Category Archives: Media ecology

Going OTT

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Ye Gods! Time Magazine has finally lost its marbles. This week’s Cover Story is about who is TIME’s ‘Person of the Year’. It begins:

You — Yes, You — Are TIME’s Person of the Year

and goes downhill from there. Sample:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

There’s something especially nauseating about watching an old-media dinosaur sucking up to the denizens of the new ecosystem.

Blogging ‘set to peak next year’

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From BBC NEWS

The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on…

Transcript

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I’m always intrigued by the way journalists rework interviews to give them a ‘shape’. Sometimes this involves weaving quotations in ways that are (perhaps unintentionally) misleading. So some time back I resolved that I would put up a transcript of every interview I gave, just for the record.

Below is a transcript of an email interview I’ve just given to a journalist on a New Zealand publication.

Q: Blogs are constantly being talked of as being “on the verge” on mainstream influence. Yet, outside a few cases in the United States (Dan Rather’s “memogate” etc), they don’t seem to have lived up to their promise. Is 2007 the year of the blog, or the year the blog boom finally busted?

A: Silly question — typical of old-media journalism. The significance of blogging isn’t measured by the emergence of publications which have the same clout as old-style media outlets (though the Huffington Post seems to be doing that too), but by the profound change in the media ecosystem brought about by thousands of editorial voices that would hitherto never found a voice or a means of publication. This is a different world from the one in which most journalists were conditioned. So forget the “has blogging peaked?” line; it’s a bit like asking “has oxygen peaked?” The real question is: has old-style print journalism peaked?

Q: Will blogs become (or are they already) recognised news-breakers?

A: Blogs and mainstream journalism have — and will continue to have — a symbiotic relationship: bloggers lack the resources and training to be major news-breakers; what they are good at is informed comment and keeping mainstream journalism honest (see the Trent Lott and Dan Rather cases) and up to the mark.

Q: The Guardian (the UK paper I read most online) seems to have co-opted the blogging model quite well – at least with sports coverage and breaking news like the tube bombings. Can we expect to see more of this cross-pollination by newspapers?

Yep. But the key determinant of success or failure will be the extent to which proprietors and editors understand the profoundly different ecosystem in which they will have to operate. The trick — as the Editor of the Guardian puts it — is not to be ‘on the Web’ but ‘of the Web’.

The most threatened journalistic species right now is the highly-paid, opinionated newspaper columnist. For many of them there are people out there on the Net doing it better — and more cheaply! Note how Time Magazine ‘bought’ Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Q: Newspaper circulation has declined (according to year-on-year November ABC stats) by another 5 %, on average. To what extent is this due to readers migrating online, and how much is due to a net loss of readers? How ugly do you think these figures will look next year?

A: I’m not an expert on circulation, but the picture varies with different cultures. In Western societies, newspaper circulation is in inexorable decline, mainly because — for whatever reason — young people don’t buy or read papers. My understanding is that newspaper readership is holding up well in Asia, but — as I say — I’m no expert.

Q: Can newspapers and, to a lesser extent broadcasters, make up their lost advertising revenues through online operations?

A: To some extent, but only to some extent. The central strategic problem for print publications is that their classified ad revenues will all be sucked away by the Net. If they were smart they’d have built online advertising businesses like Craigslist years ago. But their managements were too dumb and/or ignorant to understand the threat. They thought it was all about news. It wasn’t and it isn’t.

Q: How much of a threat does YouTube pose to traditional television networks?

Traditional TV networks have their own dire problems — broadcast TV is in inexorable decline because (i) its audiences are fragmenting (because of channel multiplication) and (ii) increased competition for people’s attention from other media and sources. YouTube merely adds to the broadcast TV problem. It might even be part of a solution for some: a few smart TV broadcasters are trying to harness YouTube to widen the ‘reach’ for their products.

Q: And predictions for 2007?

A: If you want to know the future, go buy a crystal ball.

