Bloglines - News is a conversation

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Communities Dominate Brands Business and marketing challenges for the 21st century

News is a conversation By Alan Moore on Trends Jeff Jarvis writing in the Media Guardian today says Interactivity isn't easy. I must confess that when I wrote for large publications, I said that I loved my audience ... but that didn't mean I wanted to actually meet or talk with them. The people who reached out to me as often as not did so with crayons and crackpot conspiracies, and that helped set my view of interactivity. I think the same is true for much of mass media. The old forms of interactivity helped make us into - or rather, gave us an excuse to be - isolated snobs. The internet changed all that. Online, for the first time in my career, I developed eye-to-eye relationships with readers. And I learned to respect the knowledge, intelligence, goodwill and good taste of those I saw as a mass. I embraced interactivity with obnoxious fervour and would not stop repeating, "News is a conversation ... " Jeff sums up Q: Is interactivity worth the price? A: Yes. It may not bring in much advertising (yet) and may take effort (though less than creating content). But if you treat interactivity, and the people who do it, with respect, good things will come of it: traffic, engagement, content, collaboration. Rather than restricting interactivity, I would find ways to expand it. The Post already is a pioneer in linking to outside blogs that write about its stories. Such linking, I believe, can yield more productive conversation, since these people are writing their opinions on their own websites, under their own names, and not just lobbing anonymous snark grenades into comments. But papers should also stop thinking that the world revolves around them and what they write. Instead, they should listen to hear what the public is talking about that the paper is not writing about. And papers should make readers into collaborators - not just sending in photos from news events but suggesting and reporting on stories. Interactivity isn't just a gimmick. It is a key to a new journalism. I wonder though how many newsmedia executives agree with Jeffs views? I do. As Thomas Friedmann argues The world is moving from a place where value was created in vertical silos of command and control to a world where value is increasingly going to be created horizontally by how you connect and collaborate. Whilst Emily Bell in an opinion piece in the same edition of media Guardian believes Citizen journalists should not be ruled off limits Quite right.

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Toward a Global "Internet of Things"

Toward a Global "Internet of Things": "RFID is a generic technology that entails using tiny wireless transmitters to tag individual objects, uniquely identifying them. Such RFID tags allow companies to automatically track objects, trigger events, and perform actions upon the objects."

Bloglines - Democratic New Media Publishing

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Emergic Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets

Democratic New Media Publishing Sramana Mitra writes: For the longest time, creative professionals like writers, photographers, film-makers, and musicians have been at the mercy of editors and owners of significant and prestigious media properties like The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, The Economist, MTV, HBO, and more. And yet, a handful of magazines, studios, or TV channels cannot even begin to support and lend a voice to the enormous creative spirit that exists in this world. Today, with the advent of such phenomena as blogs and podcasting, a new era of democratic electronic media publishing has come upon us. Democratic new media publishing is the name that I give to all the user-generated electronic content being published on the Internet today at the click of a post-and-publish tab with relatively easy-to-use software. Text, photo, and video blogs are the most popular forms of this New Media paradigm. The nerds have suddenly set free the liberal arts types in droves. The artsies have not yet quite figured out this enormous gift and its full potential. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is well at work, and it will change the rules of the game for creative professionals world-wide. It will also change the rules for marketers and brand-builders.

Bloglines - The Internet Journey so far

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Shrikant's Blog Technology and Social Trends for a Better Life

The Internet Journey so far By Administrator on Uncategorized Lot has happened as the world wide web continues to get graphics rich with more connectivity. The journey so far has been remarkable. It is putting lot of pressure on traditional media and future effects can only be guessed. 1995: * Netscape goes public. Amazon.com and eBay launch. n There are an estimated 100,000 sites on the web, up from some 623 in 1993. 1998: * Google opens with a staff of 3. 1999: * Blogger, one of the first popular weblog publishing tools appears. * Craigslist, which began as an e-mail list of arts events in San Francisco, becomes an online classified ads-listing company. 2000: * An average 52 million adults are online, about 5 million with high-speed internet access at home. As the year closes, there are 25.6 million websites. * Google handles more than 100 million queries a day. 2001: * Apple introduces the iPod. 2002: * 65% of American children ages 2-17 use the Internet, up from 41% in 2000. 2003: * MySpace and Friendster launch, putting “social networking site” in the vocabulary. * One-millionth iPod is sold. 2004: * Audio blogging is dubbed podcasting, and how-to articles begin to appear. * Flickr, the photo-sharing/social networking site, launches. * A typical day sees 128 million U.S. adults online. About 60 million have high-speed connections at home. 2005: * eBay has 79 million U.S. members, 168 million worldwide. * MySpace has 40 million members. * 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet. * Technorati tracks 22.9 million blogs. * By midyear, Flikr has 775,000 users and is growing about 30% a month. * LiveJournal reports 2.5 million active accounts. * 10 million Craigslist users search some 6.5 million classified postings each month. Comments

Bloglines - Best of GigaOM, eBook Available Now

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Om Malik on Broadband a daily report on broadband, VoIP, and next generation Internet

