Will the ABC be all spikes and no hub, or will virtual hubs rule?

Last month I blogged about innovation in media, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) move to develop widgets for users to aggregate ABC content on their social network sites. As I’ve said before, this is a smart move by the ABC. In taking this initiative, the ABC appears to have recognised the reality that social networks are the new hub for news and entertainment.

So it is interesting to contrast this strategy with the ABC’s primary vision to become Australia’s “virtual town square” – a hub for user-generated content. In May 2009, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, described the virtual town square as “a place where Australians can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from one another”. By November 2009, planning had advanced to the point where the ABC is to employ digital media trainers around the country to teach Australians how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

What strikes me about the virtual town square idea is that conceptually it is not  a new. Local radio chat shows are a long-standing example of user-generated content in media. The town square idea also rests on media institutions continuing to provide the hub or the space for people to use.  I just wonder how congruent the strategy is with social media has it continues to grow in importance in the everyday lives of Australians.

For when it comes to creating and uploading content, people are already doing this for themselves. The emerging social media hub is a personalised place, one that is open to friends, family, coworkers and other associates in the work place and in the community. The social media hub has user-generated photos and videos, status updates and wall posts for expressing views about whatever is of interest.  It’s a place to join groups of interest and for political activism. It’s a place where users aggregate  news feeds, music and videos from third parties, updates from their other social media sites, and feeds from people they connect with. It’s a place that links data from all over the web. In Australia, that could well mean some content from the ABC. It may well mean that data is collated and shared within user-created and run virtual communities. Users doing it for themselves.

Where might social network site aggregation and sharing go? Steve Rubel has suggested that user preferences for personalised social network sites may mean that the next great media company will not have a website, they will be “all spokes and no hub”. I’d say that is a good call.  With the widget initiative, the ABC is positioning to play in the user-defined media hub space. The corporation is doing that as well as playing host to virtual town squares on its own website. It will be interesting to see how these two plays pan out over the next couple of years.

What teenagers know that corporations do not

Well, hasn’t it been fascinating just how widely distributed the views of 15 yo Morgan Stanley intern, Matthew Robson have been. Looking at what Matthew had to say, I am not at all surprised. The messages were clearly stated and I found them hard to disagree with. What’s more, the concise nature of the report is in line with what Matthew said about newspapers in that no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper [print] since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text”. I would add: no video, no audio, no interaction, no links, no free content = no teenage readers. It makes you wonder about the form and format of other research reports. Oh, and in another report on Matthew’s comment I learned that no teenager looks at telephone directories.

Clearly, with so much to attract their attention, many people (not just teenagers) really do value a good summary of something or have a really good search engine on hand rather than pages of text. I just wonder how influential Matthew’s comments have been relative to say other analyst and research institute reports.

As to the sceptical view of 20th Century media moguls, I do wonder whether they have much insight about the way things are going. To my mind, Howard Stringer (CEO of Sony) gives the game away by describing social media as a “club”. It’s not actually a club – particularly not in the walled-garden, proprietary systems view of the world. Social media is an ecosystem in  constant emergence. No one is in control and things change fast. That is not what the moguls and big corporate institutions are used to.

Fred Wilson (a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures) had this to say about what teenagers are up to. While Fred sounded a note of caution in reading too much into what Matthew Robson had to say, based on his own kids behaviour, he went on to say that “My kids have moved from the set top box to iTunes to Netflix in less than a couple of years and are now watching much of their TV streamed over the Internet.” It is obviously a big challenge for media moguls and their international corporations to be agile and responsive to that  kind of change, especially when that don’t get the fundamentals of what is driving change.

Fred had a few things to say about profitability in internet ventures too. There are a few internet companies doing nicely thank you (including Facebook now it seems). Yeah, I know. You would expect him to have that view. But one of the things Fred Wilson gets is that the internet is transformative. He said that the internet …”is a huge game changer. The internet has been a commercial technology for about fifteen years now. And we are beginning to see the impact of it on everything around us. The industrial revolution and the Renaissance before it lasted a century or more. It takes a long time for such fundamental changes to work their way through the system and produce a new ‘normal’”. That is not a case for deferring strategies to adapt to change I should hasten to add! It is a case for building in agility and flexibility.

