I was told a story the other day of an eminent VC across the Pond who insisted that any presentation deck should be no more than half-a-dozen slides.
Why? Because you want to leave the rest ‘to the audience’s imagination…’
So with that in mind, here are five slides I put together for a recent presentation. As for the story that goes with said slides, well, I’ll leave that to your imagination… 
There was little or no doubt what caused many a Twitter heart to flutter today and that was this…
http://traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/
It is a ‘live’ map of the London Underground.
If you look at the little multi-coloured flags for long enough, you will see that they do indeed move. You are watching tube trains shuttling between London Underground stations in real time.
And for many this was another ‘Wow!’ moment; proof positive that the data miners are going to rule the world; they are the ones that – in certain eyes – deliver the real gold.
Further proof that anything that combined a map with data was hot right now came in the shape of one of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners… two boys from Riga who have created a ‘live’ map for Latvia; plotting not so much the movement of tube trains, rather a whole host of ‘news’ feeds… a Tweet from my down my street now plotted on a Google map.
They were, to their credit, swift to acknowledge the part that Adrian Holovaty had played in delivering the first, automated ‘data-as-news’ stream in the shape of his own, Knight News winner, EveryBlock.
We have, of course, been down the path of data before; why – for me – there has to be a balance between a stream of data droning on overhead and those poor grunts left on the ground trying to work out just why there were four yellow flags backed up in an orderly queue going into Marble Arch at 8.18am on the 27th June…
The danger is, of course, that you become all churlish in your dis-regard for the power of data; the fact that the Guardian can now offer a map that shows exactly where their football writers are on any given Saturday afternoon seems to me slightly beside the point… I don’t need a flag on a map to demonstrate that the reporter covering Arsenal-Everton is sat at The Emirates.
Whereas is he or she going to be?
Data in its rawest of forms needs to be softened, to be humanised, to be tailored to a wider audience… not just those who know one end of an API from another.
‘Faces Of The Fallen’ remains a classic case in point; that was EveryBlock given a ‘face’ – tragically, the faces were those of the US servicemen and women killed on active service in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Which is why when I look at the live map of the London Underground, I don’t see the future… I see part of the future; its a device to be built upon… or, more ideally, written upon. For someone, somewhere to be empowered with the means to add the why to the what…
Why are those four flags backing up at Marble Arch… what’s the story there….
There is, of course, another reason why I looked at this live map of the London Underground with interested eyes.
Because as someone rightly pointed out, that data becomes most useful in the one place that you currently can’t access it… actually on the London Underground itself. Down at the end of an escalator at 11.47pm on a Friday night; wondering where the last tube home was….
For that’s the bit where the web currently fails to find a foothold because – thus far – no-one has had either the wit or the wherewithal to whack a wifi network along those same tunnels.
It is a little known fact that the Tyne & Wear Metro is all wifi’d up; you could run that in Newcastle, no worries.
For someone who is still trying to make the world wake up to the value of elegant new networks, that’s one area that fascinates me – the opportunities content and, crucially, ad-wise that would open up across a new, wifi-enabled network of the London Underground ilk.
How many people would discard their free Standard for the real-time news and information that would stream into their SmartPhones, lap-tops and tablets halfway between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road?
That network, that platform would give that piece of raw data a proper home; a rich piece of data embedded deep amongst other pieces of networked news and information… a stream of data that would, in turn, deserve to be monetised; a useful service that would attract both eyeballs and advertisers in equal measure… advertisers that could be at once local to individual stations and national to the network…
Opening up transport network data is, equally, nothing new… this is the developers site for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the US:
http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx
And nor is seeing rail networks as a potential ‘framework’ for local journalism new either; head east for that point to be proved… http://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/
But if we ever suspect that the challenge of the web is of such a magnitude that it forces all of us to start with a blank piece of paper and work out what networks might actually work in this new world of ours, then I think one answer may lay underground.
There lies a potential content and advertising network of, as yet, untapped possibilities; of which that Live London Underground map would be just one, integral and integrated part.
There are many, many reasons why this caught my eye this week. First things first. It only actually caught my eye courtesy of Mr Will Perrin; who tweeted it out with due reference to ‘#ifnc’ on whose ‘beauty panel’ he sat and the news of whose demise came as no great shock to anyone last Tuesday.
As in the demise of the ‘Independently Financed News Consortia’ as opposed to Mr Perrin; he, last time I looked, was alive and kicking and still talking about local.
We, of course, had our own reasons to follow the fate of the IFNCs with particular interest; with due thanks to Nico Fell and Michael Wilson at UTV, we were part of their ’successful’ bid for the WalesLive model; only for that to meet its maker as Jeremy Hunt stayed true to his pre-election word, canned the IFNCs and ear-marked the money top-sliced off the BBC to further the cause of rural broadband connectivity.
The kind of connectivity, you suspect, that will be sorely needed around Cornwall if mycornwall.tv is ever to fly.
