This blog is about web 2.0, traditional media and advertising, how they affect each other and how they affect us (especially me). It is also about stuff I like such as art, design, animation, music and photography. what I feel like writing. Nothing written here should be taken too seriously...
We’ve been talking for years about media convergence since first Nicholas Negroponte coined the term and, we’ve grown accustomed to it on the web the hypermedia where all the rest converge.
As I often ask my students, I you didn’t knew the language in a website, would you be able to tell apart a newspaper, a radio station and a TV station only by watching at their websites?
You probably wouldn’t. Each medium trespasses its own traditional boundaries adding content formats from the others:
Radio websites feature of course audio but are mainly made up of text and images
TV station websites feature video but also text and audio
Newspapers website are oftentimes mere translations of the printed medium but they add a layer of rich-media in audio and video
Traditional media on the web become hypermedia and are the medium of choice for the ever growing web generation. I don’t think this generation will settle, either on a desktop or on a mobile device, for a mere digital copy of a physical medium such a newspaper.
The reasoning is quite simple and it goes as follows:
I don’t read newspapers. So, why would I want a digital copy of a newspaper?
But what if I could experience the quality contents of a magazine/radio/TV the way I’m used to, meaning rich-media, interactive, personalized, social and real-time? Would I care if I’m browsing a magazine a radio station or a TV station? Probably not as long as I get what I want, where I want it and the way I want it, which is coincidentally what the iPad promises us.
The forthcoming Apple tablet brings us a little step closer to full media convergence, not that there’s anything especially new you can’t do right now with a browser and decent internet connection, but the new apps (or rather the new content and interaction design), the physical proximity, the multi-touch interface and the position sensor make the sensorial experience somehow different to anything we’ve seen so far.
Check also the Sports Illustrated demo and ask yourself if this is just a magazine or finally a true interactive TV.
@albertcuesta tweets about this promotion (the “Promotion”) by Apple celebrating the 10 billionth download from iTunes (note that this doesn’t mean purchases).
Be the lucky one to make dowload number 10 billion and you get 10.000 US$. You can even participate without buying or downloading any song by filling out this form.
Yet another genius move by Apple that combines tech, entertainment and avobe all marketing.
iTunes changed the way you buy music, making songs and albums available for download, day or night. Seven years later, we’re about to celebrate our biggest milestone for music, yet — 10 billion songs downloaded. Buy a song, and if it’s the 10 billionth download, you could win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. It’s our way of saying thanks.
The digitizing of the information changes the rules to everything. Production, storage and distribution costs tend to zero, consumers become also producers and as a result new industries appear that render well established ones obsolete in no time.
One example is the traditional publishing industry with a business model partly based on advertising and partly on subscription, a model that’s sustainable when trucks distribute tons of paper but obsolete when the net distributes terabytes of data.
On such an environment, advertisers flee to a much more interactive and responsive medium, namely the web, and subscriptions are no match for the free high quality content available online.
Who would still post an ad to a local newspaper when you have Craigslist.org or eBay.com? Or, who would pay for gadget reviews on the NYT when you have Engadget.com?
The result: many magazines and newspapers have closed their physical editions and have gone online if not closed at all.
Although Rupert Murdoch is trying to reverse this trend by charging for online access, I think the point is made.
With all this in mind the efforts to bring ebook readers to the market by companies such as Amazon (Kindle), Barnes&Noble (Nook) an Sony (Reader), just to mention a few, make perfect sense in a time of publishing crisis (crisis meaning change, not doom).
Can Apple do the same as they did in the music and the cellphone industries? Via cultofmac.com I stumble on a presentation by Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, that has put together a simple and yet enlightening presentation about the subject.
Bijl’s states that if Apple is to reinvent the publishing business they need to cover three basic needs:
Distribution of content
Business model where publishers can charge for content
Usability so people can use the reading device as a newspaper or a book
So far, Apple has turned iTunes into an excellent platform for music and application distribution, it has a solid rock business model for both and the iPod and the iPhone have the best interfaces of their kind.
I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t want to extend this model to the publishing industry with content distribution via iTunes, micro-payments as in the iPhone App Store and a reading device that matches the iPod and iPhone usability standards.
I’m sure that the whole publishing industry (and that includes Murdoch) are eager to hear Steve Jobs’ next “one more thing”. Even more than the rest of us.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Join the advanced features on the iPhone, a fair flat rate data plan and the power of open source and you have Wordpress for iPhone, the first open source native app for the iPhone downloadable from the iTunes App store (which means installable with a single tap).
It supports self hosted blogs as well as the free blogs at WordPress.com
When I learnt about the launching of the iPhone by Telefonica in Spain I knew that something was not right. One only has to see the visual and conceptual interference that the Telefonica logo produces on Apple’s website.
We’ve all uploaded a test web site for a customer to review in a hidden directory. More so, we’ve all created the infamous index2.html.
But I bet that if you were developing a site for the launching of the iPhone in Spain, a gadget that gets a huge media and hackers attention, you’d be extra cautious about uploading any testing site, especially if they were no official news about the Telefonica-Apple deal.
Well, you probably understand it. Telefonica, the 4th largest telecom in the world, don’t!
ErneX, a colleague of mine at WeAreMortensen.com didn’t even have to use his hacking skills. He just tried a few URLs until iphone.movistar.es/index2.html (not active anymore) hit jackpot. Obviously he twittered it.
The result? After one hour more than 24.000 people registered in the microsite and the news got featured in es.appleblog.com from there to engadget.es then engadget.com and from there to all weblogs and newspapers.
How many web publishing courses can you attend for Telefonica’s last year 8.906 Milion € benefits?
Tweet This Post
