Jan 11
Posted: under Multimedia, Travel.
Just playing around with some of the photos I’ve shot over the years – this one is a panorama of the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s an amazing town – ancient and modern, and at the time this photo was taken, baking at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
The statue barely visible in the distance is the goddess of Tbilisi; she greets you with a cup of wine, if you are a friend. The sword, if you are not. (click to embiggen)
Sep 27
Posted: under Digital Migration, Multimedia, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Online (Multi)Media, Viral Fame.
This is painted on the ceiling of the Rila Monastery in the mountains of Bulgaria, one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites.
I can’t help but wonder whose eye this ancient artist used as the model for the Eye of God. The history and beauty of this complex makes me feel like I’m about to embark on some sort of DaVinci Code-like adventure, only this one will involve online business models and the mysteries of HTML5. Heh. Hopefully, I won’t be pursued by some self-flagellating Newsroom Curmudgeon, bent on undermining my message about how there is actually hope for the future, that journalism will survive, even if it does take a form that is strange and possibly abhorrent to the practitioners steeped in The Old Ways.
I’m traveling to Bulgaria (and to this amazing historical site) to lead a series of panel discussions with scholars, students and the nascent digerati on the future of journalism in the digital age, hopefully continuing in my role as an international Digital Johnny Appleseed. The training session we did yesterday at the Institute of the Americas in La Jolla was amazing – one of the best groups we’ve ever presented to, and one where we could see already that journalists from all over Latin America were discovering on their own, ways that they could cooperate and help each other across the vast distances.
And once again, I shall be completely shameless and link to the recordings on UStream of the live sessions, featuring my wife Janine.
Jul 07
Posted: under Art, Multimedia, new media, Travel, Web/Tech.
Tags: addis ababa, artwork, Ethiopia, Ku Klux Klan, Obama, painting, training
I found this painting in a humble little clothing stall in the merkato in Addis Ababa, during my last day there, when I finally got some free time to wander around and explore this fascinating city a little bit.
It surprised me to find such an accurate depiction of the garb of the KKK in faraway Ethiopia. I guess movies or popular culture have exposed even the ordinary people around the world to our more sordid side...
Amongst all the funky art & tchotchkes, this painting caught my eye for obvious reasons.
What you can’t see, of course, are all the other exemplars of Obama’s presence here in East Africa. People walk around with Obama’s face on t-shirts, bumper stickers, hats … his face is pasted onto the clear glass shelves in the jewelry shops, and to the sides of the little “blue mule” micro-buses.
This is a good thing.
Invisible to just about everyone in the U.S., we are in a struggle for influence in Africa, which more and more people are calling “The Last Frontier.” China is spreading around the oceans of money (that we gave them in exchange for cheap plastic consumer goods, but that’s another story), and they are doing it in a very tricky, manipulative way. The U.S. and Western Europe have had decades of work, trying to figure out ways to actually benefit countries with their foreign aid. It has not been the easiest process.
However, we have figured out that nation-building takes time. Lots of it. And the investments tend to be gradual, building up infrastructure, institutions, ecosystems. The kinds of things that people really don’t see all at once – but if you take a snapshot of a country 10 or 20 years apart, you see the radical transformations. I know I did when I went back to both Colombia and Venezuela after 20 years absence in 2007-8.
In Addis Ababa, the modern struggles to catch up with the ancient.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are throwing up big, showy projects. Roads, bridges, dams, buildings. And slapping their branding all over them. Ordinary people see this and say, “Well look, the Chinese are actually doing something for us. What do the ferengi leave behind? They talk a lot, but what do we have to show for it all?”
In this kind of environment, having an African-American as President of these here United States is a definite advantage.
May 19
Posted: under advertising, Beyond HD Video, Digital Migration, iPhone - Hype and Reality, monetizing mobile content, Multimedia, New Media Strategery, Online (Multi)Media, Online Video, television.
…HTML5? Not so much…
In a move certain to cause much gleeful cackling and dry-washing of hands at Adobe HQ, Hulu and Delve announced that they are sticking with Flash, rather than making the Jobs-mandated move to HTML5.
The money graf from Delve:
Adobe Flash provides: ability to secure content, adaptive bitrate streaming, comprehensive
analytics and monetization of video through a wide array of advertising
options. Customers that are using our mobile delivery solution are
willing to experiment with video on these new devices to figure out what
works and to keep their existing customers happy. But they all expect
that eventually the mobile/tablet features match that of the Flash
player on the PC.
Hulu said:
When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve
the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content
partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other. We
continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet
meet all of our customers’ needs. Our player doesn’t just simply stream
video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our
advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure
premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine
how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other
things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video
sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and
often contractual requirements.
