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:
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.
This is the final slice of the Calacanis keynote, where he concludes by showing off some of his ideas for online content sites to start effectively monetizing their audience’s attention. For example, he shows off a movie trailer that could run before users are allowed to start their Facebook session. He asks how many people [...] [...more]
This is the final slice of the Calacanis keynote, where he concludes by showing off some of his ideas for online content sites to start effectively monetizing their audience’s attention. For example, he shows off a movie trailer that could run before users are allowed to start their Facebook session.
He asks how many people in the audience would stop using Facebook or Twitter if they had to put up with ads before they used them. Although few people raised their hands in such a public setting, I tend to think that a lot of people would start to desert these services if they start to cram advertising down the audience’s throats.
Also – not sure if advertising is all that viable a business model to base your hopes on – with the economy in such shambles, businesses have cut back on advertising in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.
At the end, he returns to his attention-grabbing theme of “Just take the money! We can destroy traditional media once and for all!”
Once more, a great big shout-out to OMMA for a great conference, packed with ad & marketing people who, will deeply worried, are still trying to find a path to the future whereby the media can start functioning again. It may not look like it did in the past, but we’ve kinda known this day was coming.
Calacanis referred to this as “The Bridge.” He starts off with a little more digital triumphalism, and then talks about the real numbers behind the economic downturn, and the 20% chance of civil unrest, riots in the streets, cats&dogs living together, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, etc. etc. It’s quite canny of him to stick a [...] [...more]
Calacanis referred to this as “The Bridge.” He starts off with a little more digital triumphalism, and then talks about the real numbers behind the economic downturn, and the 20% chance of civil unrest, riots in the streets, cats&dogs living together, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, etc. etc.
It’s quite canny of him to stick a mood-changer like this in the middle of his presentation. A relentless parade of stats (allegedly) proving that digital media will win out over all outmoded forms of communication, and we will join hands and walk into the sunrise of a brave new day … would be sickening. So he threw this in here to address the fears of economic meltdown that were at the core of this conference (after all, the title was “Tools for Tackling the Downturn”).
In the early going, he can’t resist taking yet another swipe at “Old Media” saying that the audience cannot be measured – or that it can, but that the Nielsen stats are “bullshit.” Which there is a certain logic to – advertisers who buy display ads are charged as though every single reader of the newspaper is going to open to that page and look at the ad. Of course, we all know that they are not – that the ad rates are actually based on the “potential audience.”
And what Jason doesn’t really go into here is that there are some very sophisticated media analysts grinding numbers and coming up with some alternatives to the “Search Is God” theory he’s plugging.
I’ll post the video of that later – if I don’t decide to turn it into a larger story for a magazine or website – but basically, media buyers/planners are starting to get hip to the fact that search swoops in at the last second in the decision-making process of consumers, and takes all the credit for their buying choice. Meanwhile, if they had never known that there were, say, alternate iPhone headphones that actually sound good and don’t fall out of your ears – then they would not have been able to search for it.
My own prediction: in the next couple of years, we’re going to see content make a comeback.
That is, if the second part of Jason’s bit here doesn’t come to pass, and we’re all either fricasseed by angry mobs, or hiding out in the hills, living like the Gyro-Captain in “Road Warrior.”
HD video demands – at pretty decent color depth & resolution - about 15-25 megs. (Well, unless you’re trying to deal with uncompressed 1080i HD, which calls for about 400 megs - but the only reason to do that is to capture/edit, rather than watch, which is a whole other can o’ crawlies.) That means [...] [...more]
HD video demands – at pretty decent color depth & resolution - about 15-25 megs. (Well, unless you’re trying to deal with uncompressed 1080i HD, which calls for about 400 megs - but the only reason to do that is to capture/edit, rather than watch, which is a whole other can o’ crawlies.) That means that a 4G phone is basically the final linking device to provide the addressable TV & instant content delivery that we’ve all been blathering about for the last 20 years.
This article on Gizmodo is about the clearest, best-written piece I’ve stumbled across in the last year or so of baking my noodle in the alphabet soup broth of mobile media acronyms.
