River of Bats , originally uploaded by Wordyeti. As promised, here is a short clip showing the stream of bats that comes out at dusk in downtown Austin. Please forgive the shaky, jumpy camera moves – this was shot with my tiny Sony W90 camera – about the size of a deck of cards. Still, [...] [...more]
As promised, here is a short clip showing the stream of bats that comes out at dusk in downtown Austin.
Please forgive the shaky, jumpy camera moves – this was shot with my tiny Sony W90 camera – about the size of a deck of cards. Still, like I tell all my students, “the best camera in the world is the one that you have with you when the picture happens.”
The bats just kept streaming past for at least 10 minutes. It was very impressive – I thought it was going to be a nice flock coming out, but there were tens of thousands of the critters all taking wing at the same time, staying in formation and chittering to each other on their way to work. One girl in a wedding dress drawled, “Ah hope they’re all on their way to eat all the damn skeeters outta my back yard.”
I’ve seen things like this in the Planet Earth video series from the BBC; I was wondering if there were going to be hawks loitering about, looking for a late-afternoon snack. No such luck – and considering how Austin has Disneyfied itself in the last 15 years, I guess I was lucky that there wasn’t some kind of 3D Laserium “Dark Knight II” promo tie-in.
Austin – never handle a grounded bat, originally uploaded by Wordyeti. I’ll admit it – I have a fondness for odd signs & admonitions. This one appears under the Congress St. bridge, where all the bats live. (Video of the batstream to come…) [...more]
I’ll admit it – I have a fondness for odd signs & admonitions. This one appears under the Congress St. bridge, where all the bats live. (Video of the batstream to come…)
David Lafontaine, originally uploaded by paulbrannan. This is from Paul Brannan’s Flickr stream, of all the shots he took at the ISOJ. I still have to put up the shots I took … after I process them … after I deal with the balky hard drive in my Sony Vaio (aka the $2800 paperweight). I [...] [...more]
This is from Paul Brannan’s Flickr stream, of all the shots he took at the ISOJ. I still have to put up the shots I took … after I process them … after I deal with the balky hard drive in my Sony Vaio (aka the $2800 paperweight).
I actually manage to look a little distinguished in this shot. How’d that happen?
The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic). There's a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular - they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile. It's the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans. It's a human voice. The voice that says, "Well, y'know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he's a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away..."
It's the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us. The one that doesn't feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said "objectivity." The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit - because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary. [...more]
Last week at the International Symposium of Online Journalists in Austin, I presented a series of viral videos to make the point that the national discourse is no longer “owned” by what we think of as professional media. It may seem like a trivial point, when compared to the other nuclear meltdown-level emergencies of declining advertising, lack of a sustainable business model for the future, declining audience share, sky-high debt loads, etc. – but I believe that adapting ourselves to this new environment is the first step towards resolving these other problems.
I asked the audience how many of them "got" the central image here, and could put it into its viral meme context.
Over at the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles makes a compelling and far more comprehensive argument about why the whole concept of ownership of the news & the national conversation has been toxic to the mainstream media’s efforts at retaining its audience share.
Another point that I tried to make was that it is OK to use humor in your reportage, now and again. The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic). There’s a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular – they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile. It’s the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans. It’s a human voice. The voice that says, “Well, y’know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he’s a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away…”
It’s the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us. The one that doesn’t feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said “objectivity.” The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit – because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary.
[And yeah, I know, my much-promised blog post about the effects of fear in the media on all of us is still in the works. Forgive me.]
So for all of you trapped in office cubicles, or just in need of a bit of diversion at the end of the week, here are the top viral videos:
I have learned the hard way not to dare to try to play video on the UT presentation system. So I’m using this blogpost as a way to put up the links to the examples that I want to use in tomorrow’s talk about how to tell complex stories using the “Telenovela Effect.” What kind [...] [...more]
I have learned the hard way not to dare to try to play video on the UT presentation system. So I’m using this blogpost as a way to put up the links to the examples that I want to use in tomorrow’s talk about how to tell complex stories using the “Telenovela Effect.”
What kind of new dialectic – that is, what kind of form & function of transmitting information – has evolved on the web to reach the audiences? Well, one of the big successes that we should look at is the most popular webisodic – one that recently notched more than 1 million subscribers:
This is part 3 of John’s keynote at OMMA 2009. …and yes, I know, I don’t have the excerpts and such that made the other videos interesting to watch. But I figure if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably already pretty interested in what this guy has to say. [...more]
This is part 3 of John’s keynote at OMMA 2009.
…and yes, I know, I don’t have the excerpts and such that made the other videos interesting to watch. But I figure if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably already pretty interested in what this guy has to say.
"We’re about to get another breakthrough, another interface leap. If I knew what it was, I would start a company there. But I don’t know what it is yet, but I have some ideas, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today." - John Battelle
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“We’re about to get another breakthrough, another interface leap. If I knew what it was, I would start a company there. But I don’t know what it is yet, but I have some ideas, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.” – John Battelle
Battelle says he stayed up late one night (visions of the mythical college dorm room & heavy inhalation) to come up with this heavy information and interface theories, and worked up this speech to try to describe where he sees the future of the web going.
