Neal Stephenson - author of Snow Crash and one of the inspirators for the web, Metaverse and Multiverse - shows us his views on (inner) geeks, science fiction, different genres, tv, cinema, books and taking your audience more seriously on an intellectual level to boost identification. Hurray for all the geeks !
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...
This evening around 10 PM local Dutch time the first peer produced television session called Zomaargasten will be aired LIVE on the web. Based on the popular Dutch VPRO TV program called Zomergasten.
I hope you will join this highly interactive session with me and a lot of other Dutch Twitter users.
Stunning. Cost-effective and practical holographic video is around the corner. More in this link from Technology Review. I used to think the development of holographic storage and video would take many years to come. Somehow MIT is advancing faster than predicted. How does it work ? The modulator converts a video signal into a vibration. When laser light is passed through the modulator, the vibrations modify the brightness and frequency of the light. The altered light is then shined on a screen, and the varying intensities and frequencies create a three-dimensional hologram.
What does this mean ? Will 3D video become mainstream across the board ? (e.g. 3D TV, 3D movies, 3D Web (Web 3.0; Google Earth+SketchUp as well as Second Life) and 3D printers). Or does 2D still provide most value while the different 3D propositions fill in niche applications ? When is 2D best and when 3D ? In my view 3D will become standaard within 10 years across the board due to the enriched experience, lower costs and practical benefits. And when will (smart) mobile devices become 3D ? And which exciting eMarketing videos can be made using holography ?
"The tyranny of two-dimensional computer and TV displays could soon be over. A team of MIT researchers has proposed a way to make a holographic video system that works with computer hardware for consumers, such as PCs with graphics cards and gaming consoles. The display, the researchers say, will be small enough to add to an entertainment center, provide resolution as good as a standard analog television, and cost only a couple hundred dollars.
A holographic video display could provide another way to view medical images such as MRIs and CT scans, as well as sets of complex, multidimensional data and designs for furniture and cars, says V. Michael Bove Jr., director of the consumer electronics program, CELab, at MIT. And the system would be a natural fit for displaying video games and virtual worlds."
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:
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."
This post by Bob Garfield on AdAge is recommended for all traditional media owners, marketers, advertisers and ad agencies. It is quite a read but it shows that the current meltdown of traditional media due to rise of digital media is accellerating. It deepens the thoughts of Joseph Jaffe, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, Chris Anderson, Henry Jenkins, John Battelle, Kevin Kelly, Don Tapscott and puts them in the light of actual financial and commercial facts and trends in the advertising space.
Marketing, branding and communications will become more about
""People are interested in what they are interested in," he says. "The magical
part of social networking like Ning is the people [specific category] advertisers are
interested in are magically coming together." And they're trackable all the way
down to the individual user, so why waste anyone's time with what co-founder
Gina Bianchini calls "undifferentiated aspirational messages"? As for how
you serve the information once you've gotten the audience's attention, the
digital tools for doing so get ever more impressive.
One particular
eye-opener, from Vancouver, Canada, is VideoClix, a hypervideo application that lets the user roll
over any part of the image -- a car in the background, for instance -- and click
for information about make, model and so on. A second click directs the user to
the manufacturer, retailer or whatever. It's like VH1's old "Pop-Up Video" show,
only the user alone controls what to pop up. Thus, it exploits the online third
dimension, beyond audio and video: info-depth. "It's a layer of
information," says founder Babak Maghfourian, "that people will demand.""
Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins
(MIT) must be
one of my all-time favorite business books. Just finished reading it. Just
awesome ! This is a milestone book integrating the thoughts, ideas and insights
from seminal works like Howard Rheingolds' Smart Mobs, Yochai Benklers' Wealth of Networks, Chris Andersons' The Long Tail, Joseph Pine IIs The Experience
Economy and David Weinbergers/Doc Searls' The
Cluetrain Manifesto.
Not only integrates but extends in certain ways as can be seen below in some
quotes from this amazing book. Themes in the book are: reality TV, machinima,
Current.tv, gaming, transmedia storystelling, fan culture, The Matrix,
mash-ups, The Sims, alternative reality games, Idols, Survivor, Big Brother,
beta reading, Star Wars, anime, Harry Potter, Twin Peaks, The Apprentice, Lord
of the Rings, fair use policy, comics, DRM, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon,
X-Files, Pokemon and Yellow Arrows. Highly recommended reading !
“Transmedia storystelling is the art of
world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume
the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media
channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups and
collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come
away with a richer entertainment experience. The new knowledge culture has
arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down.
Think of these debates as exercises in popular epistemology. As we learn how to live within a knowledge culture, we can anticipate many such discussions centering as much on how we know and how we evaluate what we know as on the information itself. Ways of knowing may be as distinctive and personal as what kinds of knowledge we access but as knowing becomes public, as knowing becomes part of the life of a community, those contradictions in approach must be worked over if not worked through.”
Just thought about a new format about formats. Could be done on TV only, but perhaps this works best in a cross digimedia environment (including fixed + mobile Internet). How about asking viewers or users about sharing their ideas on new formats in a competitive way. The best ideas get optimized and reviewed in American Idol way. The biggest advantage is that the audience votes for the best formats and this will be realized afterwards shortly so there is less market risk and more buy-in from the audience.
Key assumption is that the TV producers or creatives no less than the (wisdom of the) crowd. I guess this is really Web 2.0 (e.g., wikis, open source). Personally, I believe we are entering a phase of complete process and output transparency which is significantly different from the current trend of user generated content. The latter is primarily output driven. Transparency in the process (and its key metrics) is much more interesting to me right now. Recently, Chris Anderson / Long Tail wrote about a similar thing in this post on Radical Transparency of Media...highly recommended stuff including the comments.
Any comments or additional ideas anyone ?
Yes....Generation Content is moving forward, this time on TV. For all my readers, this might be an interesting avenue for consumption and/or production. Can't wait to see it happen....
"We're rethinking the way TV is produced, programmed, and presented, so it actually makes sense to an audience that's accustomed to choice, control, and collaboration in everything else they do. So, we're creating a network in short form. Whenever you tune in to Current, you'll see something amusing, inspiring or interesting. And then, three minutes later, you'll see something new. It'll be a video iPod stocked with a stream of short segments and set to shuffle.
We aim to connect to every facet of real life, so the rotation will include Current Soul, Current Gigs, Current Fashion, Current Lies, Current Tech, and lots more. These segments will be anchored each hour by the Google Current: an up-to-the-second zeitgeist, a glimpse into what people around the world are searching for and talking about right now. Finally, there's the Current Studio: our participatory production program, anchored online and open to anyone. The Studio is a cornerstone of this network, and your opportunity to produce, program, and get the word out about our network. If you jump in and get creative, you will see the results on TV."
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