But what’s so special about WiMax and LTE? And how fast can they really get? Very simply, West told us, “The magic is the channel width.” LTE and WiMax use really fat wireless channels, so they can move a lot of data at once. For example, AT&T’s Kafka told us that “peak speed for LTE in 10MHz is about 140Mbps and peak speed in 20MHz is about 300Mbps.”
Did you see that? 300Mbps? Over the air? Whoooa. Well, don’t let your panties get blown away yet. Yes, 4G will be way faster than 3G. But don’t expect Asian city internet speeds wirelessly in the next couple of years. Clearwire’s Barry West throws a bit of cold water on the ridiculously scorching speeds you might see hyped for LTE: To get to that 170Mbps, “that’s like 8.5 bits per hertz and I’ve never seen a system achieve more than 5 bits per hertz.” Huh? Basically, it doesn’t take a whole lot of interference to slow your connection down, because it and WiMax use a complicated modulation scheme that you can’t have constantly cranked to 11. So real world speeds will be slower.
This, coupled with the laser-projection capabilities being built into the next phones, and the ever-smaller and higher-rez cameras, is pointing to one helluva information device in the future – one that can capture, upload, download and display crystal-clear video.
“In the future everyone will be a television network. For 15 minutes.”
Quick glossary:
4G: 4th-Generation cellphone. The big clunky analog beasts that we used up til the late 90s were 1G. The switchover to digital (when bad connections were echo-y and robot-sounding rather than crackly and static like bad radio reception) put us to 2G. iPhones operated at 2.5G, which means data rates of about 200K. The faster data rate is 3G.
CDMA/1XRTT/EVDO: The compression & transmission technology sets used by Verizon and Sprint. Popular in Korea, Japan, South America and U.S.
GSM/EDGE/HSDPA: The data transmission sets used by AT&T and T-mobile. Everyone in Europe uses GSM technology. It allows you to swap SIM cards between phones, but is slightly less efficient than CDMA.
LTE/WiMax: The coming data transmission standards that phone companies have been beating to death for the past 10 years. LTE = Long Term Evolution. This is a the data speed that will also be known as 4G.
This is the mayor of Kharkov, and he was trying to record a TV campaign commercial, but couldn't manage to string enough coherent words together to spit out a sentence.
I was particularly impressed by the torrent of expletive-laced abuse hurled at this guy by the director (who we see in some of the early shots). I think this must have come at the end of an exhausting filming session, because the director is just going off on him in a way that would put Joe Pytka to shame. [...more]
Hire this director and have him start whipping Christian Bale into shape.
This video had my class rolling with laughter – it’s slightly NSFW (mainly with the cussing in the subtitles, although if your office has Russian speakers, they might object).
This is the mayor of Kharkov, and he was trying to record a TV campaign commercial, but couldn’t manage to string enough coherent words together to spit out a sentence. Apparently, he’s notoriously stupid – “The Sarah Palin of Ukraine” – and is the subject of much mockery & head-shaking.
I was particularly impressed by the torrent of expletive-laced abuse hurled at this guy by the director (who we see in some of the early shots). I think this must have come at the end of an exhausting filming session, because the director is just going off on him in a way that would put Joe Pytka to shame.
Gems include: “Try to have an expression. Come on, at least try. Let’s go, let’s go.” “Misha, stop this crap. Really, stop it.”
D: “Why the fuck did you take your hand away?
M:”I finished?”
D: “So fucking what. You finished! Sit one second, motherfucker. OK, we have to do this all over again. From the top…”
D: “Your face is boring. Nobody is going to give you any money.”
Please, can anyone out there who has access to the footage of Palin campaign commercial filming post the outtakes to the web? Because I think the wolf-shootin’ turky-genocidin’ Caribou Barbie must’ve had sessions like this. Then again, maybe she had the offending directors fed to polar bears.
General interest sites, however ... well, let me put it this way. Check out the sode aisle in the supermarket next time you're there. Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Coke, Coke Blak, Regular Coke, No-Caffeine Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Caffeine Free Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke with Vitamins.
