What is Media 2.0?

There have been some great questions about Media 2.0 over the last few days so I thought I would join the discussion.

First: What is the best name for the changing media landscape?

Some call it Social Media, others (including me) call it Media 2.0. Jeremiah Owyang asks the question today on his blog "Hate the term Social Media? Help come up with a better term".

Well I think we already have a better term - Media 2.0.

Jeremiah says he hates the 2.0 thing. Well I say too bad. It's great! Why is it great? Because the change in media is not just about social. If it's about one thing then it's about Personal.

It just so happens that we are each (personally) social beings and therefore a symptom of more personal media is social features.

But personal manifests itself in other ways including:

• More personal choice (more niche content providers including/especially participant created content)
• More personalization (in the form of recommendations and attention based filters)
• More personal transparent (public is the new private)
• More personal presentation (choose your browser, aggregator, device, color)
• More personal scheduling (choose the time and date of the content - time-shifted/on-demand content).
• More personal connections - SOCIAL
  

But there are other aspects of the changing media landscape. Convergence, DRM (that's not very social!), Identity etc. So that's why I call it Media 2.0. It's a major new version of a very old idea. Personal human connection.

In the comments of the post he writes:

Chris, I’m not a fan of “2.0″ anything. What’s happening is the natural evolution of the web, it’s nothing really new is it?

This is why I like the term “Social Media”

Important: Social Media is about People.

I responded:

Social is a symptom of Personal - but whatever your definition - to try to foreshadow the destination/goal before we get there only limits the discussion/possibilities.

2.0 gives people freedom to decide what the next generation will look like while still giving them a buzzword to rally around.

The community and the market will decide what the 2.0 means - and I think you will find that ’social’ is only part of that outcome.

Second: Read/Write Web has an article about the mainstream media using more and more Web 2.0 technologies.

That's because they are becoming Media 2.0 - like the rest of us.

I am a bit disappointed they didn't make the link and mention the Media 2.0 Workgroup's launch at the same time.

Third: There has been an overwhelming response to the Media 2.0 workgroup.

So we have had to stop taking email nominations and changed it over to a wiki. The Wiki also has a page about the workgroup's goals and selection criteria. Nominate your favorite voices.

Also, while the people listed on the page are great voices to help spotlight the discussion, we will start to find ways to bring everyone into the conversation in more democratic ways... stay tuned.

For now I'll give you a hint and say start tagging your content Media 2.0 ;)

More soon...

Best of Breed Future

As Richard mentions on Read/Write Web today - John Milan wrote an excellent two-part article for R/WW earlier in the week, about the future of software. However - I have not yet had a chance to read it. It was too dense and long and I have not had the time to dedicate.

But Richard, being the excellent site editor and blogger that he is, recognized the possible problem and posted a summary today.

He summarizes it like this:

In Part 1 John argued that data should become open and accessible, just like the code in Open Source software. Code is often re-written and re-factored, but systems only work if they agree on the data.

Part 2 contends that people will demand more access to their data and more integration with their apps. This will result in the single minded, all-encompassing applications of today dying off - in favor of multi-celled, specialized solutions. So the future will be combinations of best of breed technology, rather than monolithic software.

John's conclusion was thus:

"And what trait will the eventual winners in this brave new world share? The solutions that can hone their data requirements, move results from system to system, use the best form factor for the job and still keep it on a human level."

Richard compares this to the new Firefox and I think he's right. But I would also like to compare it to Touchstone (surprise, surprise).

With Touchstone's input and output/hub and spoke model, it effectively moves data from one system to another and at each point making a decision about the best form factor. The example we use most is 'the more important the info the bigger the alert'.

This is probably not what John meant - but I think it still holds true.

Thanks to RSS as the universal syndication format and Microformats as growing standards, users can pick and choose the best apps to use together. We hope that Touchstone will be the best notification platform in that mix.

Via Touchstone

Note: I will start to say 'Via Touchstone' on posts when my post is based on something that I found from Touchstone. I have found that Touchstone has started to become one of my main information sources as it evolves into a complete solution and more and more of my posts are based on info it alerts me to.