Showing posts with label Jeff Jarvis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff Jarvis. Show all posts
Jarvis Likes His Bottoms on Top
I wrote teasingly about a year ago about an ad for clean bottoms on Buzzmachine. Now, author Jeff Jarvis says he likes the current underwear ad on his site that a few have called him to task for. Nothing heavy here, just jawboning on a Friday
On Jarvis' Distributed World
I thought BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis was going to do the "every page is the homepage" spiel – something that's been around for years. Instead he wrote about how the concept of the website as a destination is essentially over – that it's now about distributed content, in any number of feeds and combinations among different media. Perhaps it all appears on one page, assembled by the publisher/provider OR the user.
Seems like Jeff's talking about what could be a next generation of NetVibes or PageFlakes. Or perhaps a publisher-controlled version, such as ItsMyNews, which comes pre-loaded with whatever content strain the publisher wants, and then allows user control (and whose creators claim was around before NetVibes).
There's bound to be a battle here, though, among publisher/providers' desire to control and the perfect universe where we can assemble all we want from anywhere, at any time. I'm not calling for regulation – far from it – but there are not going to be true feed standards for awhile, if ever. Yes, .xml is easy and can be used universally, but the different flavors of it, even of RSS, are not adopted by all. In other words, some portion of what you want won't be available to assemble on your perfect page. Just as you can't get every feature on any single cell phone or cellular network, or every show or channel on any cable TV or satellite service.
So, I predict we're back at a cable TV model, albeit on steroids. Instead of getting the channels you want – in this case the content you want, which is a glorious salad of of video, audio, text, scrolls, maps, visuals, whatever – you get the content that's available for whatever aggregation tool you're using. And, inevitably, those whose desired consumption isn't part of the fatter or taller parts of the long tail will tend to get left out – as those who have particular interests now get left out of any given cable service (or aggregator, for that matter). Yes, you can cobble together all your podcasts and audio feeds, and get a scraper and and and – but who has the time, let alone the acumen, for that?
Jarvis said he was blowing our minds with these descriptions of the ultimate future – and asked how long it would be to come. Here's a further mind-blow, when the device we use is 1. a flexible piece of paper-like substance, that you can fold and put in your pocket and gets wireless reception from anywhere and you can type on, etc etc. 2. a projection from a pen like the photos of the supposed prototype that's made the rounds. A few pens in your pocket, one projects a keyboard, another a "screen" on a wall, and voila. 3. eyeglasses and ear plugs and gloves, so you're in a virtual environment even as you move through the real world 4. a biochip implant that obviates the need for any external device or screen, let alone the need to learn any computer commands. The computer learns you.
Seems like Jeff's talking about what could be a next generation of NetVibes or PageFlakes. Or perhaps a publisher-controlled version, such as ItsMyNews, which comes pre-loaded with whatever content strain the publisher wants, and then allows user control (and whose creators claim was around before NetVibes).
There's bound to be a battle here, though, among publisher/providers' desire to control and the perfect universe where we can assemble all we want from anywhere, at any time. I'm not calling for regulation – far from it – but there are not going to be true feed standards for awhile, if ever. Yes, .xml is easy and can be used universally, but the different flavors of it, even of RSS, are not adopted by all. In other words, some portion of what you want won't be available to assemble on your perfect page. Just as you can't get every feature on any single cell phone or cellular network, or every show or channel on any cable TV or satellite service.
So, I predict we're back at a cable TV model, albeit on steroids. Instead of getting the channels you want – in this case the content you want, which is a glorious salad of of video, audio, text, scrolls, maps, visuals, whatever – you get the content that's available for whatever aggregation tool you're using. And, inevitably, those whose desired consumption isn't part of the fatter or taller parts of the long tail will tend to get left out – as those who have particular interests now get left out of any given cable service (or aggregator, for that matter). Yes, you can cobble together all your podcasts and audio feeds, and get a scraper and and and – but who has the time, let alone the acumen, for that?
Jarvis said he was blowing our minds with these descriptions of the ultimate future – and asked how long it would be to come. Here's a further mind-blow, when the device we use is 1. a flexible piece of paper-like substance, that you can fold and put in your pocket and gets wireless reception from anywhere and you can type on, etc etc. 2. a projection from a pen like the photos of the supposed prototype that's made the rounds. A few pens in your pocket, one projects a keyboard, another a "screen" on a wall, and voila. 3. eyeglasses and ear plugs and gloves, so you're in a virtual environment even as you move through the real world 4. a biochip implant that obviates the need for any external device or screen, let alone the need to learn any computer commands. The computer learns you.