In such far-flung nether regions of the United Kingdon, such debates flourish. Callum at HighlandWifi is a new pal of ours after his success at Smarta100; we have also been walking this kind of walk in Norfolk; one of the reasons why I tucked the domain name www.yourNorwich.tv up my sleeve last summer. Just in case talks with You-Know-Who ever came to fruition.
The fact that Addiply now runs an MPU unit to host video – be they news, info-mmercial or straight commercial – also floats our boat; it was why I was up at the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital last week talking about local video we could drop onto www.southnorwichnews.co.uk Sure enough, a short info-mmercial about the merits of the ‘Park & Ride’ ahead of fighting over the last free verge at the car park will be winging it’s way across to our Claire.
Simple join the dots stuff; there’s a highly-relevant 4,000-strong digital audience; there’s a highly-relevant digital message for that same 4,000-strong audience… how do we join the two… and reward Claire’s hyper-local publishing efforts into the bargain.
But what makes the emergence of – I presume EU, RDA or ‘public’ funded MyCornwall.TV soooo interesting is how, exactly, it might fit in the ‘Parry Model’ now – apparently championed by HM Government. A model that, according to one informed estimate doing the rounds on Tuesday night, could take up to five years to properly gestate.
First, of course, an investment banker from Lazards how has to nod and approve; we can all only hope that the fabled Nick Shott doesn’t take his investment cue from the clowns at RBS who swallowed every word that the old Irish chancer Brian P Tierney had to say with regard to Philly Media Holdings…
We digress. The Parry Plan, of course, is for 81 ‘Local Media Companies’ to populate the local ‘TV’ news space suddenly to be left as and when ITV vacates the scene of the 6.30 revenue crime.
Why it was 81 and not 63 or 96 no-one was wholly sure when it came to the panel discussion at The Frontline Club on Tuesday night. For me, it was Marc Reeves who made one of the night’s most telling points when he tried to get people to see beyond this notion that ‘TV’ – going forward – was going to involve a studio desk, two presenters, a gaffer, a boom-boy and all else that comes with our traditional notion of ‘TV’ news.
In its stead would come something altogether more radical and ill-defined; something that an emasculated OfCom will clearly struggle to define and regulate if this idea of ‘TV’ proves to be no more than Claire from www.southnorwichnews.co.uk armed with a video enhanced iPhone – and a 4,000-strong audience to match.
The answer as to ‘Why 81?’ comes in the form of OfCom’s part in Parry’s original report to the Tory party; written in summer 09, it was still championning ‘Channel M’ as the way forward; the same bastard child of GMG/MEN that TrinityMirror wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole when it came to the MEN’s recent sale.
Anyway, here we go…
http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/920601/Tories-unveil-plans-81-new-local-TV-stations/
It’s 81 cos that was the number of spectrum ’sales’ people figured you could auction off; those in turn would give rough audience numbers – per LMC – of 500,000.
‘The Tories would also auction spectrum to create local television licences that would form a key part of these LMCs. The party statement said Ofcom had identified 81 different locations where such licences could be created, covering populations of about 500,000.’
At which point, presumeably, Parry, Shott, Hunt et al figure that even what was left of a Johnston Press sales team could find enough ads to support a ’studio’ in the bowels of the Sheffield Star. Job done.
Now Sheffield, Yorkshire, has its own TV station; still seven short of Birmingham, Alabama, but done. 6.30 ’slot’ filled. Everyone’s a winner.
OK. Go back to www.mycornwall.tv – or, indeed, imagine our Claire with a camera and a video platform on www.southnorwichnews.co.uk – and, for my money, we’re getting far, far close to the likely reality – particularly if you then empower both with a wifi cloud slung above their heads.
Cos – smartly – MyCornwall don’t see their world through the eyes of neat, 500,000 ‘viewer’ chunks of spectrum. They seem themselves split into another 12 sub-domains… from Lizard to Bodmin Moor; neither gives a toss about what happens in the other; both care deeply what happens beneath their own connectivity cloud.
The future of local ‘TV’ ? I suspect it starts at the door of The Jamaica Inn, deep in the heart of Bodmin Moor…
http://www.mycornwall.tv/region/bodmin
It starts with a ‘bottom up’ solution… it doesn’t start by splitting spectrums into 81, 500,000-strong chunks in the vain hope that a ‘top down’ imposition from the former chairman of Johnston Press and an investment banker from Lazards will work wonders.
It won’t.
The answer is – as we speak – bubbling up from below.
Like many of us, I’ve long been an admirer of what a certain Sunderland student has done in terms of his final year project.
If ever there was one person who took C Shirky’s words to heart and experimented like his little life depended on it, then its Josh Halliday.
It therefore came as no surprise to find Master Halliday being the first person to whip Addiply’s new MPU ad panel off the shelf and drop it into www.SR2blog.com.
Others might feel their way gently into this whole ‘richer media’ landscape.
Not Josh. He grabbed the bull by the horns and made his www.SR2blog.com capable of hosting video ads off our Addiply back-end… or rather, we host; Josh plays.
Click through that ‘Advertise here…’ button and you’ll get here…
http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&pid=57
That’s how you place a video ad yourself into the heart of SR2. For a fiver a week.
Simple.
Which brings us to these two pieces that popped up in the Guardian last week; the fact that some £520 mill is being wiped off the Government’s advertising budget. This year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/24/coalition-freezes-advertising-budget
Down at the coalface, that means individual campaigns will be hit… ‘A spokeswoman for the Home Office, which runs high-profile ad campaigns on issues including teen alcohol abuse and knife crime, said that there would be a £5m cut to its communications and marketing budget…’
Click through that live link to ‘teen alcohol abuse’ and you get to this…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/17/advertising.health
A video advert.
I’ve never been to SR2. I met Herb Kim and his Codeworks crew in Sunderland the other month; I’ve no idea whether that was in SR2. But the suggestion is that parts of SR2 aren’t the greatest.
Like every, ageing industrial mass in the UK, SR2 will have ‘inner city’ issues. Some of which will, you suspect, include teen alcohol abuse.
Now, if I’m the COI with a budget now £5 mill light, but a message that I’d still like to drill down into the heart of afflicted communities, Josh’s little video ad space looks absolutely heaven sent…
For a fiver a month, I can place that video ad for teen alcohol abuse right where it needs to be seen… only if I were Josh, I’d start charging them £50 a month for that privilege.
The winners? The UK tax-payer and Josh Halliday. The losers? All the third party interventionists. Now a COI ad monkey can place that ad themselves. They don’t need an ad agency to do that work for them….
Nor, of course, do they need the static pages of the local evening newspaper.
Not that that appears to be of any concern to certain regional newspaper execs; certainly not Martin Morgan of DMGT…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/28/dmgt-regional-business-apps
… given the squealing noises to be heard from the Newspaper Society every time the thorny issue of planning applications comes up, it was remarkable how few feathers the fact that Northcliffe’s titles look set to be £10 million lighter courtesy of public ad spend going down the proverbial toilet ruffled.
“Government-related advertising is actually a small part of overall advertising, we are not a major recipient of government spending,” said Martin.
‘DMGT added that growth in private sector advertising was “taking up the slack” of any drop-off in bookings from the government..’
Fine. If you’re not that bothered, lets give what little COI cash there is to every hyper-lcoal Josh we can find.
For them, it could make the world of difference; the difference, say, between ‘not-for-profit’ and ‘not-for-loss’.
As world and his wife waits to see where the first of the new Chancellor’s cuts will come on Monday – £6 billion-worth, to be precise – we lost an important advertiser on MyFootballWriter.com the other week.
They have, in fairness, been replaced by another important advertiser; so all is not wholly lost. But both serve something of a purpose as we all try and figure how to make the numbers work once Mr Osbourne goes to work.
So after the better part of three years working with Golley-Slater and the British Army, this week we welcomed Great Yarmouth and Waveney NHS Trust to the MyFootballWriter fold with their ad for chlamydia awareness.
A click-through and you’re here… http://www.areyougettingit.com/
The point is that both the British Army and the chlamydia campaign share one thing in common – they’re both trying to work out how on earth you target 16-25-year-old ‘lads’ when – in every reality – they are probably not reading their local evening newspaper any more.
They will be on-line. They will be on FaceBook. On YouTube. On their smart phones. Reading their footie. Where – in every likelihood – they won’t be is ferreting out the nearest corner shop and waiting for the van with the newspapers to arrive.
They’ve gone. Long gone.
But hanging around a footie website; that’s a possibility. And if I’m the Yarmouth & Waveney NHS Trust and I’m charged from on high with hitting that young male audience – somehow – you will feel pretty happy about justifying your ad spend.
It’s local; it’s on-line; it’s footie; it’s young men. Tick, tick, tick…
And for that level of ‘certainty’, you will be prepared to pay a premium.
Just as I, the publisher, am happy to stick to my guns and charge a premium to the NHS Trust; because I ‘fit’ with what they are looking for. I offer them the audience that they seek – and that has value.
Even now. Even in this current climate. That is an efficient and effective way of delivering ‘brand’ value. And for that, someone can pay.
Because as every local and national Government department comes under huge pressure to justify every last penny of their ad spend, such thinking is going to be crucial.
Demand sweeping savings of every local council and it’s not just their much-hated ‘newspaper’ offerings that will go to meet its maker… because if the choice is between one OAP home and the £000s and £000s I’m still obliged to spend in planning applications advertising in the back pages of the local weekly paper – and all in an age when I can get that ‘data’ fed out to the public for nowt – it’s a no-brainer.
Whatever the local newspaper barons demand.
What are market forces dictating? To maintain indirect public subsidies for an information platform that technology is fast making redundant? Is that the Tory way? Is that what Master George wants?
Read the tea-leaves as to the Jeremy Hunt vision for the delivery of local news and he would – it appears - still be wedded to this notion of city-based TV stations popping up across the land in the manner of Birmingham, Alabama.
That’s the interesting line from here…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/17/jeremy-hunt-priorities-culture-secretary
That rather than Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Durham, Sunderland etc etc all falling under the one roof that an ‘independently financed news consortia’ might have offered; somehow each will find the wherewithal to produce their own TV stations. NewcastleTV, SunderlandTV, etc, etc…
Maybe, the LibDem ‘wing’ of this new Government can persuade our Jeremy to give the IFNCs a ‘go’; maybe Archie Norman’s long-standing connections with the Tory hierachy will see a deal being stitched as a newly-liberated ITV.com ‘re-enter’ the local news market that they were desperately hoping to abandon.
Perhaps.
But the point is I think Jeremy Hunt’s vision is – actually – do-able. I said as much after speaking on all things ‘local’ at GMG’s Oxford Media Convention…
Some five months on and – to mis-quote Mr Weller – the more I see, the more I know; the more I know, the more I understand how this can be done.
Part of the answer lies in the on-going power of local, display advertising; why it is that we’ve always been able to attract the likes of the British Army and the local NHS Trust to take out a tenancy-based ad on MyFootballWriter.
It is a lesson not lost on Google, either. Wade through the weighty tome that was The Atlantic this month and their piece on ‘How To Save The News’… http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/8095/ …and there it is; pretty much the same conclusion… (on Page 6)…
‘Online display ads may not be so valuable now, he [Google's Neal Mohan] said, but that is because we’re still in the drawn-out “transition” period. Sooner or later—maybe in two years, certainly in 10—display ads will, per eyeball, be worth more online than they were in print…’
Really? ‘…be worth more online than they were in print…’
This is the man from Google talking, right.
‘Wherever people choose to spend their time, Mohan said, they can eventually be “monetized”—the principle on which every newspaper and magazine (and television network) has survived until today.
“This [online-display] market has the opportunity to be much larger,” he said. It was about $8 billion in the U.S. last year. “If you just do the math—audience coming online, the time they spend—it could be an order of magnitude larger.”
‘In case you missed that, he means tenfold growth.’
Which makes my clap ad worth £1,500 a month. Plus VAT. Give or take.
There is, to my mind, another trick you need to pull to make Jeremy’s ‘city-tv’ vision flesh and that comes down to delivery systems; what replaces the press hall, the delivery van and the paper boy.
For that you need some serious wads of cash and some kick-ass kit.
Funny thing is, I could even tell you where both were. Do that, however, and someone would have to kill me.
But it’s do-able. As the boys from Google know.
I might have trouble finding the quote again; so many ill-thought gems have passed across our screens of late as politicians and pundits alike fail to square this electoral circle.
So, bear with me.
Gotcha…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/09/tory-activists-blame-david-cameron-chums
In particular this paragraph:
‘One senior Tory said: “If we had not had the television debates we would now be in government with an overall majority. Debates, plus big society and gimmicky nonsense equals a hung parliament.
‘”No debates, plus core message and proper politics would have equalled victory.”‘
For me, that is a fascinating piece of societal naievity; from someone who clearly still resides in the 20th Century; about 1911, if I was pushed.
‘No debates = victory’
Hello? The great Tory mistake – the reason why David Cameron didn’t win a clear and outright majority in last week’s General Election – was because he allowed himself to engage in a conversation with those he sought to rule?
In that allowing himself to be put through that ‘X-Factor-esque’ mill, he empowered the grubby prols with the chance to compare and contrast him with the far more telegenic Nick Clegg; he was the one that ‘got’ how to hold a conversation with the individuals within that studio audience – and, by implication, the even greater audience beyond.
The fact that the Liberal Democrats didn’t then translate that into a greater number of seats, merely left the FaceBook chattering classes with this sense that the British electoral system wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be… that, to quote David Cushman if memory serves, our age-old political lords and masters have managed to fine-tune the system to such a degree that it can now deliver ‘three losers and no winners…
Genius.
It’s never like that on X-Factor. There always has to be one winner… and by collaborating together as individuals; by all of us making our telephone votes count, so we decide. SuBo, Leona, whoever… We, the Great British public decide.
The fact that this fatally flawed and failing electoral system of ours could yet deliver the same entrenched stalemate again in six or 12 months time appears not to have crossed anyone’s mind; the North could stay resolutely red, the South-East stoutly blue, the South-West defiantly orange…. And then?
But more pertinently still, this whole notion that the masses won’t do as they are told clearly extends to the highest reaches of the old, established media order – and, in particular, certain corners of the Murdoch empire who seemingly have yet to compute how ’it’ works.
How empowered we have become in having meaningful conversations outside their jurisdiction.
And as the Great Plan of A Cameron Election starts to unravel, so they are left to flail around in all-too embarrassing a-fashion; the fact that today’s resignation offer by Gordon Brown was no doubt largely orchestrated by the two biggest bogey-men of the British ’right’ in the shape of Messrs Mandelson and Campbell merely left them losing the plot completely… in this case Adam Boulton…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZm5cm0ZtL4
What, however, makes all the difference in 2010 is the fact that, in years gone by, that act of journalistic idiocy would have gone all-but unnoticed and unremarked.
The next day someone might have said: ‘Oooh, did you see that Boulton lose it with Campbell on TV last night…?’
And the answer might have been: ‘Nah… missed it. Any good?’
Today and we all get the chance to see Boulton do his paymasters few favours; we not only relive every moment again on YouTube, but we comment upon it… we talk about it… we hold a conversation, among oursleves, about what that means…
Look not so much at the clip itself; rather the pages of comments that it now provokes as everyone relishes Boulton’s frothy-lipped fury that Campbell of all people had returned to upset the Tory apple-cart.
Here the winners are clear. ‘Brand’ Boulton takes a beating just as ‘brand’ Burley got a caning the other night; we – the audience – are the winners; we are the ones enjoying the last laugh at our former masters’ expense.
It is a world turned upside down; it is a revolution; it is further evidence that we will not ‘bow to our master, pay rent to our lords…
The world has changed. And all in a way that we are only now starting to see… and, in that sense, this General Election makes for compelling viewing.
Because they are all now puppets on our stage; we pull the strings. And it will be us, not The Sun, wot wins it.
As we all sit and wait this weekend to discover what electoral system can be made to best fit our growing conception that a new, networked world might be afoot - Clue: 660 silos into one, collaboratively-attuned, X-Factor-literate populace doesn’t go – this caught my eye.
Courtesy of Mike Riddell. One of Addiply’s friends ooop north.
It is the story of the sudden, near-instant and – as yet – unexplained ‘dip’ in the New York stock exchange last Thursday.
It sent the markets into a potentially fatal tail-spin, from which they just about recovered… albeit at the expense of 000s and 000s of little investors from SmallTown, MidWest getting their fingers burned as they had little or no time to react to such wild fluctuations.
Just as – the claim goes – certain airline pilots have little or no time to react to the on-board computer when it decides to go for a dive… the automatic pilot automatically – and instantly – reacting to flawed pieces of data with tragic consequences for the individuals on board.
The individual named by the LA Times as being aboard the NYSE on Thursday was a musician from Phoenix. She won’t be flying again.
‘The free fall spooked individual investors such as Roxy Lopez, a Phoenix musician, who took three-quarters of her money out of the stock market in 2008 after losing tens of thousands of dollars during the bear market that took hold during the recent financial crisis,’ the LA Times noted.
‘Lopez had been preparing to boost her stock allocation but has now changed her mind.
“The irony is that I was just starting to feel comfortable again and I was just starting to buy some individual stocks again over the last two weeks or so,” she said. “But now with this, I don’t think I’ll put any more of my money in there. It’s too volatile and I just don’t trust the market.”
The two words that, for me, scream out are ‘trust’ and ‘the market’.
Because as you read on, it becomes increasingly obvious that Ms Lopez is quite right not to trust ‘the market’ - it has long been skewed against the individual by certain Masters of the Universe within the system. People aren’t playing fair. Technology is inserting a complexity into the system that denies any one individual investor the chance to play on a level playing field.
In this case, it is boys and their big toys – or rather, HFT firms. You begin to wonder whether or not ‘high-frequency trading’ might soon join such phrases as ’sub-prime mortgages’ and ‘collatorised debt obligations’ in the markets’ lexicon of shame.
CDOs were, of course, the vehicle of choice for traders buried deep with Goldman Sachs as we – the hapless owners of RBS – were left with an $800 million cold.
But this suspicion that HFTs could be behind the kind of near-catastrophic node-dive that spooked ‘the markets’ on Thursday is worth a better understanding; cos someone – again – is playing fast and loose with our fortunes here; above all, thwarting the individual’s presumed right to compete on a level playing field.
I say ‘presumed’. No doubt, someone would suggest that given the laws of the jungle and the Ascent of Wall St Man, we - as individuals – have no right to presume we enact our lives on a level playing field. Its the boys with the biggest toys that make the biggest killing.
Or in this case ‘swashbuckling traders on souped-up computers’.
The danger, of course, is that letting big boys play with big toys in a largely-unregulated and as yet unchallenged market place can have unforeseen consequences. In that… ‘the slightest error can send the market reeling before human overseers can detect anything amiss…’
Cue another little beast in this jungle – the ‘flash order’. Not something, you suspect, that Ms Lopez was ever aware of.
What are ‘flash orders’? According to the LA Times, ‘flash orders’ are ‘a controversial practice in which high-frequency traders get a leg up by getting an early glimpse of incoming orders from other investors…’
Like Ms Lopez.
“No longer do we rely on people shouting on the exchange floors to transact business,” said Mary Schapiro, chairwoman of the SEC.
“Instead, we rely on computerized trading whose speed has accelerated from seconds to milliseconds to microseconds. And for some, that isn’t fast enough,” she said.
“But … just because technology is progressing and trading platforms have proliferated — fairness must remain the underpinning of the market.”
And therein lies the key… fairness.
Because with the march of technology comes complexity and with complexity – if you are not all-too careful – comes obscurity. And it is when such mighty institutions as Goldman Sachs, the New York Stock Exchange and, indeed, the UK electoral system start to become ever-less accountable; their inner-workings ever-less transparent to the individuals without, that their foundations start to shake; that the calls for fundamental, societal change grow ever more louder.
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, evidence of Clay Shirky’s ‘collapse to simplicity’ is ever more compelling…
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
Big is in danger of going bust. Or rather has in the case of the Greek economy. Or Lehman Brothers.
Our future is – in every likelihood – small, simple, open and accountable. In fairness, we might have no choice; we might all have to start from scratch again – and build new communities of trust and trade from the street up.
How Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Brown ever get this elegant Shirky-esque circle to square with 150 years of Parliamentary two-party privilege is something that – I suspect – will prove beyond them. There are too many a vested interest at work to prompt instant reform; just as the bonus culture of The City and Wall St ensure that the current Masters of our Universe will survive for a while longer.
But there is a mood for change afoot. Just not the one prescribed by the Tory party.
The more observant among you will be aware that late last week, Addiply dipped another tiny, tiny toe into the world of hyper-local media when Guardian News & Media opted to give the system a trial on their own, new ‘Local’ sites in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds.
Indeed, a couple of days later and we even had our very first £20 per week advertiser in the shape of http://www.readersheds.co.uk/
Who knows what that means for any of us in the medium-to-long term. For now, it remains little more than a trial. A suck-it-and-see operation on the part of GNM – wedded, like the rest of us, to this idea that if nothing works, everything might…. that now is, indeed, the time for 000s of little experiments; of which the Addiply/GuardianLocal tie-in is just one.
So, we’ll see. There will be no promises from our side of the fence that we’re about to change the world.
We’re just in the business of giving publishers, large and small, a new tool to play with in the hope that it might – just – form one possible part of one potential answer.
In that regard it was interesting to note that the start of Emily Bell’s farewell speeches before she disappears to New York to join the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen in the hotbed of US J-School thinking, that she sensed the answer would lie in some form of hybrid model – a bit of this here, a bit of that there… etc, etc…
That there will be no one, single answer to all our web woes; what works for some, won’t work for others.
But what interests me in the midst of this current General Election campaign is just how much of our once-accepted world is now bust – be it morally, financially or, indeed, philosophically, there’s not too much for anyone ‘big’ to shout about.
The world’s biggest investment bank Goldman Sachs is just the latest cornerstone of ‘big’ business to find its very foundations under threat; now to my mind, ‘big’ politics of the two-party variety in the UK is under threat like never before.
The televised leaders’ debates are, in part, to blame.
Suddenly we’re all empowered to see who of our three, potential leaders-elect can actually hold a conversation; who can ‘engage’ us as an audience; an audience weaned for the better part of ten years on such shows as ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and ‘X-Factor’.
And, in many ways, the live debates are no different; who has got Prime Ministerial ‘talent’; which of the three candidates has that ‘X’ factor that marks him out as my preferred candidate?
But – and here’s the ‘big’ problem – the old, electoral system doesn’t ‘fit’ with the way in which we’re now empowered; the level of expectation that comes from us ‘choosing’ a Susan Boyle or a Leona Lewis.
Most people, I suspect, would settle for a phone vote these days; swap Peter Snow and his ’swing-o-meter’ for Simon Cowell and a big, red button and it’d be job done.
As it is, Clegg can sweep the popular vote, but the very nature of this country’s electoral system ensures that he’s got next to no chance of becoming Prime Minister – the man most able to hold a conversation with the people of this country won’t get in.
Because the system – the ‘big’ beast that is two-party politics and first-past-the-post protocols – won’t allow for the collaborative voice of the individual voter to be heard.
And how are individual voters collaborating like never, ever before? Through their alter egos on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc etc… this is where the debates are being instantly dissected and opinions shaped or re-inforced. That’s where the consensus is to be found.
Of course there is another fixture in the roster of ‘big’ that are finding life very uncomfortable right now – and that’s the big media beasts of the right for whom this election is not playing out as they demanded.
Because people will no longer do as they are told; just as they won’t watch the news at 6.30pm or wait for the paper boy to deign to show up at 6.30pm every evening, they won’t sit there and be told who to vote for.
Go back – as we all-too often do – to Christopher Hill and this world of ours that is fast turning upside down and it’s there again, this ragged band of Diggers…
…who headed to St George’s Hill intent on defying the landlords, etc..
‘We will not bow to masters
Or pay rent to the lords
We are free men…’
Free to hold our own conversations as to who we think is best suited to life at No10; this assumption by the ‘big’ beasts of the media jungle – be it Murdoch Jnr or Mr Dacre – that we will ‘bow’ to their will is a throw-back to another age.
When ‘big’ ruled.
When life was more complicated; when the ‘collapse to simplicity’ as foretold by Mr Shirky had yet to take root in our consciousness.
That essay – to me – looks increasingly seminal in its thinking.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
That the same logic that Shirky appears intent on applying to complex ‘business’ models could apply equally as easily to complex ‘voting’ systems of which the UK variety is a class apart.
The simple solution is to put Messrs Clegg, Brown and Cameron in front of Cowell, Morgan, Cole and Co and for them to press a big red button as we all reach for our mobile phones.
We’ll vote for the lad we like, we trust… the one we think can have a conversation with.
That’s simple. And that’s small.
Big and complicated don’t work. End of.
This I thoroughly enjoyed…. Marc Reeves’ telling review of the current state of the Midlands Media Nation.
http://marcreeves.blogspot.com/2010/04/media-mayhem-in-midlands.html#more
There were some lovely lines therein; this one rang a bell: “… new-school upstarts (guilty as charged) come along with three smart people, three laptops, an idea, and perhaps even a corner of a serviced office, and fulfil a need for information and advertising at a fraction of the cost…”
Although in our case, you can substitute corner of a serviced office for corner of the Old Dear’s kitchen.
And the conclusion: “Perpetual revolution and reinvention are the only new constants in the media now…”
Very good.
Because Marc is spot on. There is a revolution afoot. And we would all surely see it as such – if only we were outsiders ‘looking in’ as opposed to those caught somewhere near the eye of the storm.
But the use of the word revolution is telling; that and this whole idea that no-one has an answer; that we’re all fumbling around in the dark trying to make things work; a bit like Percy from Black Adder… we all end up desperately hoping that we’ve struck web gold, only to hit pure green.
A splat of green today… tomorrow…?
Go back to that Christopher Hill book: ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ and re-read that line from Hill’s introduction… http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/12/30/as-2010-looms-perhaps-we-need-to-party-like-its-1649-not-1499-and-to-recognise-that-maybe-the-world-is-indeed-turning-upside-down/
This one… ‘This book deals with what, from one point of view, are subsidiary episodes… the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters…’
Now read Will Perrin’s comment on Marc’s blog… how that Midlands ‘beat’ is offering a rich and vibrant ‘hyper-local’ scene; it’s just a case of now finding ‘their own solutions to the problems of their time…’
ie making local on-line pay.
“Commercially these are non-barking dogs at present – volunteer run, providing a wonderful eclectic information services and taken in aggregate commanding a fair number of eyeballs, “ Will writes.
“There’s potential here for some sort of ad sales co-operative that sells their space to advertisiers and others who are ethically aligned with the site publishers…”
Of course, he’s right. There is a large opportunity here; if we can just find the right tools for the job… and the ‘co-operative’ spirit to match.
Addiply is in this mix. We have, already, got www.thelichfieldblog.co.uk to a position where it approaches ‘not-for-loss’.
Phil and Ross can now not only run their own text ad service with a 90% revenue return; they can now offer richer media ads… banners, buttons, skys, etc… all the big boy ads that used to be the exclusive preserve of our media betters.
But this is only part of the answer. Because, as Marc rightly notes, we all need to evolve as we go; that settling for new media green ain’t good enough. A splat today will be… a splat tomorrow.
What we have to address next is the thorny issue of sales. That nasty bit of asking punters for money. A tenner for a banner ad here; a fiver for a text ad there.
That’s the problem that Will rightly highlights; cos I know for certain that people like Nikki out of http://digbeth.org/ it is simply not in their DNA to don a ’sales’ hat. Whether that has to be part of our future skill set or not is almost by-the-by.
Right now, we need a means to co-operate when it comes to ad sales.
Which is why Addiply’s next stop is to bolt in an affiliate sales programme into its make-up.
We had one of those ‘Doh…’ moments in London yesterday; by chance right in Will’s patch too. Mr P John was there to witness it, too…
Because deep within the code bowels of http://www.tipexchange.co.uk/v3/index.php – the original birthplace of Addiply – lies an automated affiliate sales programme that our Ian is now about to dust off, unpick and weave into Addiply.
And here comes the fag-packet theory… Addiply offers publishers a 90% revenue return. For those more confident in the sales arena, that’s fine… they’ll sort out their sales.
For those who find that a particularly nasty nut to crack, you will – in theory – be able to ‘out-source’ that function.
To a neighbour. A friend. A relative. A former local newspaper ad salesperson with a fresh contacts book and, potentially, an axe to grind. They’d be ideal. Must be dozens of them, these days.
And, say, offer them a 25% commission. Or 15%.
We’ll empower the publisher to set their own commission rates. If its 15%, you’re still taking 75%; 25% is still a 65% return.
And the publisher will still enjoy pre-approval; no affiliate-sourced advert will go live without the publisher’s approval; he or she will still make sure they ethically ‘fit’ with the community they’ve built.
But with an affiliate tracking code in place, you can reward your local, part-time sales force automatically via PayPal… track whose selling well; who works their patch best… and allow people to cross-sell into other affiliate-enabled sites… sell a batch of text ads across Tamworth, Lichfield, Digbeth and Bourneville with each site owner paying said ‘rep’ their set commission return.
We empower a New Model Army of locally-focussed, part-time sales reps to sell into a network on a simple, automated, accountable and transparent basis.
At which point, too, the bid model may well kick in; you offer your space for a fiver a month, a silver-tongued ad charmer could find a client willing to take that space for six…
That might be the way to do it.
Might.
In times gone by, we used to use the Shilbottle Coal Co as our prime example of a local tradesperson who ‘got’ what Addiply offered the local advertiser.
The chance to place a simple, text ad himself.
For a fiver a week in the case of TrinityMirror’s JournalLive site in Alnwick.
Or, in the case of Josh Halliday’s http://sr2blog.com/ and the little text ad that appeared thereon for a Sunderland tiler, http://www.tilingservicesne.co.uk/ a couple of quid per month.
To put his Sunderland tiler ‘brand’ in front of the good people of SR2.
Himself.
I might be wrong; I don’t think tiler and student are mates. The former simply recognises that the latter has a spot of digital ad space for sale in front of his target audience and – with a little help from his Mrs’ PayPal account – so he was able to place an ad himself.
As he might have placed a postcard in the window of a Hendon PostOffice; his business card tacked to the wall in the local chippie.
He didn’t need an ad agency to tell him where to place his ‘brand’; nor did he need a digital marketing guru. Somehow he worked it all out for himself… because it’s not rocket science.
He wanted to place his ad… just there. Where? There… in front of his potential punters in SR2.
Oh, there… OK, fine… Go on then. It’s a couple of quid. For a month. Do it in three clicks.
Simple.
Three clicks later and there it is. In front of his eyes. Placed. Tacked to the wall of Josh’s digital chip shop.
What said Sunderland tiler didn’t need to do, of course, was to go via a big black box and a magical algorithm in sunny California.
He cut that ‘complexity’ out of his life – the complexity that comes with one end optimising his campaign brightly enough to ensure that he will end up on http://sr2blog.com/ ; the complexity that comes with an algorithm recognising that the same little text ad wants to be in SR2 and the back-streets of Sunderland; the complexity that comes with Josh ensuring that his ad space is open to the likes of local tradespeople – and not B&Bs and Hotels In Sunderland.
Or, if you’re Patrick Smith and his journalism blog, Used Car Sales In Rochdale… http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/03/27/if-any-of-us-are-ever-going-to-get-to-that-ledge-marked-not-for-loss-we-have-to-do-better-than-selling-used-car-ads-in-rochdale/
I would hesitate to say that in the last four years I’ve found myself walking hand-in-hand with Mr Clay Shirky.
A bit like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, me, MyFootballWriter and Addiply walk firmly in their shadow.
Perhaps we try and walk the walk that they actually talk… for example, trying to make certain visions of an entrepreneurial and web-empowered Africa flesh.
Mr Shirky’s latest tome was fascinating.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
Once again – in my humble opinion – we could get certain of our pieces to ‘fit’ within this new, societal jigsaw he was drawing; one in which ‘complexity’ was starting to get the cold shoulder from a populace enabled to view the world in a different light.
To re-invent ways that they organised themselves – both commercially and philosophically – and all from the bottom up as they tired of the ever-growing complexities that were delivered from the top down.
All of which takes us right back to Christopher Hill; and the world that he saw starting to turn upside down in 1649 as the Diggers, Levellers and Co looked to create ‘a common treasury for all… ‘
Writing his introduction, Hill wrote: ‘Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition and the middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain.
‘… This book deals with what, from one point of view, are subsidiary episodes… the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters…’
The only word that is, alas, missing is ’simple’.
That we were – in 1649 – witnessing various groups of common people trying ‘to impose their own simple solutions to the problems of their time…’
Read Shirky’s tome and the point is clear; the simplest way to deliver me media in 2010 is into the palm of my hand; two touches of a screen I have the weather, the sports results, a home made video to chuckle at…
… all in the same way that, in three clicks, a Sunderland tiler can place a text ad in front of a Sunderland audience. It doesn’t need to go via Mountain View. Thataway lies ‘complexity‘.
‘In such systems,’ writes Shirky, ‘there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change…’
So what if someone asked Google to change AdSense? ‘Can we not do our advertising on a tenancy basis, Eric? I can’t get anyone to click…’ might be an example, I guess.
Just a little tweak? Even that, it seems, can pose a fundamental challenge to the established order.
‘Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites…’
Further on, Shirky notes: ‘It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime.
‘That’s not how it works, however.’
No, it’s not. Because people want simple; they value simple – particularly in times of economic strife when ‘complexity’ comes with at least two other partners in societal crime, obscurity and cost.
‘I don’t have time to get this to work… nor do I have the cash to pay someone else to get this to work…’
That, I strongly suspect, will be the refrain from SMEs the world over as they try to figure out how on earth they ever market their digital wares.
‘It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old,’ Shirky concludes.
‘But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future…‘
If Shirky is right, then there’s a bright future in store for at least one Sunderland media student and, likewise, his local tiler.
