gizblog

Big day, big news

Today marks the end of a hectic couple of months. Lots of announcements and briefings about our ambitions and plans at Channel 4.  The details, documents and videos are all here.

My video contribution isn't on the site (for rights reasons) although given I look a bit like John Terry remonstrating with an off-screen ref that's no bad thing.

Initial reaction seems good, and the next few months will be relentless, fun and a fight worth fighting.

New year, new gig

I'm surfacing for the first time since starting my new job.

Just before Christmas I started a new role at Channel 4. I'm heading up new media and technology, including all of our multiplatform sites and services. Someone described it yesterday as in charge of string theory: everything that's not in the broadcast dimension.

So far, so good. There's lots of passion and purpose and although there's a lot to do there's the appetite to get it done. There are some very interesting puzzle pieces to fit together, and an opportunity to do some really innovative stuff. And the stakes are high with linear schedules (eventually) on their way out.

Watch this space.

Andrew Keen vs William Caxton

The Cult of the Amateur is the first book in a long time which I've forced myself to finish. Poorly written, flimsily argued and often infuriating. Many others have already skewered the central points of his argument about the democratisation of content (notably Tom Coates, Emily Bell, Euan Semple and Lloyd Davis). I'm only going to pick up on a couple of quotes, and a historical parallel.

First, two quotes which made me splutter out loud.

"History has proven that the crowd is not very often wise. After all, many unwise ideas have been extremely popular with the crowd. This is why the arbiters of truth should be the experts - those who speak from a place of knowledge and authority - not the winners of a popularity contest"....

This argument wouldn't last long in a school debating society. It's hard to know where to start. Is democracy really a bad idea?

"As a profoundly unmusical fan myself, I can scarcely conceive of Bach releasing a raw version of his Brandenburg Concertos to be remixed or mashed up by his public"

When I read the above quote I was listening to Bach on my iPod. Only it wasn't Bach, it was Busoni, who's chiefly remembered for his profound reworkings of Bach themes. It hadn't occurred to me before that they were mashups, but they are. So too are the early works of almost every composer, or painter (etc) I can think of (Bach included: he shamelessly reworked Vivaldi, Buxtehude, Pachelbel....). It's how artists grow, and it's how art evolves.

Finally, I haven't seen anyone pick up on the parallels between the current democratisation of content and the explosion in the availability of content after the printing press arrived. For once, this was a period of history which I studied. There have always been people like Keen who are afraid what might happen if the ability to consume and create content gets into the 'wrong hands', and if those who have enjoyed monopolies in controlling people's attention are no longer in control. William Caxton had to deal with them in the late fifteenth century (although admittedly I'm lifting this, unchecked, from Wikipedia....)

"There was widespread unease amongst the Merchant Class of the time, who felt that if the printed page were to become widely available to the population, then it might filter through to the poor. The poor, it was believed, might then "become aware and enlightened of their circumstances" and, ultimately, dissatisfied and aggrieved. This, it was felt, might lead to unrest and civil disturbance.

In challenging the wisdom of his critics, Caxton announced: "If tis wrong I do, then tis a fine and noble wrong"."

'Nuff said.

The Long Tail and Innovation

Just watched an interesting talk by Charles Leadbetter on Ted. He was early to the idea of the impact that amateurs can have, and had some interesting thoughts on innovation which are relevant to my previous post on the Long Tail.

He uses a couple of examples to illustrate how innovation occurs by amateurs focusing on niche needs, and which then go on to become huge and mainstream. In other words, how amateurs in the long bits of the tail create stuff that migrates to the head. Two examples have stuck in my mind: the jerry-rigging of bikes for off road use, which turned into the mountain bikes we now know; and the creation of rap music which started off as the purest and most raw form of user generated content and which is now a huge mainstream category. Another reason why anyone who thinks the Long Tail is 'only full of crap' is living on borrowed time. And another reason why I'm getting annoyed at (but still persevering with) Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.

He finished with another interesting idea. The world of amateur participation isn't new: the voluntary sector is already a large and vital contributor to society at large. But it is gaining momentum, and is being fueled by technology. What impact could this have for the provision of public services? How could healthcare be improved by harnessing its users in new ways? And what implications are there for Ofcom's proposals for a public service publisher?

User Generated Advertising

Our current campaign for Yahoo! Answers has what we think is the world's first user-generated and personalised advertising. 

If you go to  www.sharewhatyoulove.co.uk you can create a mini video featuring yourself and your passion, and even create a banner ad which will be served on the Yahoo network at a pre-arranged time. To see my video, click here (and yes, I am keen on polar bears), and to create your own (which takes 2 minutes) click here.

A great way of getting across the core message about Answers: real answers to real questions, from 4 million experts. And a real innovation in UGC.

Hats off to to the team, who deserve to be proud of it. See what you think.

LastFM, CBS and Monks

A brief but elegant piece from Tom Loosemore on the LastFM acquisition by CBS ends with a familiar theme about the myopia of broadcasters. Some broadcasters (such as CBS) are busy re-inventing themselves, and their relationships with audiences. But..

"Others are still deluding themselves that their uniquely wonderful content will see them through. Monks and bibles, my friends, monks and bibles..."

It's not as if they haven't had recent experience, particularly in the US, of how new players can turn traditional consumption patterns upside down. Someone, somewhere, will write the next Three Blind Mice

I was at a dinner recently which had a number of the great and good from the broadcast world. The after dinner debate included a discussion of how the end of the Long Tail is 'full of crap', which has riled me ever since because it's based on at least three fallacies.