New Media Futures

Well, it’s been a while since I took notes of the New Media Futures event held at the RSA (UK) on 8 April 2009. I’ve have not had the time to share ’til now. There were some very interesting points about emerging business models and shifts in consumption. There is an audio of the event here and a video of one of the speakers (Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard) here. Other speakers were David Smith (Global Futures Forum) and Richard Titus (Head of Future Media, BBC). 

Some key points 

In a digital, IP world, technology becomes a commodity. What then has value? 

•    data and relationships between data 
•    events 
•    user experience (eg. mobiles know who and where you are, offering a  more personalised experience; advertising morphing over the next 3 – 5 years  to become interactive) 

The BBC’s iPlayer is available on mobiles now. There has been 300 million downloads/streams in the last seven months. Real-time information is displacing stored information  - Google is old information, Twitter is right now. 

In an age of an “exaflood” of information, where the internet has removed barriers to distributing content – including copying – what comes in place of selling copy is attention. Content distributors are dis-intermediated. The objective of those with something to offer over the web is to get attention. Money is made around the content, not from the content, through 
things like: 

   - packaging 
   - time-shifting 
   - personalisation 

The current situation for the media industry is described as being in a state of transition from an age of control, domination & power, to an age of collaboration. Everything is going to the cloud (music, video, print). No one is in control of the cloud. Content owners, telecoms carriers, brands, advertisers all need to collaborate to create a new eco-system, maybe 
supported by a collective license to access and share content – similar to a radio broadcasting license to play music. The system would legalise what people are already doing on the web (copying and sharing content ). Payments would be made according to popularity (eg. clicks on YouTube). 

Gerd Leonhard referred to a piece by Kevin Kelly, The Technium: Better than Free  It’s a thought provoking piece on where value lies the networked economy. The answer lies in what can’t be copied or reproduced. The new generatives add value, say be interpreting or finding stuff, or just by making more accessible. Publishers, broadcasters and recording labels aren’t needed for distribution over the net, but they do have a role in channelling attention to particular content. The more that new media generatives know about people (where they are and what they are doing) the more likely they are going to get their attention. 

Writing this posting got me thinking about “regulation 2.0″ as it where. What are the new generatives for you to consider going forward? Ideas anyone?

Social networking in 2030… or 2015?

I seem to be spending more time finding information about past events or reading publications that are two or more years old. One example is learning what the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders had to say about the future of social networking by 2030. Here are three of their expectations:

• Networks that reach accross sectors, value-chains and national borders will be standard by 2030
• Markedly different company structures and forms of cooperation are likely
• About one-third of people in work will spend more than 10 hours per week online.

I wonder what the participants would say now? I’d bet they would bring forward their expectations a few years. Here in Australia some are saying that we are poised now for a period of accelerated development in social networking in the corporate sector. I’d agree with that. Whatever else that has contributed to the rapid rise in social networking over the last two years, the need to create value in the present economic environment is going to be another driver in the use of social networking. In the Foreword to Networked Citizens, Robert Ainger said that the value of networking in an economic downturn could “mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalising”. I do so agree with that – there is a lot of doom and gloom about and not enough attention on opportunities. Leveraging social networking is an opportunity.

Institutional failure has taken a well deserved hiding recently. The widespread reduction in trust of financial institutions has been a value-destructive force of huge proportions. But then declining respect for institutions in the public and private sectors has been evident for some time now.

Now here is the twist. Trust has been a driver in the rise of social networking. In thinking about the work, people are increasingly reliant on their social network for ideas, to solve problems and to seek career opportunities. Social networkers look to each other to play games and to socialise or find out what hot (eating out, entertainment, the latest gadgets or where to go on vacation and so on). There is a lot of trust building up through online activities.

When an organisation hires a social networker, they actually take on more than an employee. I would be surprised if who a person networks with is not already integral to some employment decisions. Social networks of consumers are factors in a firms value-chain. Social networks are channels in the democratic process.

