a “cultural impresario” or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an “intellectual enzyme”. Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is “a biological catalyst – an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things”.
The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” – the parallel universes of the arts and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures, one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. Or shots of the billboard photographs of his head that were used to publicise an eminently forgettable 1968 movie. But he’s also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call.
The new Digital Divide
From today’s NYTimes.
The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.
Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.
The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic.
Michael Flanagan, the chief technology officer at Arieso, said the study did not produce a more precise profile of extreme users. But the group, he said, was probably diverse, with a mix of business users gaining access to the Internet over a 3G network while traveling, and individuals with generous or unlimited mobile data packages watching videos, the main cause of the excess traffic.
Interesting data. At the moment, only about 13 per cent of the world’s 6.1 billion cellphones are smartphones, according to Ericsson, the leading maker of mobile network equipment, but the rate exceeds 30 percent in larger markets like the United States, Germany and Britain. My (informal) guess, based purely on observing those around me in the street and on trains, is that the proportion of smartphones is much higher than that in the UK.
The increasing penetration of smartphones is a one-way street — and, as Jonathan Zittrain, Tim Wu
As the NYT report puts it:
The more powerful phones are rapidly replacing the simpler, less voracious devices in many countries, raising traffic levels and pressure on operators to keep pace. In countries like Sweden and Finland, smartphones now account for more than half of all mobile phones … About 35 percent of Finns also use mobile laptop modems and dongles, or modems in a USB stick; one operator, Elisa, offers unlimited data plans for as little as 5 euros, or $6.40, a month.
As a result, Finns consume on average 1 gigabyte of wireless data a month over an operator’s network, almost 10 times the European average. As more consumers buy smartphones, the level of mobile data consumption and congestion will rise in other countries.