Streaming Media East '07: Non-Media Companies Get Media
I thought I'd coined the term "every company is a media company," meaning that the accessibility of the tools and the imperative to touch customers directly makes every company -- whether Wal-Mart or HP or Sun Microsystems or GM or Caldwell Banker or the local New York ice cream shop with a website – a company that produces media for its customers, or "constituents," if you prefer.
Then I found out at Streaming Media East that The FeedRoom CEO Bart Feder has been going around saying the same thing. And he tells me Streaming Media honcho Dan Rayburn's been saying it, too. FeedRoom handles video in one form or another for all the companies mentioned above, and a bevy of others. FeedRoom's revenues from Enterprise clients has gone up 80% this year, compared to last, while their business from media clients is essentially flat, Feder said. And those companies are embracing many of the practices that some traditional media companies have been slow to adopt: encouraging consumer-generated content, trying viral video, reaching out directly to people over the heads of any mediators, creating communities of excited brand-loyal consumers, and using customers' input as marketing intelligence.
Feder also, in an interview, talked about "direct to constituent" video, meaning that companies reach out to their dealer networks, managers, consumers, the press, and so on, and target each of them separately, having either open or closed networks, with various levels of control. When someone on a panel Feder was on said companies were having trouble creating enough content, Feder suggested that every company should give its 250 smartest and most loyal employees video cameras, and get them each to produce one video. Voila, enough content to run one video a day for a year of business days. Cheap, too. (And, of course, more for The FeedRoom to run through its system, and charge for.)
Jeff Jarvis, who moderated a panel today, likes that there's no arguing at this conference about whether the way things are is right or wrong, that the way media is now is treated as a given. So does Steve Safran of LostRemote. (I was a fly on the wall -- well, a guy standing in the aisle - -when Safran was speaking to Jarvis.) Jarvis argued earlier th at media companies should encourage consumers to distribute their media, stop worrying about how to control it and instead start worrying how to get it into consumers' eyes and ears.
He pointed out in a conversation a the conference today that perhaps the reason corporate
Streaming Media East '07: Scoble's Six Figures
Scobeleizer's Robert Scobel, on a Jeff Jarvis-hosted panel called "Creating the New Television" lets on that he earns six figures per quarter from his show on PodTech, which is basically geeks talking to geeks. He said he earned that much because sponsors want to reach that rarified geek audience, so even if it's only a few thousand, or tens of thousands of people it's the right 10,000.
Others on the panel sounded like they were still looking for a way to justify the cost -- save, perhaps, Adam Elend, who Executive Produces the Wall Street goof WallStrip.com,Blogger: MediaFlect - Create Post and says he spends $2,500 to produce each daily episode, uses a SAG actor as a host, and also has the kind of rarified audience advertisers love to reach.
Mary Matthews, producer of 39 Second Single, whom Jarvis has promoted mightily on his blog, referred to needing a day job, and J. Crowley's Black20.com is done on a shoestring, as well.
Watching the various videos -- other than Scoble -- especially Crowley's little comic vignettes, I couldn't help but think that, yes, this is interesting, new content, targeted, Crowley says, at a young male demographic ("We're in that demo, so why not have us call all the shots" instead of going through some media execs who would control it, he said) - but it's still just amusing stuff, that anyone with a good comic sensibility can produce. Cheaper, fun, funny, and a matter of taste. But still, basically, a video vignette -- could have been Saturday Night Live or any other sketch comedy show, really.
Others on the panel sounded like they were still looking for a way to justify the cost -- save, perhaps, Adam Elend, who Executive Produces the Wall Street goof WallStrip.com,Blogger: MediaFlect - Create Post and says he spends $2,500 to produce each daily episode, uses a SAG actor as a host, and also has the kind of rarified audience advertisers love to reach.
Mary Matthews, producer of 39 Second Single, whom Jarvis has promoted mightily on his blog, referred to needing a day job, and J. Crowley's Black20.com is done on a shoestring, as well.
Watching the various videos -- other than Scoble -- especially Crowley's little comic vignettes, I couldn't help but think that, yes, this is interesting, new content, targeted, Crowley says, at a young male demographic ("We're in that demo, so why not have us call all the shots" instead of going through some media execs who would control it, he said) - but it's still just amusing stuff, that anyone with a good comic sensibility can produce. Cheaper, fun, funny, and a matter of taste. But still, basically, a video vignette -- could have been Saturday Night Live or any other sketch comedy show, really.
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