The video insiders guide to neighborhoods across the world

Well, the title is a little overpromising. Sofar, TurnHere.com only covers parts of the USA. But nevertheless, the idea is nice. and some of the films are really made will with a lot of effort by all the individuals. Just like this one here:

New York private eye Dempster Leech weaves a tale of the restaurants, shops and people of Chinatown from the early 1800s to the present.

Culture and transformation

This book could be interesting: Transformation. A forthcoming book by Grant McCracken, who now, writes a little about his book:

This book argues that there’s a new cultural regime, one that is, I believe, changing how we define the individual, the self, our culture and our economy.

He jumps right into the discussion about how commerce and pop culture has influenced our lives until today.

The academics and the essayists insisted that popular culture was a corruption, that the consumer was a dupe, that something had gone terribly wrong now that capital and commerce had been allowed to interfere with culture.

He counters that argument, saying:

Popular culture got steadily better. We did not dumb down and out. TV improved. […] The parts of culture not touched by commerce, well, many of them descended into self absorption and incoherence. As Tyler Cowen pointed out, commerce is actually good for culture. Go figure. Shakespeare did.

This could turn out to be a very interesting read!

Networks, Power and Money.

In April, ABC announced that some of their prime time shows will be available online the day after they first aired. Not for free, of course, they contain ads that you cannot skip. (This reminds me of the discussion that arose when bloggers found out that Philips is filing a patent for devices that won’t let you skip commercials.

This created a huge discussion in the last couple of week about the future of the (TV-) Networks in a world with perfect digital free distribution networks. Here and here, are two posts that discuss this.

Jeff Jarvis also writes an extensive Post on this topic and claims: Everybody’s a network:

And of course, the networks face no end of competitors in content, as well. Rocketboom now has twice the audience of many cable news shows because the stranglehold the networks had on distribution and audience is over. The audience is on stage. Your customers are your competitors.

So in a way, content is still king, but everyone can now create and distribute content. Distribution is no longer an added value for consumers. Organisations that built their business model around the distribution and ownershop of content need to change their business model now. One way could be, as Jeff writes, to use their expertise to show people where to find the best stuff.
A VC writes about the future of media, about how content needs to be unbundled, micro-chunked and freely distributed.

Jeff goes on:

In the old static-network world, it made no sense to send people to other networks; in the new, fluid world, they’re going to go there anyway, and so the best thing to do is to help them find the best stuff, redefining the value of a network.

In a way, it’s like Google: People go there, in order to be pointed to other websites. They don’t go to Google for „Google content“. Because there is none.

So content should be microchunked, freely distributed and then we need someone to help us find it.

Jeff points to Bubblegeneration who knows the solution:

Rebundling is where value capture will happen – at communities, reconstructors, markets, networks – that direct people’s attention to individualized ‚casts. This is where branding will be reborn – and where advertising is already being disrupted, ripped apart, and reborn (viz, Google, PPC, pay per call, etc)

It won’t happen overnight. But in the next few years, rebundling will be the future of connected consumption. Most often, it’s why consumers connect in the first place: why do you think people <3 MySpace, Last.fm, etc?

Newspapers like NYT and WPO made the same mistake Disney is make; ceding market power to players like Technorati, Memeorandum, Delicious, etc; record labels did it, ceding market power to players like Last.fm, Apple, and MySpace; and now, finally, we have TV guys doing it – ceding their market power because they don’t understand the new economics of media.

Content can be created and distributed by anone. But we will need an Audience Relationship Manager to help us through the jungle of information and find what’s relevant for us. At the end of the day, it’s about the scarcity of attention, a big topic nowadays and John Hagel writes:

That is one of the consequences of the growing relative scarcity of attention – anyone who can help audiences connect with the most relevant and engaging content will be richly rewarded.

Links & News – 12. May

Guess-the-Google spotted yet again.

Interesting how new stuff isn’t always new. I blogged about Guess the Google almost exactly a year ago to date.

And today Skeeballer writes about this , almost exactly a year later. And I don’t mean to say he’s late, or didn’t know what was going on a year ago (on the contrary, with all the cool stuff that’s getting published every day, it’s impossible to keep up).

I just recognised, that Websites without timestamps are truly timeless (I know, sounds stupidly obvious).
So maybe, Guess the google was already 1 year old, when I first blogged about it. Or two, or three years, who knows? Only one thing is sure – it couldn’t have started before the Google image search functionality.

It made me think of another fact: now that I link to Skeeballer, Technorati will most likely say, that I linked to their site a few hours ago, then „1 day ago“, later maybe „20 days ago“ and so forth.
Now, imagine Technorati keeping their databases up and running without deleting anything – and me and Skeeballer doing the same with our weblogs. After 20 years it will say 7300 days ago, or may be 20 years, 1 month, 12 days ago. This could go on for a very long time: The web just doesn’t forget any longer.

Just think about it – what if YouTube keeps your silly video (that your evil friends uploaded) live to see for the next 20-50 years?

I am truly glad that most of my adolescent misbehaviours happenend, when video cams were too expensive and mobile phones with cams didn’t exist yet. There are enough stupid photos of me, as it is…

The Economy of Unbundled Advertising

Terry Heaton writes about „The Economy of Unbundled Advertising“ which is about TV News and advertising in a Postmodern World – an interesting article in The Digital Journalist.

But now we’ve entered the world of unbundled media, where people download individual songs instead of buying CDs, watch programs when and where they want (without the commercials), and read news stories or snippets of stories

His advice to advertisers is to leverage this and fill the space with microchunks of your message ready to be picked up by smart aggregators crawling the web for information that users requested.