Inspire

Stats on Digital Media - A Global View from Morgan Stanley by Mary Meeker

Great overview, recommended viewing. Watch the part on China and mobile. I was recently in China for one week with 40 Dutch entrepreneurs and innovators in digital media. It was my highlight of this year so far. Impressive stats on the Chinese mobile market like 550 million mobile phone users, 56 million mobile internet users (while 3G services are just one month active in this huge market) and China Mobile is 4 times the market value of Vodafone and thus the largest mobile operator (MNO) in the whole world. Clearly, in a few years most mobile innovation will come from China due to their incredible ambition, growth (potential), economies of scale and availability of hundreds of thousands of highly educated and eager mobile/IT graduates across the whole mobile ecosystem. Yearly, that is ;-) Think about the implications of these numbers for a few minutes...

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New Innovations from Japan: Japanese Super Creators

Below a video from Google TechTalk. Some highly innovative applications are highlighted related to mobile LBS visualization apps, OCR software with automated integration into Google Docs and Spreadsheet, edgy video/movie editing software, a HTML PC doc to Flash Mobile doc conversion tool and a push-delivery system for real-time web content with scheduling features.

Highly recommended !

Kevin Kelly on the Evolution of Value Creation and Business Models on the Web (Better Than Free)

Better Than Free is a new blog post by Kevin Kelly with a lot of buzz on the web this week. It is about the evolution of business models and value creation on the web. Important piece of thinking, especially for all those involved in the digital content/entertainment business. In my view this post resonates with the attention economy and the emerging business models within social networks/platforms (recommendtions, social economy). Additionally, people pay in my view increasingly for experiences (physical and social) and context and less for the content itself. Both are relatively scarce.

"When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. Well, what can't be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

There are 8 key value drivers : Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation/Support, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability"

A Search Engine for Virtual Worlds by Google and Linden Lab

Search within Virtual Worlds is reaching the next level in post from Technology Review on searching more effectively and socially within Second Life. Tagging is useful but fallable. Long term, objects in virtual worlds will in my view be recognized just like in (Mobile) Augmented Reality.

"In addition to being able to search for objects, residents can now look for information--about hobbies, for example--in each other's profiles. Dzwigalski says she expects that being able to search profile information will improve Second Life's social features.

Before Linden Lab announced its new tool, third-party companies, such as Electric Sheep, were working on their own to improve search in Second Life and other virtual worlds. "The search capability in the worlds has been historically quite basic," says Giff Constable, who leads the Electric Sheep's software business unit. Constable says that his company was sending bots into Second Life to pick up virtual objects and extract data from them in order to compile search results. "The analogy would be to Alta Vista in the early days of the Web, before Google came around and became able to rank things for popularity," Constable says. He adds that his company hopes to take advantage of the new search tool from Linden Lab and will focus on providing additional tools for social networking and e-commerce."

The War Tapes : Impressive, Real and User Generated Videos from the Iraq War

Just saw a new video on TED on The War Tapes, a powerful and courageous documentary with user generated videos shot by soldiers themselves during the Iraq-US war. Impressive stuff, especially the emotional degradation illuminated in the trailer as well as the speech itself by Deborah Scranton. Watch for the last 4 minutes. 

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) : Milestone For All Of Us

Sometimes a new website is launched touching every cell in my body. Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is such  a website. As a nature lover I believe this is an excellent resource. Thrilling, exciting, moving, inspiring, important, enchanting and above all transcending as this is a milestone for the world, ecology and humanity. Great ! Thanks to E.O. Wilson and TED. The video below shows it all...

"Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity."

On Citizendium versus Wikipedia, Digital Maoism and the Difference between Wisdom of the Crowd and Collective Intelligence

A fantastic post by Larry Sanger on Edge on Wikipedia and other forms of mass online opinion. It is about subjectivity and objectivity, about equal access and authority, about meritocracy and reputational systems. Sanger is co-founder of Wikipedia and started a competitor called Citizendium (Wikipedia with real names and experts-integration). Sangers' deepens my previous posts on journalists and bloggers, on who controls entries on Wikipedia from a PR point of view and on Jaron Laniers' Digital Maoism. Highly recommended reading and watch out for Citizendium to grow rapidly !

"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.  An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with.

But that's exactly what happens on wikis, and on Wikipedia.  To be able to work together at all, consensus and compromise are the name of the game.  As a result, the Wikipedian "crowd" can often agree upon some pretty ridiculous claims, which are very far from both expert opinion and from anything like an "average" of public opinion on a subject.  I don't mean to say that the Wikipedia process is not robust and does not produce a lot of correct answers.  It is and it does.  But the process does not closely resemble the "wise crowd" phenomena that Surowiecki is explaining.

The desire for fairness creates hostility toward any authority—and not just when authority uses its power to gain an unfair advantage, but toward authority as such. That is, the most radical egalitarians advocate that our situations be made as equal as possible, including in terms of authority.  But, in our specialist-friendly modern society, expertise can confer much authority not available to non-experts. Perhaps the most important and fundamental authority experts have is the authority to declare what is known. This authority, then, should be placed in the hands of everyone equally, according to a thoroughgoing egalitarianism.