So trust in social networks is of considerable and growing social and economic importance. But how durable is that trust. Institutions and individuals have substantive legal and commercial frameworks in place to support their rights and obligations. What of social networks…particularly distributed social networks? Now that, I feel is a Big Issue…or soon will be.

Value Chain 2.0

I’ve just read Value Chain 2.0 by Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang 0f ThinkStudio. The authors hypothesis was that when consumers shift from being passive to active, they become integral parts of the value creation process – Value 2.0. I agree.

This analysis contributes to the expanding literature on the economic and social consequences arising from the Participative Web. My last two postings (in reference to changes in the work place and social capital value accruing from social networking) are also subsets of the Participative Web.

Participation is reshaping the media too – instead of passively sitting back to take whatever broadcasters and publishers distribute, consumers are now producers and distributors – prosumers as they say.

Instead of passively taking in media accounts of political developments, citizens are now journalists and they communicate directly online with senior politicians. So it goes on.

The authors of Value Chain 2.0 observed that a company’s support environment (especially Internet-based industries):

• does not belong to the company itself anymore, but to the “whole ecosystem in which the company is immersed” (page 5). Being an ecosystem, there are multiple stakeholders
• the internal processes of a company must connect with the non-linear, complex and networked realities of the participative economy
• the value chain 2.0 is only valid for companies that have opened up their value chains to integrate their customers.

The authors refer to the ‘infrastructures’ of a company connecting directly with the infrastructures of the other stakeholders. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable but I am left scratching my head some what. There is an assumed complementary relationship between value chain 1.0 and 2.0. But it seems to me that dynamic is really the tricky bit. How much would value chain 1.0 change in the course of connecting with value chain 2.0? Will a new and as yet unknown value chain emerge? Possibly.

Goofy2

Goofy2 English version will be live in about one month! Here is what I had to say about this a few weeks ago….posted by Kashgar (Goofy2 co-founder). Nice one.

Goofy2 seems to me to have an appealing interface. It’s open, participatory and has a global reach. You can have rich connections with friends and colleagues around the world… to co-create, contemplate or just have fun.

I’ve copied the ‘About’ section (English translation) of Goofy2 for ease of reference:

• Goofy2 is a web-based easy-to-use software that people can use to post ideas in short text plus a rich media attachment, and share with friends and the world.
• You can use it to have discussions on topics that you choose;
• You can embed rich media codes to share music, images, videos and flash with people;
• You can brainstorm on things with colleagues;
• You can just talk when you need some listeners;
• Or, you just want to check out “what the world is thinking about…?”

Telecommunications and the mobile internet

Susan Crawford has posted a useful perspective on the ‘open’ conditions placed on C Block spectrum (in reference to the recent FCC auction, USA) and what is possibly a strategy to get around them. Bear in mind that the intent of the open conditions rules is to decouple applications and devices from the underlying network, thereby promoting innovation and choice.

There are fundamental issues at stake here in the migration of voice and multimedia to wireless IP networks. Verizon’s strategy appears to be a reassertion of the telecommunications model of vertically integrated, fully managed and billed services. As Ms Crawford observed, that’s not the internet.

The strategy underpinning Verizon’s business model hinges on the successful deployment of IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). Developed by the mobile industry standards group 3GPP, IMS was developed as an evolutionary replacement to GSM (an ecosystem for cellular networks inclusive of billing systems). IMS allows for traffic discrimination, billed according to network operator requirements. As an industry standard – as with GSM – IMS is a standardised set of specifications for devices to connect to broadband wireless networks.

Susan’s posting also provides a view on government’s role in this context:

- In cooperation with industry, develop a standard set of specifications
for all devices to connect to broadband wireless networks
- Ensure the specifications do not unfairly discriminate
- Police the industry to ensure that industry effective comply with the
policy intent of de-coupling networks from applications and devices

Verizon’s mobile sector strategy in the United States is a test between vertically-integrated, fully managed networks vs. the open nature of the internet. What’s more, my understanding is that IMS could be deployed in wired networks as well. Will openness win over closed systems in the long-run?