Each of those products exists because there is a niche out there that wants to drink them. Why would Coke want to waste its ad dollars for health nuts that want a soda that has vitamins and that they can delude themselves into thinking that is "good for them" ... on a site that has an audience of cigar-smoking red-meat-eaters?
The advertisers have had to fragment their products. Those fragmented products have to be marketed just to the people who are going to buy them, or they are not viable. That means that the platforms that those products advertise on have to be similarly well-defined.
The root of the problems with mass media isn't that there isn't interest in the information - it's that the advertising money is shifting away to places where the audience is better defined & targetable. [...more]
This is going to have to be quick – I haven’t had any spare time to blog, since I’ve been finishing up on editing the Great Big Scary Project, and I have to churn out my intros to said project, along with sprucing up my multimedia examples for my trip to Kiev.
But – two items this week converged (yeah, there’s that word) to illustrate one of the powerful, emerging lessons about New Media. It’s one that I learned years ago, when I first rode a couple of dot-bombs all the way down into the crater.
Big site traffic numbers do not necessarily mean big money. Read More
The landscape up here is so beautiful, and the light has been amazing. I’ve taken to experimenting with combining multiple exposures into HDR photos. Here’s a view from atop Mt. Vision. This one needs a bit more adjusting – the fog clouds look pretty good, but the highlights of the sky & clouds in the [...] [...more]
The landscape up here is so beautiful, and the light has been amazing. I’ve taken to experimenting with combining multiple exposures into HDR photos.
Here’s a view from atop Mt. Vision. This one needs a bit more adjusting – the fog clouds look pretty good, but the highlights of the sky & clouds in the upper left need to be processed a bit better. Still this was a beautiful, amazing scene. (This was done with the HDR functions of Adobe Photoshop CS3)
Next, here’s that same scene, as handled by Photomatix:
You can clearly see the difference – in the Photomatix version, the color in the foreground pops out, without sacrificing the contrast & color in the fog banks in the background. I’ll be posting a video of the fog drifting in through the trees later…
…and now, as a break from the heavy news about New Media & the near-constant anger & backbiting going on over whether or not civilization as we know it will survive another aggregate circulation decline… Here’s a reminder that creativity and innovation still exist, and are being used to make beautiful things. Relax and enjoy: [...] [...more]
…and now, as a break from the heavy news about New Media & the near-constant anger & backbiting going on over whether or not civilization as we know it will survive another aggregate circulation decline…
Here’s a reminder that creativity and innovation still exist, and are being used to make beautiful things. Relax and enjoy:
I received the tweet earlier today, and it rocked my world like a bombshell. It was from Scott Beale, owner/operator/provocateur of the Laughing Squid collective of digital mischiefmakers. It read “what could you possibility be doing right now that is better than watching a cat ride a Roomba http://ping.fm/DRqoO” Here is the video embedded here, [...] [...more]
I received the tweet earlier today, and it rocked my world like a bombshell. It was from Scott Beale, owner/operator/provocateur of the Laughing Squid collective of digital mischiefmakers.
It read “what could you possibility be doing right now that is better than watching a cat ride a Roomba http://ping.fm/DRqoO”
Here is the video embedded here, but I encourage you all to click over to Laughing Squid, just so’s he can get some page traffic. Genius such as this must not go unrewarded.
I was forced to click over. What right-thinking person would not?
The conclusion is obvious. There is not one single thing that would be more important to do right now than to watch a cat riding a Roomba.
It makes me want to install wall-to-wall carpet in my house, just so I can justify getting a Roomba to see if my cats will do this. I love the rather scholarly air the cat seems to have, as though he were pondering one of the great questions of life, the universe & everything. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is, indeed a Zen Master Cat, and that he accepts the abrupt changes in speed, direction and scenery as all part of the temptations of Maya, the World of Illusion, and that the only appropriate response to such temptations is to adopt a calm, contemplative approach to the vagaries of the paths we travel as we journey through Life’s Rich Pageant. His purr is the equivalent of an “Ommmm” mantra.
Or maybe it’s just that the Roomba gets warm as it operates, and the kitty just wants to toast his butt a little.
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.
