Senna

October 10, 2011 By 2 Comments

I watched Senna tonight – the first DVD I’ve bought in a while, and certainly the first I can remember buying on release day for a long, long time.

Watching the final seconds of onboard footage brought a lump to my throat, a feeling in the pit of my stomache and transported me back to being 17 and sat in the living room of the family house, watching the race live with my father.

It also brought home the fact that whereas the loss of Steve Jobs or Princess Diana etc were tragic events, the live nature of it made it akin to the JFK shooting for me personally. Even down to the search for the cause, whether on a grassy knoll or in the design of the Williams he was driving.

It’s weird, watching it now, as I’m close to turning 34 – the same age as Senna when he died. I’d known motor racing was dangerous long before when one of my first F1 heroes, Elio De Angelis, died in far more horrific circumstances, but that was during a testing session, so was far removed. And the death of Roland Ratzenberger just the day before had been tragic, but as a relatively new driver to F1, I hadn’t got the same longstanding fan relationship with him (even if patriotism often had me cheering for Mansell versus Senna, for example).

It also brought to mind racers since, on two and four wheels, from talented amateurs and those at the start of their career, to those competing at the highest level, and some of which I had the honour of meeting or occasionally actually chatting with. I’m not a talented enough writer to be able to justice to the passing of any of them, but  maybe someone else has;

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Filed Under: Motorsport, Personal Tagged With: , , ,

Everyone’s a curator now…

October 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We’ve talked for years about citizen journalism and self-publishing, but more important than the channels of distribution are the ways in which content and context are discoved via search engines and social recommendations, and the fact that theoretically this leads to any piece of content available online being indexable, findable and potentially popular.

But what’s interesting me at the moment is the rise in curation – not necessarily on a professional level (for example NPR’s Andy Carvin curating Middle East tweets to an audience of almost 60,000 followers, or the increased use of tools such as Ushahidi and Storify by journalists and news organisations), but the effect it has on ‘ad hoc’ content curation – note how I’m trying to avoid that increasingly ridiculous line between amateur/citizen and professional/establishment content production!

What I mean by ad hoc is that we’re all walking around with cameras or mobile phones, and many of us are then sharing via our various online networks – and that can range from family pictures and days out to long form writing and video. And I’m struck by the way in which my own experiences are changing, even at a family event.

How curation changes our lives:

I recently went down to the war museum at Duxford for the second time this year to celebrate a family event with my parents and my son. And as always, I was carrying my phone (a Nokia N900 for the record), and taking a mix of personal family pictures and ones which I intended to make public on my Flickr account and possibly elsewhere. All totally normal.

Consolidated B-24M Liberator

Consolidated B-24M Liberator Second World War American Bomber

Except here’s the change. The first time we visited I took a load of pictures of the amazing planes and tanks on display, and then made them public with most of them just called something like – ‘Plane at Duxford’. I’d uploaded probably 80 or so photos and didn’t really want to spend a whole Sunday cataloguing them. And the blog post it inspired was a thought about how the rise of communications technology etc seems to have sucked all the glamour and excitement from air travel.

This time I did something totally different.

Almost subsconsciously, every time I took a picture of a vehicle on display, I also snapped the information beside it about the model and historical information.

And I wasn’t doing this for myself. Occasionally I’ve snapped museum information if it’s something I want to investigate further later on, but although I quite like planes and military history, I don’t have the time or inclination to start reading up on it at the moment.

Instead, I realised I was automatically doing it becuase I knew at some point I’d have the time to make those images public, and I wanted to be able to hopefully provide the correct and relevant information for anyone seeing them, as well as potentially feeding my ego by making them more discoverable. I recently discovered that my Flickr account has had over 12,000 views, and although I know that those stats include all the times I’ve looked at my own snaps, that still leaves a lot of views from other people – some of whom have been kind enough to leave comments on the images I’ve made public (apparently 699 photos, with far less tagged and geo-located, according to the handy stats page).