I support meritocracy: I think experts deserve a prominent voice in declaring what is known, because knowledge is their life. As fallible as they are, experts, as society has traditionally identified them, are more likely to be correct than non-experts, particularly when a large majority of independent experts about an issue are in broad agreement about it. In saying this, I am merely giving voice to an assumption that underlies many of our institutions and practices. Experts know particular topics particularly well. By paying closer attention to experts, we improve our chances of getting the truth; by ignoring them, we throw our chances to the wind. Thus, if we reduce experts to the level of the rest of us, even when they speak about their areas of knowledge, we reduce society's collective grasp of the truth.

It is no exaggeration to say that epistemic egalitarianism, as illustrated especially by Wikipedia, places Truth in the service of Equality. Ultimately, at the bottom of the debate, the deep modern commitment to specialization is in an epic struggle with an equally deep modern commitment to egalitarianism. It's Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I'm on the side of Truth."

Web = Youniversity ; Fora.TV and Research Channel Complement TED, Edge, Google TechTalks and YouTube

We already have YouTube Science, TED, Edge and Google TechTalks (all of favorites of mine). That is a real blessing ! But now we also have Fora.TV and Research Channel. Thanks to Wall Street Journal for pointing these two out. Just great !

When will Joost (P2P on demand TV coming soon) integrate all of these videos while leveraging the social networking options, annotations, tags and other metadata (more in my earlier post on Joost) ?

Who needs a university or any other physical school ? The stuff available in these six (video) sites is just mind-boggling and growing every day.

Two questions remain:

• Is there any way in which we can reduce our sleep period ? ;-)
• How can integrate Nintendo Wii technology in these sites to guarantee our physical workout and reduce obesity ? ;-)

Bloggers, Journalists, Flow Organizers, New and Old Media, Convergence and Mass Collaboration

I couldn't agree more with the quotes below from this post from Bruno Giussani (one of my favorite bloggers). Amen !

It even applies to the corporate environment...professionals will increasingly be enablers, knowledge integrators and less experts, leveraging their networks of experts and the ideas of the mass. Mass Collaboration by Don Tapscott in terms of the Wiki Workplace.

"At a recent conference in California, Ethan Zuckerman, the Harvard-based co-founder of GlobalVoices
was asked whether newspaper and television editors were still relevant in these days of participatory, "citizen" journalism. He offered the best answer I've heard so far on that question: "Don't speak. Point!" By which he meant: the days of journalists and editors "speaking on behalf of people" or "speaking to people" are over. "Point to people and get out of the way," he said.

A pretty radical statement. But Zuckerman didn't mean that the days of editors and journalists are past. He was rather suggesting that with facts, information and opinions circulating freely and broadly, their role is changing into that of facilitator, coach, flow organizer.

The new power of editors and journalists will depend on their ability to take on new tasks: to animate a group of people; to develop ways to organize how information is gathered and used, with the participation of what used to be called "the audience;" and to help people navigate an information landscape that's increasingly crowded and constantly shifting.

The direct implication is that the newspaper and the television/radio channel are no longer a mere product --and that they have to relinquish their self-representation as "beacons" or "heralds." They have to become places. Places where people from the community converge, stop by, make connections and come back again to build a common future. Places where most of the social, informational, entertainment and economic value is created not by the journalists and publishers, but by the members of the community. Encourage the exploration of ways to connect communities using digital media. Because, of course, the most powerful content of all, is people themselves. A key role of the media in the future will be to provide the places—to become the platform—for people to link what they know with who they know, and to expand both their knowledge and their network.

What does all this say about the future of journalism? At least three things. First, journalists will be around for a long time. Secondly, they need not fear what's coming because it will be exciting and vastly expand their possibilities. But, thirdly, they will need to reinvent themselves as a skilled part of a crowd rather than as lecturers, to become more tolerant of ambiguity, to become fluent in both the tech innovations and the shifts in social dynamics that are driving the development of media."

Update on Joost, Web 3.0 and Metadata

A very important post on Joost from NewTeeVee in this post. Joost is one of the first Web 3.0/Semantic Web companies around integrating RDF in their P2P TV product. Clearly, Joost will be the biggest success on the web in 2007. Convergence Culture from Henry Jenkins applied in a creative way.

"The notion of using this type of data for some creative mashups first came up on the Ironic Sans blog, where a Joost fan by the name of David Friedman brainstormed about a feature that he would like to see in the client: The ability to share comments on the programming based on each show’s timeline. Says Friedman: “Imagine watching a show like Heroes once, and then watching it again with comments turned on to see what other people caught that you missed.” Joost is planning "trivia” that pops up at specified timestamps and will timestamped tagging, commenting, annotation, etc.”

So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming.

Imagine a personalized TV channel that only serves you shows your friends are literally talking about. Or think about the way this could transform programming itself. What if the Lost folks didn’t do their next Alternative Reality Game on the web, but in Joost itself, allowing you to collaborate with your friends and collect clues while watching the show? Now that’s what I would call combining the best of TV and the net."