Best of GigaOM, eBook Available Now By nobody@example.com (Om Malik) on Announcements GigaOM hit the 5000 post mark earlier in 2005, the fourth year of blog’s existence! As a blog, it has been an amazing experience for me; writing and developing a very special bond with some of the smartest and most informed readers. With just over 5600 posts, it has been hard for me personally to keep-up with the archives. Don’t blame me for forgetting what I wrote, say a couple of years ago. I can only imagine, how hard it will be for readers, since “internal” search is still a bit of a challenge. So I decided that it was time to create an eBook of the top 20 posts: The Best of GigaOM. It is a mix of the most read, most commented posts ever. And a trip down memory lane. It has been designed by my dear friend Arno, who is a great designer. Check out his website, and if you need some design work done, he is one of the best. Some suggested that I should charge for this download, but somehow, that just didn’t sit right for me. So here is a little christmas present for all. You can get it here. Its in a format that is ready to print, so you can enjoy it when stuck in an Airport, waiting for you connection. However, if you would like to support future projects, that involve more “thematic” ebooks, I won’t say no and send you a heart felt thanks! Comments

Bloglines - Information: Pure and Actionable

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Atanu Dey on India's Development Deeshaa

Information: Pure and Actionable By Atanu Dey on Information and Communications Technology The greatest technological advancement of the modern world, after sliced bread and the personal computer, has to be the cell phone. It is the one device that makes possible the notion of the global village, it inter-connects billions through wireless, satellite, fiber-optic, and microwave networks spanning the globe. Perhaps the only thing that the poor fisherman in the Kerala coast and the rich stock analyst in the New York Stock Exchange have in common is the cell phone. What accounts for the unreasonable success of the cell phone is that it reduces the cost of accessing information instantly. I define a cell phone as a general-purpose personal information communications device. I would like to stress that the “personal” refers to the information, rather than to the ownership of the device. Here is what I mean. What is information depends on who the person is. For instance, to me “cricket scores” means a lucky locust and I could not care less, while others are willing to pay to be told some nonsense about “145 for 6”. The rich and the poor alike have a need for information and depending on their personal interests and occupations, they differ in their willingness to pay for information. That is of course true for all things, not just information, ranging from personal hygiene products to modes of transportation. Thus while the device is common, what the poor do with the device is different from what the rich do with it. This point is important to keep in mind when looking at the market for information with the cell phone as the enabling device. I like to distinguish between two broad categories of information: pure, and actionable. Actionable information is something that enables a decision to be made and action is prompted as a result. Pure information is something that does not result in an immediate response or action. Pure information is “good to know” as opposed to actionable information which is “need to know.” Economists may call pure information a luxury good, while actionable information is a basic good. Since the rich typically spend a greater percentage on luxury goods, and the poor a greater percentage on basic goods, it is obvious that the poor will spend relatively more on actionable information as opposed to pure information. Examples of pure and actionable information is not independent of a person, naturally, given that information is personal. However, just to take an example, cricket scores are pure information unless you are a bookie and need to settle accounts. The price of fish at a particular market along the Kerala coast is actionable information to a fisherman out at sea because it affects his decision where to land his catch. The busy stock analyst catching up with the latest political news while commuting to work is consuming pure information, and he is willing to pay for it even though he will not take any immediate action on it. But getting news on his cell phone is a luxury that the fisherman would not be willing to pay for. The bottom line: though the technology is universal, the needs and capabilities of different parts of the world are diverse. That is, there are different markets. And what works in one market may not work in a different one: a tautology no doubt but often forgotten in the haste to transport a solution from the developed world to the emerging markets of the developing world. For instance, online advertising, search, etc, work in the US and other rich countries to support free or subsidize services. But in the poor countries, the services may not be supportable unless of course the market in the poor countries is defined only in terms of the small percentage of rich people in those countries. India has a population of over one billion but in terms similar to those of a rich economy like the US, I would approximate India’s “effective” population to be around 10 million. That is, imagine that India has only 10 million people, with 20 million cell phones, about 5 million PCs, a couple of million cars, and annual average incomes of around $20,000. The solutions that work for the US population, will work for this restricted population in India, with the obvious caution that the market is about a tenth of the US market. The rich are different from you and me, noted F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemmingway identified the difference and said that they have more money. I keep that distinction firmly in mind whenever I try to figure out what works and what doesn’t around the world. PCs and the internet works in the rich world differently than they will in the poor world. So the opportunity for developing innovative solutions specifically for the emerging market is phenomenal. Consider the sheer size of the population which is mobile-phone enabled: there are 70 million or so mobile phone subscribers in India, and it is growing at around 2 million a month. By next year’s end, that will be 100 million. Most of the users will not be those who can afford the luxury of pure information, but will be those who need actionable information. The cabbie needs to know where his next fare is, the plumber where the leaky faucet is, the corner grocery store where which household needs supplies, ad infinitum. We all have goods and services that we need to sell or buy from the neighborhood. The cell-phone is the perfect platform to create a mobile marketplace where millions of trades can be enabled for economic efficiency and growth. As an economist who swears by the power of the market, I predict that the biggest challenge and opportunity lies in creating solutions that will enable the mobile marketplace. Two major components have to be built: one, to make actionable information accessible for trades to take place, and two, an accounting and payment mechanism for those trades. This will identify the two parties in a trade, will connect them, and finally help with the payment. Any economist worth his salt should be able to figure this one out in his spare time. I had enough spare time. Good bye and have a wonderful happy new year. Related post: Saving Private Information. Comments

MercuryNews.com | 12/25/2005 | Top 10 tech trends for 2006

MercuryNews.com | 12/25/2005 | Top 10 tech trends for 2006: "Top 10 tech trends for 2006Once again, it's time for SiliconValley.com's annual look into a crystal ball for technology trends in 2006. Never mind that the smartest people in tech wouldn't dare make serious predictions about what innovations will catch fire next year. We make a humble try anyway.Video -- in the form of your favorite TV dramas or Hollywood hit movies -- will come to the big screen in your living room and to the small screen on your cell phone. Whenever you want it. No need to mess around with time-shifting TV devices or mail-order flicks"