First, it's been easy to assume that popular content is good (particularly if you've had a hand in making or distributing it). In fact, as Tom points out, popularity has in part been driven by our inadvertent ability to control attention. TV channels will increasingly be seen as merely inefficient video on demand, and the shaky relationship between popularity and merit will start to become clear.

Second, the Long Tail is full of great stuff that is no longer able to command giant audiences. 'Hit' products that are no longer at the front of the store aren't crap (Star Wars, Seinfeld, Life On Earth....). Equally, it's become cost effective for high-quality, 'professional' niche content to find, and sustain, its audience. All that content sits in the tail, and it's pejorative to think it's crap.

Finally, the tail is full of an enormous amount of stuff that would never get an audience on a broadcast network. But is it crap? Not to the people who made it. Nor to the people who they're sharing it with. The ease with which people can now create, share and participate in content is enabling millions to be famous to the fifteen people they most care about. if you think that what they're creating and consuming is crap, you're losing touch with what your audience cares about, and you're living on borrowed time.

Untidy desks

Bumptop is great. A PC desktop that can be used like a real desktop: untidy piles, intuitive and engaging actions. If only Vista came close to this...

The video's a bit long, and geeky, but the product's very cool.

The next generation of photo sharing

  3D Flickr Emergence 
  Originally uploaded by jurvetson (thanks!)

TED had a very cool demonstration of 3D photo aggregation from a company recently acquired by Microsoft.

The image here is a composite of all the photos on Flickr tagged with the words "Notre Dame". The software looks at these photos and does three things. It works out what Notre Dame looks like and builds a composite 3D image from bits of the photos themselves (represented here by the ghostly blue - white image). It also works out the vantage points and viewing angles of the photographers in the Parvis Square outside (the orange triangles). It then wraps them both together in a 3D zoomable interface that feels as though you're flying, and enables you to easily view any of the photos that make up the image. Breath-taking.

Computer algorithms are not great at understanding what photos depict: (e.g.is it a sunset, a honeymoon, a particular beach in Spain, or all three?). The current generation of photo sites has overcome this by enabling people to add descriptive words to their photos ('tags') so that other people can discover them. Flickr does this brilliantly, and it's underpinned its explosive growth.

What photosynth does, cleverly, is to take this to the next level. If you get an algorithm to look at photos tagged with the same words (e.g. Notre Dame) it'll be able to figure out that the photos are of the same object, and then reaggregate those photos in interesting ways.

It'll be interesting to see where this leads, but an easy and obvious application is to develop 3D maps based on actual photos that you can walk or fly around. Microsoft's already on that case. It also points a way forward for navigating user generated images once there are unfathomable quantities available.

You need to see the demo to really get this, and it's at the following livelabs link (and it's worth waiting for all the relevant plug-ins....)

Media brands and dangerous lunatics

A great piece by David Hepworth in Media Guardian on the challenges faced by offline media brands who want to engage with their readers online. It's a succinct and enjoyable read.

Here's the creative dilemma for magazine publishers on the web. They know how to fashion a product. A community site isn't really any such thing. A magazine is a compromise between the range of content that can realistically be offered, the people who can be persuaded to go into a shop to buy it and the advertisers who can be lured into supporting it. However, a website is an arena where things take place. The relationship between editor and reader is altered from priest-acolyte to host-guest. The magazine is no longer the gatekeeper guarding the door to the cupboard marked "content". They provide the name above the door of the club and what goes on inside will be dictated by the people who visit.

Editors are always ambivalent about the actual members of the public who pay their salaries. When readers are writing in to tell them how good their magazine is, they're people of rare taste and discrimination. When they're complaining about something, they're dangerous lunatics with too much time on their hands. With a community site you're inviting those self-same lunatics in and asking them to help hand round the peanuts.

Neatly put: this is a real dilemma which we struggled with in setting up icircle way back when. Enabling users to participate, while not wanting them to take over, is really hard. Particularly if you've spent your career building and protecting your brand offline. Perhaps the biggest leap of faith is to admit that your customers never realised that you owned the brand in the first place.

Politics, regulation and the Long Tail

An interesting day at the Parliament and the Internet conference. We were corporate sponsors, which meant we could attend, and I also gave a speech (the overview of which was blogged here)

I'm not a policy wonk, and I find the pace and detail of the debates hard going. But I have real respect for the people who were there, drawn largely from the regulators, industry and parliament. The UK's good at striking the right balance between letting the online sector thrive and providing the rules and protection for those who need them.

A couple of interesting ideas, in particular, caught my attention. The first follows on from Eric Schmidt's speech to the Tory conference last week where he described the current generation of politicians as being from the TV generation, implying that though they understand that the internet's important they're not quite sure how to deal with its consequences. I think he's got a point. Politicians are used to a world in which they could easily access attention. In the emerging world that will be harder, as demonstrated by the low rankings of their websites (the three main parties appear to have only a few tens of thousands of visitors, and rank below the BNP). Equally, politicians have been used to a role in which they exercise judgement on behalf of their constituents, and we have only used referenda in rare and particular circumstances. Going forward, their judgements will be open to much more scrutiny, and (at its logical extreme) almost anything could be put to a public online vote. In theory, nothing could be more liberating and democratic. In practice, this is uncharted and un-nerving territory.

The second issue that caught my attention concerned e-crime. One delegate asked how law enforcement would work with virtual goods: if you buy a sword, or some property, in an online game for real money, and it's stolen from you, it's effectively a crime. But can you report it to the police? Would they know what to do? I've got no idea where to start on this one, but it's good that someone's wrestling with it.