Media 2.0 Roadmap

I have been thinking a lot about 'Media 2.0' lately. So I quickly wrote up a roadmap from the distant past media landscape to our near future opportunities. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Distant Past (Local Radio Stations)

• Distribution: Costly, via radio towers and dedicated ‘wireless’ receivers
• Content: Local news and radio plays
• Advertising: Local sponsors
  

Past (National Radio Networks and TV Networks)

• Distribution: Costly (via radio and TV towers, TVs and Radios)
• Content: National shows targeted at demographic groups
• Production: Costly
• Audience: One way broadcast from the top to the masses
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by editors) is on the air – segmented by broad demographics
• Advertising: Local and National sponsors
  

Recent Past (Internet – Web 1.0)

• Distribution: Cheaper (via modems and PCs – unstructured content in HTML)
• Production: Costly (in terms of time and skills)
• Audience: One way broadcast from the top to the masses – now also on the web
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by the editors) is on the air – segmented by more niche demographics
• Interaction: Interest groups and communities trapped in silos
• Advertising: Local and National advertisers splitting revenue across web, tv, radio.
  

Now (Internet – Web 2.0)

• Distribution: Mostly Cheap (existing TV, Radio towers and across multiple devices using the Internet – structured content via RSS)
• Production: Cheap (just click publish on your blog)
• Audience: Two way participation within the audience (‘the bottom’) with democratic editorial control in the grassroots
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by the audience) as measured using services like Technorati, TechMeme and Digg etc. Segmentation in the mainstream continues by more thinly sliced Demographics)
• Interaction: Interest groups unbound by silos (due to RSS)
• Advertising: Context sensitive Ads targeted at the page – served by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft
  

Coming (Media 2.0)

• Distribution: Cheap (across multiple devices using the internet as the ‘universal pipe’ – structured content via RSS). Aggregation is the main user interface.
• Production: Cheap (just click publish on your camcorder and mobile phone)
• Audience: The audience is gone, only participants are left: Two way participation with all stakeholders and democratic editorial control of what’s on the web and what’s on the air
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by the participants and measured by services like Technorati, TechMeme and Digg) is played on air. Segmentation by niche interest groups.
• Relevancy: With hyperchoice, ‘What’s personally relevant’ becomes far more interesting that 'What's popular' – Audiences of one.
• Advertising: Ads targeted at the individual – served by aggregators

Citizen Tipping Point

Over on his Logic + Emotion blog, David has a great YouTube video of an interview with Ben McConnell about how citizens are now dictating the 'Cultural Conversation' through social software and participant generated content.

He also goes on to explain why corporations need to tune into the conversation. Now if only they had an easy-to-use tool that made that possible.

Check out the post and watch the video.

Thanks to Marianne who pointed out David's blog to me!

Messy is the new clean

I have long held a strong personal dislike of MySpace. I don't think they really care though - it's not targeted at me - it's targeted at a totally different demographic.

That won't stop me airing my grievances though.

One of the main reasons I dislike it is how messy it is. How utterly useless the user interface is and how much worse the users make it with their colors and backgrounds and embedded music tracks. It drives me crazy whenever I find myself accidently stumbling onto a MySpace page.

I have always been a fan of clean lines. In fact, I have just been working on the secret, yet-to-be-revealed, Touchstone user interface that will be revealed with the all new Touchstone Beta and it is all about clean, simple lines.

Over on BubbleGeneration however, he explains that clean lines are just old fashioned. They are part of the 20th century's Modernism movement. To quote:

Re-engineering was about streamlining: about cutting the fat; about removing "resistance" and "drag" created by superfluous processes, whose near term returns were non-existent.

The result, as we all know too well today, is a commercial landscape both bleak and bland: homogeneous, robotic, synthetic, and hyperrationalized, where the Barista's or burger-flipper's value is timed, measured, studied, and analyzed to death.

He uses mySpace as the prime example. He states that mySpace beats LinkedIn as a real social platform because, unlike LinkedIn, mySpace allows its users to get messy - to hack up the page and distroy any trace of consistency.

Touchstone, of course, is very different from MySpace or LinkedIn. The primary setup/status windows are not about personalization, self-expression or social networking. So we can get away with clean, simple lines. That's what I tell myself anyway. I don't want to make a messy interface that people can hack up. I want it to be clean and slick.

I take comfort in the fact that Skype seems to have the same philosophy and they aren't doing too badly.

Am I the only one who thinks that MySpace chaos and CraigsList's complete disregard for aesthetic quality is disturbing and concerning? Someone save me...

Update: Daniela suggests to me on Skype that perhaps I don't like MySpace because Murdoch bought it just to drive traffic to his Fox TV sites.

This is probably a topic for another post but I don't mind that Murdoch, being an old school media guy, recognized (in some small way) the volume of traffic that MySpace could generate and purchased it to keep his media company relevant. I do, however, have a problem with the fact that the platform itself didn't necessarily deserve the popularity it received/receives (for reasons mentioned above and many others) and the fact that people like Murdoch, in general, don't understand the real power of social platforms beyond the old 'eyeballs to monetize' paradigm.