Librarian in Residence 2

Considering the huge number of other people at Duxford that day armed with cameras and mobile phones, I wonder how many other images were being captured, shared and then found online, and how many other people might start doing similar things to catalogue their own creations?

How much more content is being produced already which isn’t being curated and tagged, and therefore lies undiscovered? And how many more people will start creating collections of items which interest them, using tools which are easier and more accessible than a traditional blog? We’ve already seen that to some extent with the rise of simpler tools such as Tumblr, or the amount of video and photo content which is being shared on Facebook every day, along with the immense volume of videos on Youtube. And there seems to have been an increase in tools and services which attempt to help curation, whether it’s the more established universal shopping and fashion industries, or newer ideas. But none of them have got mass traction yet – if one does, how will that change things. Is there a way, for example, for a service to help me not only collect and curate everything I might have uploaded to Facebook, but to easily let me share it outside of that particular walled garden?

It’s one reason why I use Flickr, and pay for a Pro account, along with increasingly looking at using the likes of Audioboo and Soundcloud for audio. Obviously Youtube and others such as Vimeo have video covered, and my blogs and websites do the job for text. But at some point someone will crack the way of making all of these points easy to distribute to, and more importantly, collate and curate from? (You can already do easy sharing to a number of those sites even via older phones and services – for Flickr and Youtube etc I tend to use the built-in service on the Nokia, but I know several others exist for publishing – just not for pulling it all back together). I could hack everything together myself to make a coherent lifestream, but I’ve never found enough reason to take the time, and I suspect most other people feel the same ( I do find the time if clients agree to it though, so have some experience of pulling it all together!)

It’s even more obvious with the launch of the new Facebook Timeline profiles. It shows how much time, effort and content we’ve all pumped into something which has inherent value in many ways, but also locks that content up inside itself.

Library Closed

How might it serve us, and others, to be able to set it free, and accumulate it all in the same way as Klout and Peerindex attempt to pull in our activity and interaction to assign us scores for influence? Back in June 2007 I wrote about Hasan Elahi, who created a site to which he uploaded his entire life as a response to being mistakenly put on the FBI watch list and getting detained at an airport. I’m not suggesting we auto-publish all our data all the time, and there are many privacy implications involved in that debate, but we’re all becoming auto-curators, and that could potentially lead to a second era in terms of social media and networks as that behaviour becomes part of everyday life for us all.

Filed Under: Digital Culture, Digital Publishing, Lifestreaming, Media, social networks, user generated content, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Movember registration now open…

October 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It’s likely you may have heard of Movember, the facial-hair based annual charity event, but if not, it’s well worth checking out as it again raises money to help cancer charities – particularly poignant in the tech world at the moment.

Registration for this year is now open – and I figure if I’m going to take part again this year, I need to alert existing and potential clients to the reason why I might be sporting a particularly embarrasing attempt at a ‘Selleck’ in meetings.

Filed Under: Charity / Cause Tagged With: ,

What really ended EMAP’s golden days?

October 7, 2011 By 6 Comments

There’s an interesting article on the Huffington Post UK site by former EMAP Director Colin Morrison, in which he asks Who Killed Britain’s Best Media Company, and goes on to discuss the inner workings of the leadership of the company at the time, before it was split into a consumer business which was sold to Bauer, and a B2B business which continues the EMAP brand joint-owned by Apax and Guardian Media Group.

It makes for interesting reading – the relationship between Robin Miller and David Arculus for example. By way of context, the ‘glory days’ appear to have been 80s and 90s – basically right up until around the time when I joined, which was after U.S investment went badly wrong, and the initial heavy investment in transferring brands to the digital worlds also had a major stumble.

But I do think he overestimates the brilliance of the leadership versus the problems of a traditional media company faced with the age of digital disruption that has seen the internet, mobile and tablets appear alongside a number of major digital properties which now command the attention economy.

Even now traditional media companies are still struggling and battling to make the transition to the web, whether newspapers, magazines, radio or television, and they’re all still behind where they should be. A lot of that is down to the nature of the organisational structure, and the risk averse tendencies of a middle management who are being pressured from above, and block so much potential from below.