Bear Stearns and the Long Tail

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I know — it sounds like the title of a kids’ fairy tale, but Bear Stearns is an investment bank and they’s just published an interesting report on how the long tail phenomenon will affect the media business. In a nutshell, they conclude that “Aggregation and Context and (Not Necessarily) Content Are King”.

Actually, the report is a lot better than you might think from that headline. Among other things, it looks at the evolution of the TV cable industry as an example of a long tail development.

MyTrojan

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Here’s something from Insecure.org to make Rupert Murdoch choke on his muesli.

Overview

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Myspace.com provides a site navigation menu near the top of every page.

Users generally use this menu to navigate to the various areas of the website. The first link that the menu provides is called “Home” which navigates back to the user’s personalized Myspace page which is essentially the user’s “home base” when using the site. As such this particular link is used quite frequently and is used to return from other areas of the website, most importantly from other user’s profile pages.

A content-replacement attack coupled with a spoofed Myspace login page can be used to collect victim users’ authentication credentials. By replacing the navigation menu on the attacker’s Myspace profile page, an unsuspecting victim may be redirected to an external site of the attacker’s choice, such as a spoofed Myspace login page. Due to Myspace.com’s seemingly random tendency to expire user sessions or log users out, a user being presented with the Myspace login page is not out of the ordinary and does not raise much suspicion on the part of the victim.

Impact

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Users are unexpectedly redirected to a website of the attacker’s choice.

Users may be tricked into revealing their authentication credentials.

Affected Systems

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Myspace.com: http://www.myspace.com

Here’s GMSV’s account:

Some MySpace users are getting their first taste of an STD — a socially transmitted disease. Identity thieves are using a vulnerability in the popular social network’s navigation to spread a particularly virulent worm that steals log-in credentials and lures users to phishing sites. Attacks begin with a rigged QuickTime video. “Once a user’s MySpace profile is infected (by viewing a malicious embedded QuickTime video), that profile is modified in two ways,” WebSense explains. “The links in the user’s page are replaced with links to a phishing site, and a copy of the malicious QuickTime video is embedded into the user’s site. Any other users who visit this newly-infected profile may have their own profile infected as well.” MySpace hasn’t revealed the extent of the infection, but an informal scan of 150 user profiles by FaceTime Communications found that close to a third were infected. That same ratio probably doesn’t translate to MySpace’s 73 million registered users — if it did we’d have a Black Death-style Web pestilence on our hands. So in the end this mostly serves as a reminder that everyone needs to pay more attention to security. “We’re continuing to make the same mistakes by putting security last,” Billy Hoffman, lead engineer at Web security specialist SPI Dynamics, recently told News.com. “People are buying into this hype and throwing together ideas for Web applications, but they are not thinking about security, and they are not realizing how badly they are exposing their users.”

Oh my Paxman!

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From Comment is free…

This is Paxman as you’ve never seen him before. Filmed on a mobile phone, by the look of it: out of focus, white balance all wrong, and with the camera on its side. He looks, well, pretty pissed off.

“Is this thing on?” he barks. “Hello! As part of the BBC’s commitment to saving money, not only are you the licence-payer required to watch Newsnight, you will shortly have to make it too. For reasons that are somewhat vague to me we’re going to choose five two-minute films made by viewers and broadcast them, as of right, in January. They’ll be voted for on our website by popular vote, all the details are … whose stupid idea was this…?”

Communications — the next decade

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I’m at the OFCOM conference in London. The last session today was centred on the launch of a collection of essays commissioned by OFCOM and now published as a handsome hardback. My contribution is in Section 1: “Trends and Challenges”. (It should, of course, have been titled “Trends and Problems”, but the P-word is now banned in all polite circles.) The section also includes Jonathan Zittrain’s Inaugural Lecture and a terrific essay by Eli Noam.

Online video ‘eroding TV viewing’

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Another canary in the mine — a BBC report saying that:

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising – three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

Of course this is all minority stuff — for now…