Behind these two statements, back in the misty shadows, loom the outlines of the Hollywood studios and TV networks. I’m guessing the last couple of weeks have seen lots of closed-door meetings about what happens when we all start watching TV & movies on our iPad(-like) devices.
The problem with just abandoning responsibility letting the Apple empire do all the driving is that, as we have seen in the last couple of months, Apple’s hidden face is starting to emerge. And it ain’t pretty. Allowing Apple to control the flow of content through its ever-expaning iTunes store just means that you’ve given up the pricing and distribution power on your creative products.
Ask the music industry guys how that worked out for them.
If you can find any, that is.
So let’s take a look at the objection of the big video players to Apple’s vision of the future:
1. Content security. If you don’t think that the movie & TV guys have been sweating blood over the nightmare scenario of their business model going the way of CDs, think again. For the last five years, I’ve been going to tech conferences in and around LA, and at each and every one, the most popular booths are the ones touting various DRM/security features. Now, publishers such as O’Reilly may hold that “DRM is more costly than piracy”, but in the executive suites at the studios, that is a minority view.
You just can’t make a business out of producing $200 million movies like Iron Man 2, and then hope to recoup your costs by giving away the content, and hoping … ads will support it? Or that you will sell enough merch through wider audience? Nuh-uh.
Adobe and the Flash team have spent years banging on various content-security technologies, some of which tout NSA-level encryption schemes to try to mollify the big content creators. I’m guessing there’s not much love for Apple’s “blind faith” scenario with HTML5.
2. Adaptive bitrate streaming. Sounds like something a character played by Dan Aykroyd in his heyday would have spat out in staccato fashion. Basically, it means that when the web is congested (or your bus travels between a couple of skyscrapers as you watch video on your Droidphone), the video will momentarily de-res a bit until the signal is once again clear. We’ve found that having a momentarily blurry(ier) video is far less disruptive to the viewer than having fits, starts, jumps and the little hourglass on the screen.
Not having this technology means that watching a video is going to become a throwback to the early days of the web … when you’d be downloading a GIF and watching the lines appear … and then hesitate … think about it … then another line appears … then it hangs for a minute … then ten lines appear all at once … then you start clicking in frustration, trying to get to another page that doesn’t so closely resemble a chamber of Hell.
If you really want to Geek Out, check out this excellent deconstruction of the (supposed) HTML5 video standard VP8 on the x264 blog. It explains far better than I can all the nitty-gritty issues behind the hype on “open source” video codecs. Again: not pretty.
3. Analytics. Apple is maintaining that firewall for content served through its store & technologies. You can get raw numbers, such as how many people downloaded the app/video. But nothing more than that. Which feeds into the next point, big time –
4. Advertising. The big selling point for online/mobile video over broadcast is that we’re better able to target the ads to the users, based on the data we collect from cookies, user agents, location, time, etc. If this is missing, so is the competitive advantage, and the dollars start flowing back to tried-and-true TV.
Also, HTML5 is not as robust an ad-serving technology. For Hulu, which is the bigtime play of the TV networks, if the ads can be skipped as easily as with a TiVo, or excised altogether, what then is the point of serving up all that content for free? If the advertisers aren’t getting any value for sponsoring the programs then they quite simply … won’t. And then where does that leave us with our fancy new tablets? Watching more dancing cat on piano keyboard videos?
Apple quite simply does not care about that. Their point is not to help content creators or advertisers. Their focus is on selling as many overpriced gadgets as possible, and then locking the users into having to pay thru the nose thru Apple’s store to actually get any content to watch/listen/read on that gadget.
Jan 23
Posted: under E-ink devices, Mobile advertising technology, monetizing mobile content, Multimedia, new media, Platform obsession, Web Tech.
Tags: barnes & noble, e-reader, nook
Setting a couple of bookworms loose to play with the next generation e-readers is like setting Augustus Gloop loose in the Wonka Chocolate factory.
The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family.
Dec 16
Posted: under Multimedia, New Marketing, new media, Online Video, Video, Webconomics.
Tags: Bad Romance, business model, fetish objects, infomercial, Lady GaGa, Marshall McLuhan, music video, Nemiroff vodka
The song itself is kinda beside the point – it’s bubblegum synth-disco-pop, about as bland and processed as the stuff the taxi drivers in Moscow used to subject me to on the way back & forth from my gig there. Which may be why it’s getting so many views – this is the kind of stuff that works internationally, since the thumping beat and lyric structure make it sound pretty much interchangeable with everything else on the radio.
Can't wait until she starts marketing the exploding bustier shown here; Madonna's Wannabees all wore their undies over their shirts. Wonder if GaGaEttes are going to be lighting their smokes off their flaming boobs.