It’s no coincidence that at the time myself and other digitally-addicted colleagues were pushing for ideas like low cost digital launches based around teams of 2 or 3 and a blog-based platform, Mashable was being launched by the then 19-year-old Pete Cashmore (2005). The same year saw Yahoo Answers launch – I suspect that was before I suggested the idea of the Ask An Expert section on MCN, but certainly we beat the likes of Quora by some way. I’d try and check, but it appears Bauer’s sites are experiencing an outage at the moment…

And funnily enough, the best time and definitely the most innovative I experienced was when for a few months a small team of us operated with barely any ‘adult’ supervision. Suddenly we were able to produce a variety of RSS feeds for starters. And initially noone paid much attention to my friend, colleague and talented video specialist Angus Farquhar starting to mess around with Youtube, establishing a channel which became a Partner channel early on, and has now racked up over 88 million views. I’d like to think that was partly down to my own appearances on the daily news show we started, that sadly petered out due to a lack of involvement from anyone else, along with the podcast Angus initiated.

I also took the chance to start playing with social media – we quickly had a Myspace page and Flickr group up and running, to be joined by Facebook and Twitter.

This isn’t to blow our own trumpets – there were lots of other talented digital people across the business, and many of them have gone onto great success since moving to other companies or starting their own businesses.

But the scary fact is that EMAP had websites for titles dating back to 1998, such as the original motorcycleworld.co.uk site, as captured by the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. That was around the same time as Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. Since then, we’ve had Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006), the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010), and Blogger (1999) or WordPress (2003). In addition to Mashable, there’s the likes of Techcrunch, PerezHilton, the Huffington Post itself, Boing Boing going web only, and hundreds of other sites commanding a large amount of content and attention.

And many content companies have changed how they do things, giving rise to the likes of the Demand Media content farm which is built to respond to search and advertising demand. And that’s before we get into the likes of Paper.li, or Flipboard etc.

(I actually remember bringing in the wonderful Andrew Davies from Idio to discuss the idea of personalised digital magazines on-demand to a bemused audience).

Oh, and there’s the whole world of Glam Media, Shiny, B5 and all the other content networks that exist in a myriad of sizes, shapes and forms.

And yet, the traditional organisations, structures and practices still remain. Even when they did try, they put all their eggs in one basket, and then set fire to the basket (e.g. Ditto.net).

As any blogger will tell you, bespoke quality content is incredibly labour-intensive with low margins, and the rise in content marketing is due to the fact it works extremely well for business which have products to sell.

What’s going to hurt even more…

And that’s where the increased pain is going to come. More and more businesses are realising how useful content marketing can be, which is great for me as a consultant in that field, but not good for magazines, which are going to increasingly be cut out of the loop as middlemen unless they can build their own value as arbiters of taste in a cost effective way which includes social signals and added value.

And the areas which do create bigger margins are those around social, data, analysis – all the areas which allow a small team with a lot of technical knowledge and skill to achieve far greater scale for the cost of servers and number crunching. Meanwhile we’re still in the very early days of social media and mobile, and both are still operating in a manner similar to media companies when it comes to generating revenue, which means as they’ve gained respect and interest of the advertising agencies and clients, the pot of money available for the media brands is being thinned out.

Meanwhile small independant blogs and websites are still appearing every single day, powered by the availability of self-publishing and self-promotion, and the simple fact that some of us, despite the knowledge of the economics of the media, just love to write. Hot Mod Media is the catch-all for my own network of sites, and with a total financial outlay of about £500 per year, it’s already reaching over 200,000 uniques annually (Oct 2010-Oct 2011, and that’s going to rise massively with audiences increasing 500% already this year). Most importantly, the only ongoing investment at the moment is my spare time, and that of a small number of volunteers.

So as much as the leadership changes and struggles may make for good reading, and there’s undoubtedly some elements which affected the company as a whole, I wouldn’t say that it’s ultimately what ended the golden days of the big British media company…

Filed Under: Digital Publishing, Magazine Publishing, Media, newspapers, Print Publishing, traditional media, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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