Category Archives: Media ecology

Open source news

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Perceptive column by Jeff Jarvis. Excerpt:

A week ago, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger made quite a stir when he announced that some articles destined for the newspaper would now go to the web first. This may not seem like a big deal, except to the journalists whose circadian rhythm of meetings, deadlines and drinks will now suffer chronic jetlag. And you might say that this is being done already as major newspapers put updates online. But in giving the web priority over the paper, the Guardian is handing its crown jewels, its polished final product, to the future. And that is changing the nature of that product.

When the paper puts an edited story online hours before the old evening deadline, it means that readers may then react, asking more questions, offering more facts. And that means the reporter can augment that story for print. Thus the simple act of exposing a story to daylight before the dark of print can improve the journalism in it. After publication, this continues as readers offer more help and the story is updated online, in its text or in the discussion around it. This needn’t become an endless edition. But it is the end of news on the stone tablet. News becomes plastic. And news opens up…

Bloggers and the Democratic Party

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Interesting piece about the effect bloggers are having on the Democrats…

Joe Lieberman has a fight on his hands. Until very recently, the three-term Democratic senator and former presidential candidate was cruising to re-election in Connecticut, his home state. But the 64-year-old grandee now finds himself in sudden danger of falling victim to a new political life form: the internet candidate.

Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur, has come from nowhere to pose a serious threat, with the help of internet fundraising and anti-war bloggers outraged at Mr Lieberman’s gung-ho support for the Iraq invasion.

Homeless connectivity

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Amazing Wired News story…

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

He claims he created one of the first handheld computer scanners and played a major part in the data transmission industry in the early 1990s. “I’ve always been trying to stay up on internet technology,” Ivy said.

Ivy isn’t the only homeless person who makes it a priority to keep gadgets handy even when a cooked meal is hard to come by.

Many of those now living without a permanent roof over their heads have cell phones in their pockets or laptop computers at their hips. While people living in shelters and alleys have found it difficult to cross social divides, the digital divide seems to disappear on the streets. Nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “More have e-mail than have post office boxes,” Stoops said. “The internet has been a big boon to the homeless.”

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

“Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families,” Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel…

Thanks to Cory & BoingBoing.

Hello Mother, Hello Friendster…

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Tom Lehrer, where are you when we need you? This from today’s New York Times…

Summer camp directors have a new scourge, and it is not mosquitoes or impetigo. It is the Internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, where young people often post personal or revealing information.

Camps say they are increasingly concerned about being identified in photographs or comments on these sites, even innocuously. They worry about online predators tracking children to camp and about their image being tarnished by inappropriate Internet juxtapositions — a mention, say, of the camp on a site that also has crude language or sexually suggestive pictures. “This is probably the No. 1 issue facing all camp programs,” said Norman E. Friedman, a partner at AMSkier Insurance, a major camp insurer.

The Digger’s quest for eternal youth in cyberspace

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And here’s my take on what Rupert Murdoch is up to. (Also from today’s Observer.)

In less than a month News Corporation stunned everyone by paying $580m (£313m) for MySpace.com, a social networking site with annual revenues of about $20m. The following month it bought Scout.com, a college sports site. And in September it bought IGN Entertainment, an entertainment and videogaming site, for $650m. One analyst predicts that Murdoch will spend between $500m and $1bn a year on online ventures in the next three to five years.

Given his totemic status in the industry, other media firms are wondering what he’s up to. The answer is simple: Murdoch is chasing kids. That’s the only possible explanation for his decision to pay ridiculous prices for MySpace and IGN. (Scout.com looks more like a traditional old-media play.)

Here’s the reasoning: Murdoch has all the newspapers, TV stations and movie studios any mogul could want. But he’s noticed the media ecosystem changing…

Jumpcut

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The user-generated content bandwagon rolls on. Jumpcut is a web service which enables you to edit small movies (add soundtracks, efffects, etc) in your browser. According to this New York Times report, there are lots of workalike services on the way:

Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.

Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.

“We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing,” said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. “We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail.”

Mr. Kaskade refers to the process as “mixing,” however, saying he believes that the term “editing” may sound labor-intensive to the amateur videographer. Previously, putting together a multishot video like Mr. Moore’s would have involved installing and learning to use a piece of software like iMovie from Apple, Adobe Premiere or Studio from Pinnacle Systems. Some of that software is packaged free with new computers or sold for about $100.