But the real action here is in the video to the song. Blew my mind. Didn’t think that people had budgets like this anymore. Costumes that would make Gaultier sick with envy — white latex with “Where the Wild Things Are” shiny plastic crowns, some kinda homage to LeeLoo’s orange strappy outfit in The Fifth Element and a Eastern European mobster/white sex-slave buyer with a steampunk-ish articulated brass chin. Looked to my eye like about a week in production, probably about $500K in total costs of models, locations, crews, lighting, post-production.
The plot seems to be that Lady GaGa wakes from her sleep the way normal people do – by sticking her hand out of a gleaming white Tylenol-shaped coffin – getting forced to drink high-end vodka and the gyrate for & be sold to a bunch of strange pervy dudes.I half expected to see Liam Neeson kicking someone’s ass in the backdrop and telling her, “Here’s the scary part. You’re going to be taken…”
Nobody does these kinds of elaborate music videos anymore, because there is no way to recoup that kinda cash from the moribund music industry.- at least, not until now.As Dan Neil points out in the LA Times
the “Bad Romance” video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.
This isn’t a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.
I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does.
No, you need to sell things that people can’t copy – or at least, if they do, it kinda defeats the purpose. So Lady GaGa’s come up with the list of high-end commercial goods to do “Hero Shots” of in the video and obviously done revenue deals with them.
As a business model, I have to say hats off to the Lady. She’s adapted to the draining of value from the content (i.e. nobody actually buys music anymore – at least, not like they used to), and migrated over to where the money still lies.
When advertising no longer works, when information is a commodity in which we all drown for free, then the only things that are left that have any value are physical objects that we can wear, eat, drive or plug in, as well as what cultural anthropologists call “fetish objects” that bestow special status because they signify that we hae enough disposable income so as to be able to waste a couple grand on some gaudy sunglasses.
I’m not sure if this is the way that all news & entertainment is going to have to go in the future. All of it sponsored, with big shout-outs to the guys footing the bills worked into the info-stream every 10 seconds or so. I do know that if this works, we’re going to see a lot more of these “branded videos” online.
Oct 17
Posted: under Multimedia, new media.
Tags: adsense clickfraud, blog monetization, Blogging, New Marketing, New Media Migration, paywalls, Politics & New Media
This is the last class I taught in Astana – they were very engaged with the idea of moving from traditional media to “New Media,” particularly with blogging. The main question on everyone’s mind was “How do I drive more traffic to my site?”
I didn't know the Russian phrase for "Group hug, people!" So I just stood in the back and spread out my arms.
I showed them some of the very basic tools to promote your content – the simplest being the blast e-mail alert to people you’ve signed up on a subscription list. A couple of people in the class were already up on Twitter, and I sang that particular gospel, as well as the advantages of setting up Facebook groups or using the same functionality in the Russian equivalent, which is a Classmates.com-alike.
As always, the skill level in the audience was very uneven. Some people were way out in front of the pack, others seemed to be lost. I tried to deliver a wide variety of tools to hit everyone. I got just a couple of hours to do some very basic tourism after this session. The scale of the construction going on here is truly awe-inspiring.
It's pretty chilly here; not snowing yet, but it's thinking about it - thus the heavy clothes. Also, behind me is the new Presidential Palace.
Aug 04
Posted: under Design, Multimedia, New Marketing, Uncategorized, visual storytelling.
Tags: Adobe MAX, animated, conference, Los Angeles, popularity, tag cloud, UGC
I stumbled across this today while poking around at the new Adobe products, trying to decide whether it’s worth it to upgrade to CS4 for the new features in Premiere Pro and Photoshop, or to just hang on to CS3.
Anyway, this is a 3-D animated tag cloud to promote the Adobe MAX conference here in LA; but I think they might want to regulate this a bit more, because some of the user-chosen tags are getting a little … pungent. Hey. That’s pretty good. Maybe I’ll go there and add “pungent” to the mix…
Jun 29
Posted: under journalism, Multimedia, Uncategorized.
Tags: cat, death, Duce, life, loss, love
On Friday, I lost my cat Duce to a terrible and swift-striking illness. I am going to devote this post to remembering him, because he was such a large & special part of my life for the last 8 years. This is the last notice my friend will receive on this earth, and I want to do this right, to honor what he meant to me and to the other people he charmed and brightened the lives of.
If this strikes you as over the top, please click over to the regularly scheduled media criticism & analysis; but let me have a moment here, please, because this has struck me at a deep & unexpected level.
Our Honeymoon Never Ended
Apr 24
Posted: under Amusing Nonsense, Art, journalism, Multimedia, Online Video, Uncategorized, Video, Viral Fame, visual storytelling, Webconomics.
Tags: Evil Clowns, Friday Noon Videos, Seth Rogen, slow-motion camera, stop-motion video, viral hits, viral videos
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:
