I’m at Disruptive Media in Stockholm, and just held a presentation about internet currency. The (Swedish) slides are below:
All about filters
Read Martin´s thoughts on music and the internet. Well worth it.
The first thing labels will have to do is skip the record prefix in their name and start calling themselves music labels. To be able to take the important full scale step from the physical world to the internet labels have to break a huge psychological barrier. The barrier of doing things in the way they’ve always been done.
I believe that the future of the internet as a distribution channel is all about filters. Here the music label has a big role to play: Creating artistic contexts for musicians to work in and consumers to find new things in. That is – labels will have to start focus on their core business again. They have to take a dozen steps back and set a side anything that haven’t to do with finding musicians they believe can influence people to the bone. This is something labels have been really good at in the past and is the reason why they once were created.
Tre förutsägelser om framtidens medier
The following post is written in a series for the Swedish online paper Aftonbladet.se about the future of media and journalism. The posts in English will continue as usual after this.
Jag har blivit ombedd att vara del av Aftonbladets bloggpanel som den här veckan handlar om framtidens nyheter och mediekonsumtion. Det är ett kul ämne, och ett som jag bloggar om väldigt ofta. Men för att få någon slags form på det tänkte jag inrikta mig på tre förändringar som jag tror kommer att ske och påverka mycket – och många.
1. Internet finns överallt, och i allt
Häromdagen blev jag intervjuad i egenskap av att vara en digital native. En av frågorna var hur det min syn på internet skiljer sig från de som är äldre. Jag svarade att internet är integrerat i nästan alla delar av mitt liv, och att det inte är någonting som jag sätter mig ner för att använda. Så kommer det att fortsätta att vara. Det kommer finnas tillgång till internet överallt (via Wimax, Wifi och HSDPA) av den enkla anledningen att livet inte kommer att fungera tillfredsställande om det inte finns. Internet blir bäraren av alla de medierna som vi konsumerar.
Vidare, kommer internet att driva mer än bara datorn/mobilen/mediespelaren. Redan idag finns ett paraply vars handtag lyser med samma intensitet som sannolikheten för regn. Fotoramar som visar bilder från RSS-flöden. Således kommer vi att konsumera media oftare, på fler sätt och i betydligt mer avgränsade förpackningar. Lokala regnrapporter till paraplyskaftet, till exempel.
2. Internet blir intelligent, och förstår dig (äntligen!)
I en värld av överflöd söker man efter genvägar till det som är mest väsentligt – för en själv, i den specifika situationen. Detta behov förklarar sökmotorernas framgång. Men än så länge är de ett ganska trubbigt instrument där man inte tittar på mycket mer än de faktiska bokstäverna. Och med bokstäver blir det, som bekant, ofta fel.
Inom ett par år, kommer det man kallar den semantiska webben att ha en betydligt bättre förståelse för vad det man letar efter. Utan att bli för teknisk kan man säga att det adderas ett lager av intelligens som underlättar sökningarna. Om Fredrik Reinfeldts årslön är offentlig, och likaså hans äktenskap med Filippa Reinfeldt, kommer en sökning att förstå vilka ekonomiska tillgångar Filippa minst borde ha – utan att den uppgiften egentligen står någonstans. Rätt tillämpat kommer detta att förändra mediekonsumtionen radikalt. Det kommer att gå att hitta information och nyheter på premisser som man inte trodde var möjliga.
I somras var jag i Palo Alto, mitt i Silicon Valley, och lyssnade på hur de som jobbar med den semantiska webben beskrev dagsläget. Som jag förstod det fanns det inte ett enda medieföretag som deltog i deras diskussioner. Det är oroväckande – om de traditionella medierna vill hålla sig relevanta.
3. Journalisten gör urvalet, inte materialet
Redan innan vi hamnar i scenariot i punkt två kommer vi ha ett stort skifte i journalistens, och journalistikens roll. Jag tror att journalistens uppgift allt mer kommer att likna en konstkurators jobb. Man går inte (nödvändigtvis) till ett galleri för att man känner till konstnären som ställer ut – utan för att man litar på galleristens omdöme och smak. På samma sätt tror jag att man kommer leta efter medievarumärken som kan guida en rätt i de frågorna man är intresserad av. Men det behöver inte vara de själva som skriver texterna – precis som att galleristen inte behöver måla tavlorna. Det är urvalet – kuratorskapet – som är det intressanta. Läsaren blir ledd till den informationen som man vill ha, och det spelar mindre roll om det är en blogg, en wikisida eller ett inslag i webb-tv.
I samband med detta tror jag att personfokuset kommer att öka. Redan idag är det starkt i vissa kretsar. Vad säger Per T Ohlsson om Israel-Palestina-konflikten? Vilken kashmirtröja tycker Ebba von Sydow är mest prisvärd?
Samma typ av fråga kan ställas angående nyheter, och på ett hyperlokalt plan: vilka bloggare tycker Martin Hallgren är mest intressanta angående friskoleutvecklingen i Lomma? Man litar på att Sydsvenskan hittar rätt röster i debatten. Man litar på att Martin Hallgren gör ett urval som passar en själv.
* * *
Ovanstående tre trender tror jag kommer bli tongivande i medias förändring de närmaste åren. Några mer precisa tidsangivelser är för svåra att uttala sig om av flera skäl. Dels för att det har visat sig att förutsägelser av den typen nästan alltid är fel, men också för att en trends genombrott är en definitionsfråga och svår att avgöra. Att de kommer bli viktiga inslag däremot – det är jag övertygad om. Är du av annan åsikt vill jag jättegärna höra dina tankar bland kommentarerna.
Och till sist – för dig som inte brukar läsa den här bloggen – jag heter Björn Jeffery och är VD och internetstrateg på den strategiska webbyrån Good Old.
Uppdaterat: Läs gärna de andra inläggen i serien också!
Beta Alfa: Med en fot i framtiden
Not another planning blog: Därför är mediet verkligen inte budskapet
LK9: Några ord på vägen
Mindpark: Papperstidningens död – mediehusets framtid?
Alter Ego Resonerar: Framtiden i nutid
Media Culpa: Medielandskapet 2012: en personifierad digital mediepytt
Working with what you’ve got – The Fokus.se story
At the end of last week we released the second part of our web project for the news magazine Fokus. It’s a wiki with the 100 most powerful people in Sweden, to begin with. Also, we built in Twingly functionality which aggregates what bloggers say about each person.
Working with a small, but strong, brand like Fokus requires careful planning. Below I’ll share some thoughts on how we reasoned in choosing these specific projects.
1. First things first: get up to speed. Before we could do anything interesting or exotic we had to make sure that Fokus regular website was okay. Our hypotheses was that a lot of bloggers read the magazine and would have blogged about the articles – if only they weere published online. We found several examples that supported this idea.
We went through the magazine to find the most blog worthy and reoccurring features. We made sure that these articles were easy to link to, and easy to find each week.
WordPress was used to make a very non-blog looking site that focused on the main story of each printed issue. The editorial staff adds a few extra features to the main story every week; sound clips from an interview, more pictures or a movie for instance.
To enhance the weekly magazine feel, we made a parallel navigation structure that made it easy to find specific articles in each issue. This, along with some WordPress plugin goodies such as Lightbox and a few others made the site simple, easy to use and SEO-friendly. So far so good.
2. Making it interesting. The next step was the launch of the wiki that I mentioned earlier. Fokus expressed a wish to engage political bloggers in some way – an idea that we fully supported. Our suggestion was a wiki with politically and socially interesting people. This, with some sort of tracking functionality, would create reference points around which discussions in the blogosphere could circle. It also creates a natural meeting ground between the people writing the blogs, and the people being written about.
We figured that the only thing we could guarantee that everyone in the wiki would be interested in was – well – themsselves. Everyone has ego-googled one time or another. This is a way of simplifying ego-searching in the Swedish blogosphere, if you will. As a launch, and an editorial start to the wiki, it was decided that Fokus should rank the 100 most powerful people in Sweden.
We could not use Swedish Wikipedia as they wouldn’t have allowed anyone to add themselves the way Fokus have intended. Also, the tracking would have been difficult to implement. The financial aspect of being able to sell advertising was of course a part of this decision as well. We looked at developing our own ping-service but took the decision that a modification of Twingly´s widget was the best way to go. Primelabs were very helpful and positive in developing this. As far as we know, the combination of these two services is unique – but please correct me if I’m wrong here.