If what he said above is right, then there is about to be another evolutionary stage, and the current titans of search (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) are going to be replaced by The New Hot Thing. He seems to be hanging his hat on “conversations” which sounds pretty good to me – the human urge to connect & trade information is one of the strongest forces on the web. I’m just not entirely convinced that the Facebook/MySpace paradigm is at all viable. We’re been waiting a while now for anything remotely resembling a business model to emerge, and the latest news is that Google’s shareholders are starting to get a bit bent out of shape about subsidizing the world’s inconsequential home videos, and that Emperor’s Missing Wardrobe-type questions are starting to get asked about the 1/2 billion a year burn rate.
Money quote:
YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely.
Battelle’s take on where all this is headed is pretty complex, and not all that out of line with things that you’ve probably heard before. This is only the first part, so stick with it – it gets more rewarding as we go along.
Here’s some teaser quotes to get you to click over and watch the video – please excuse the camera movement, but Battelle kept pacing around on the stage, and I had to either go so wide that focus was a problem, or track him, making the camera movements a little jerky.
Every publisher is now a marketer … you have to engage the audience in a conversation … if you don’t know how to do that, you’ll die. That’s it. It’s over.
I call this the conversation economy. It’s kind of a sequel to the search.
The three-bump theory of how man interacts with technology … as Eric Schmidt is fond of saying ‘25% of GDP is fine with me.”
We all give Apple credit, but basically we know that Windows won. I call this the “hunt and poke” interface … that’s way better than learning a foreign language like FORTRAN. That’s also called the “I’m lost in a foreign country interface.”
We started having conversations at scale with our customers. All of a sudden every customer could talk to every company, and nobody was ready for the conversation. But around the turn of the century, we started to develop that interface, and that interface, I argue is search. This is the first time we have ever been able to have a conversation in our own natural language with a machine. People don’t see search that way, but I do.
Another quick hit, because I’m swamped with assignments right now. Many newspaper/media analysts have eagerly seized upon the micro-commerce capabilities of mobile phones and devices like the Kindle as possible ways to get readers to pony up for their content. Steve Smith, the self-deprecating mobile industry analyst, has an insightful take on this issue over [...] [...more]
Another quick hit, because I’m swamped with assignments right now.
I think it is a mistake for media companie [sic] to think that putting the same old content into our pockets or “at our fingertips” is enough to merit a fee. They need to reimagine content as a service. That is a tremendous challenge/opportunity. It means that publishers have to think beyond the media and imagine how people put information to work (or to fun) in their everyday lives.
If a publisher can turn media into a utility, not just more data, then the rest of the argument about pay-to-play models on mobile make more sense. If there is something of value to buy on the mobile platform, then the built-in payment system, the always-there convenience, and the pay-to-play habits of mobile usage make a fee-based model workable for some. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful by-product of the mobile media evolution if it forced publishers to revisit and reimagine how and why their product makes our everyday lives better, easier, healthier, or more enjoyable? Content could have functionality. Media would be a service — not just, well, media.
The thinking on this is pretty terrifying to anyone hoping that the news business will be able to just point their CMS outputs at .mobi or m.[whatever] sites and go on their merry ways. If what Smith says is true, the news business is going to have to get a lot more disciplined about packaging up the information and presenting it to the average time-starved reader in a way that is immeidately, recognizably useful.
This means that big, exhaustive, Pulitzer-bait investigative pieces that curmudgeons point at as the core business that can’t be replicated … are not going to be in the lifeboats that make it to Digital Refuge Island. Well, at least, not in the way that we’ve all come to expect.
I’ve been thinking a lot about investigations lately, and I think they represent the best of traditional media … and the worst. Yes, they are responsible for great, sweeping changes and for holding corrupt politicians, abusive bureaucracies and ugly social trends up into public view.
But these investigations have become an industry unto themselves, and like many institutions these days, they function based upon their own internal logic, rather than upon what the external market/society need. That is, the investigations are done in secrecy, over a long period of time, consume vast amounts of manpower, and are disgorged all in a huge tidal wave of text/photos. All to an audience in which – according to readership surveys – 80% of the intended audience never skips past the first column of text on page one to dig into all this hard-won information.
If an investigation is published and nobody really pays attention, was it really worthwhile? I can already hear the outraged screams in response to that question.
How about this: wouldn’t it be better to accomplish what a big investigation sets out to do – that is, to identify problems, focus in on miscreants and victims to breathe life into the story, suggest solutions, AND FOLLOW UP IN AN OLD-SCHOOL CRUSADE – in a way that readers actually pay attention to?
One of the “ah-ha!” moments I’ve seen in the trainings we’ve done is when we talk to the ad/biz side, and ask them whether they think advertisers are buying column inches of ads – or if what they want is more customers walking into their stores.
This (buzzword alert) paradigm shift in the mission of newspapers has to have its own parallel epiphany over on the editorial side.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
Interesting. AT&T just bulk-emailed all us iPhoners, asked to tell 'em what we think of service http://tinyurl.com/26zflmq Brace for impact! 20 hours ago
Journalistic hardcases: "the cynicism of a brothel madame with the self-righteousness of a lynch mob" http://tinyurl.com/39yqk7c22 hours ago
Chilling video of Caracas aka "embassy of hell" where the residents are literally drowning in blood http://youtu.be/5YJQuIxijl42010/09/08
@footenotes No, thank YOU for sharing @mixmobi with us & letting us feature you in the book. Next up: iPad & iPhone design. Expect a call. 2010/09/07