The analyst firm Parks Associates estimated last year that only about four million people regularly use such software for video editing — far fewer than the number who capture video using camcorders, Webcams, digital still cameras and cellphones.

But with more videos of soccer games, weddings and cruise vacations being posted online — and potentially being seen by people who have not been dragooned into the living room for a showing — editing gains in importance, Mr. Kaskade says, even if it involves trimming only the dizzying camera whirls at the beginning of a shot, or the inevitable question, “Are you taping right now?”

The bandwidth implications of this are interesting. All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)

Grouper users have to download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in conjunction with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their PC and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.

The long tail in action

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From today’s New York Times…

a nice illustration of a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix’s inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day? The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That’s right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. “Americans’ tastes are really broad,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process…

As I was saying…

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… about user-generated content. This article about YouTube continues the theme. Excerpt:

YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites signal a shift in the way entertainment will be made and consumed in the future. They’re creating a new form of television that’s at once personal, grass-roots and unfettered.

With the emergence of technology for easily sharing video over the Internet, viewers are gaining the autonomy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod, laptop or desktop computer. And the masses are getting an opportunity to create and experiment with video while bypassing the central filter of a TV network.

No company epitomizes these rapid changes more than YouTube. In the past six months, YouTube, a 27-employee company housed above a pizzeria in San Mateo, has become a new global stage.

Visitors to the site view more than 50 million videos a day, mostly made by amateurs. Its audience has mushroomed to 12.5 million a month, making it the chief place people go online to watch video. It has become one of the 50 most visited Web sites overall….

Hmmm…. Wonder what their monthly bandwidth charges are like.

On the other hand…

Web sites such as YouTube, whose motto is “Broadcast Yourself,” have a long way to go before killing off the boob tube. In a recent survey for the Online Publishers Association, 24 percent of Internet users said they watched online video at least once a week and only 5 percent watched it daily. The average person watches 4 hours and 52 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen Media Research. On average, each YouTube visitor spends nearly 16 minutes on the site, according to Hitwise, an online measurement firm in New York.

For now, YouTube is a pastime mostly for the young. Thirty-one percent of its visitors are 18 to 24, according to Hitwise. And that is probably the age range of most of YouTube’s budding video makers.

But that only emphasises the point I was trying to make in my lecture. Nobody is saying that YouTube means the end of broadcast TV, any more than blogging means the end of journalism. It’s just that user-generated content brings new organisms into the media ecosystem, and changes the relationships between its components. The only things we can say for sure at the moment are that: (a) the old, near-total dominance of push-media and publication gatekeepers is eroding; and (b) the media ecosystem is rapidly becoming much more complex. For a fuller argument, see Yochai Benkler’s new book.

So who are the really creative people around here?

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I’ve been lecturing for years (e.g. here) about the coming transformation from the ‘push’ world of broadcast TV (in which small numbers of content creators push multimedia content at passive consumers — aka couch potatoes) to a world dominated by ‘pull’ media like the Web. The dominance of the broadcast model led people to assume that audiences were essentially passive and stupid — which is why, to broadcasters, the notion of “user-generated content” is an oxymoron.

I’ve also been putting forward the (to me, obvious) proposition that the current surge of user-generated content (e.g. in Blogging, Flickr, YouTube, Google Video, etc.) is a very good pointer to the way the world is going to be. Now comes some really interesting empirical evidence in support of that from the Pew Internet Survey whose latest report says, in part

Overall, 35% of all internet users have posted content to the internet. Specifically, we asked about four types of online content: having one’s own blog; having one’s own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.

  • An even higher percentage of home broadband users – 42% or about 31 million people – have posted content to the internet. They account for 73% of home internet users who were the source of online content. A majority of them are home broadband users.
  • Having a fast, always-on internet connection at home is associated with users’ posting content to the internet and thereby shaping the environment of cyberspace.
  • Although home dial-up internet users get involved in putting content online, they do not do so at the same rate as broadband users.
  • Just 27% of dial-up users, or about 13 million adults, have placed some sort content online.
  • Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content.
  • Overall, 36 million internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of internet users. Home
    broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.
  • Home is not the only place from which people upload content. Among the 11% of online Americans with access only at work or some place other than work or home (such as a library), 21% have posted some content to the internet. That comes to 5 million people.