3. Results. It’s far too early to tell what the results are going to be, but the initial response we got from bloggers and MSM has been overwhelmingly positive so far. I took some screenshots from the night of the launch that you can look at here if you like:
Bear in mind that the projects were adjusted to fit both the budget, and the amount of hours that could be used for updating the site each week. A lot of things could have been done differently, if the conditions were different. This is always the case, but I thought that it deserved being pointed out specifically to avoid a discussion about the wrong things.
Presentations from the week
I’ve done two public presentations this last week, and even if there’s not a lot of text in them I thought you might be interested.
tags technorati : nmd07 newmediadays mediaevolution presentation
tags bloggar.se: nmd07, new media days, media evolution, presentation
At Media Evolution today
I’m in the audience of Media Evolution at the moment, and I’ll be holding a short keynote later on. If you’re here – please come up and say hello to me or my colleagues. This is what we look like. There’s a video of me here as well – and if you’re wondering: yes, the last part was intended as a joke. It didn’t really seem to get through well enough 😉
The same things goes for tomorrow, when I’m in Hellerup for New Media Days.
Don’t be shy!
OMG! Google acquires Jaiku
Google acquires Jaiku
Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.
But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.
Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders
(source)
Jaiku, one of my favourite internet services, was just acquired by Google. Congratulations to Jyri and the rest of the team! And the mist clears slightly on the Gphone front. It´s very interesting news, but too early for me to have an analysis worth while. Let’s just let this one sink in for a bit.
tags technorati : jaiku google acquisition
Most transparent CEO – part 1
As I’ve been challenged by both Jocke and Sorosh regarding the title as most transparent CEO, I have to step my game up a bit.
Apart from Jaiku and Dopplr, I’m planning to release my calendar (iCal) and my todos (Remember the Milk). Unfortunately the iCal-feed seems to contain everything I’ve ever written it in – and not just the upcoming events (is there a way of fixing this?). This means that I have to go through all my events in order to make sure that nothing sensitive is published. I can be transparent, but I can’t assume that all my clients want to be. I’m working on that one.
On all future events this could be arranged fairly simply, but on the other hand – what is the point of saying that I have a meeting with a someone if I only name their company name, or the persons first name? That would be like phoning somebody’s secretary and finding out he/she was “in a meeting”. Not very transparent. On the other hand I can’t force it upon people either.
It’s interesting, but a bit tricky all this. Any thoughts on what approach to take here?
tags technorati : transparency radicaltransparency
tags bloggar.se: transparens
Why Web TV is more than just bad normal TV
I’m a guest lecturer at the University of Lund this week. The theme is online journalism, a subject that interests me a lot. Apart from the irony of me lecturing at the same institution that I once planned to attend, a lot of interesting thoughts have come up regarding journalism. Web TV for instance. I had to write it down.
It seems some have misunderstood the whole point of TV, or moving images, on the web. It’s not the fact that it can be done, and it´s not that people have suddenly opened their eyes to it. It’s that TV on the web can do things that regular TV can’t.
So why is so much of Web TV just a cheap, badly edited excuse for not owning a real TV channel? Because the people doing it are old media. And they tend to look at other old media to try to understand what’s going on. Bad idea, considering that most old media sucks.
Here’s five aspects I thought of that makes Web TV superior, and that should be used more often:
1. It’s on demand. Nuff said.
2. It’s endless. Regular TV lacks the space, and therefor the versatility, of publishing alternate takes, edits, or angles.
3. It’s interactive. Reader commentary – text, chat or video response – adds a new dimension to the conversation.
4. It’s fast. Update as often as possible.
5. It’s there. You need a semi-modern mobile phone – that’s it. The possibility to catch moving images has never been better. You can, and should be, unique.
tags technorati : television webtv tv media
Good Old does Pecha Kucha
Tomorrow, Wednesday, I will be holding my first Pecha Kucha presentation in Gothenburg. The topic is Jetset for all and is loosely based on this blog entry that I wrote a few weeks ago. If you’re around, please come by! It’s free! 19.30 at Nefertiti is the place to be.