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...
Res nou pels geeks però una introducció a les xarxes socials i a l’impacte que tenen a la societat. Ha estat molt interessant participar a la Universitat de Lleida a les jornades que l’associació ASPID, una associació de discapacitats físics de Lleida, ha organitzat al voltant del tema xarxes socials.
No havia tingut mai abans ocasió de conèixer la relació dels discapacitats físics amb un món sense cap barrera ni arquitectònica ni tecnològica.
(Documentary entirely in Catalan. Excerpts translated into English after the video)
“I tu quin diari compres?” (which newspaper do you buy?) is a 40 minute long documentary by the Catalan public TV on the changing of the news landscape in the digital world. It covers issues about media convergence, citizen journalism,social networks and the search for viable business models online.
The newstand in the journalism faculty of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona sells 80% less newspapers than 10 years ago and they survive selling candies. We’re witnessing the crises of the newspaper business model while there’s no clear digital alternative.
You don’t have to find the news, news simply find you.
You know exactly what’s going on, they can’t hide it from you.
Nicholas Lemann, dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City
What’s really important is that we have a lot of different points of view published digitally. Will this substitute journalism? Clearly not. The crowd can’t do it.
I’m a New York Times and a Philadelphia Inquirer subscriber and I’ll continue to do so because I want these two newspapers to exist.
I don’t mind paying for the subscriptions but I’d prefer if newspapers talked about the things that really worry me. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t and when they don’t I search the internet for information about the issues I’m interested in.
Newspapers are more concerned with the news that help them selling more rather than with news that people want to know. Sports sell more than social issues.
The only question I have is whether the business will be print or multimedia. So in this difficult moment of transition you have to be as flexible as possible: you have to produce good print journalism, on the web, on iPods, on mobile phones, on computers and if they invent a watch we also have to be able to serve news there.
If you have an excellent content it translates into a good business whether it’s print or whatever.
Sílvia Barrosso, editor of Avui.cat, largest Catalan online medium
I didn’t find adapting to the immediacy of the online world difficult. You just change your mindset and accept that you’re a radio.
In principle I work for the printed version but I end up working also for the digital one.
I five years time I’ll cover an event and bring my video camera. I’ll produce the written column, the video, the digital column… everything. I’m not ready but I have no choice.
All newspapers, if not there yet, are on the verge of having more readers online than on paper.
Traditionally the business model for the newspaper was based on advertising and sales. Online sells don’t exist and advertising revenues are minimal compared to print.
We assume that if newspapers move to the web they will survive but this is not a certain thing. A successful online publication has profits of around 3% while a successful newspaper can yield a 30%. With this margin the capacity to reinvest in professionals to improve content quality will diminish resulting in a loss of quality.
Google news hierarchy is done by a machine; the most read news are the most important and the most important are the most read.
We left to the robots what they do best and we don’t want to do. We don’t devote any effort to cutting & pasting information nor the last minute news. This is done so the few resources we have can work on information that’s different from the rest.
Big newspapers are also disappearing from the internet. Now who gives you credibility apart from the brand? Most of the times a contact from your social network. You click on the link without knowing where the information came from.
We will survive without some well know mastheads that’s for sure.
Google is so successful because it organizes information the way people like it and that’s why we like it.
We usually don’t have today’s newspaper but we know what’s going on.
Someone in my Twitter network has posted a link that I assume it will be interesting because I trust this contact as a news source.
Contents can be generated by professionals and the big challenge for people is to filter these contents in order to get what really matters. It used to be easy before in the newspaper era where one-size-fits-all. If you don’t like it I’m sorry. Now all the information is available and the challenge is for the technology to serve me the five items of news that really matter the most to me.
The great thing about being a citizen journalist it’s that I’m not necessarily accountable to do things the way the other journalists do. I can be very personal and tell exactly what I think to my readers.
Some rewrite without even crediting the source expensive that may well be news stories of journalists who have invested days, weeks or months in their work.
Let me remind Rupert Murdoch than he can shut down the indexing of his contents by Google right now by disallowing Googles’s robots in the robots.txt file.
But be carefull because when you do, and that’s why you didn’t do it, you’ll be denying access to all website that aggregate and link to your news and overnight you’ll start losing most of your traffic.
Luís Collado, head of editorial contents Google Spain
We never had any request to disallow Google’s robot from any news company. Not even Murdoch’s.
What internet gives for free is all kind of news bulletins, sports, financial information, wheather information… but what it doesn’t offer is investigative reports.
The important question is not if there will be newspapers. The important question is if there will be journalism and the answer is yes.
Over the years I’ve been involved in many online projects on the internet, be as a tester, programmer, interface designer, information designer, content creator or project manager. After having been very creative at doing all kinds of mistakes this is what I learnt:
The only constant is change
Changes occur faster with every new change
Therefore changes are not constant
Corollary: If you ever meet anyone claiming to be an “internet expert” watch carefully as he disappears in a whizz and changes into something else.
A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:
Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.
Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.
The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.
The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.
Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.
We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.
The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.
We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.
We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.
In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.
Note: This manifesto is the work of several authors, and the property of everyone. Copy it, publish it, pass it on as you will.
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.
This post started as a late night tweet summarizing (in less than 140 characters) the story of writing hence the title of the post. Here’s the original tweet.
From 4,000 BC to 1992: Pre-web era. Writing
The representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols is known as a writing system. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form
From 1992 to 1997: Web 1.0. Online copywriting
Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. The term may be applied to any content regardless of media (print, radio, television, or online media).
From 1997 to 2004: Web 2.0. Blogging
A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog”) is a type of website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
From 2004 to 2008: Social web. Posting
Like in Facebook when u post stuff 2 ur friend’s wall such as:
sup? will upload pics from last party… check’em l8er
From 2008 to present time: Live web. RT
RT @my_tweep EPIC WIN ->I haz my pics O_o <-LOL or WTF?! :D
(If you don’t understand this last chapter you can check what people are saying right now at twitter.com)
What do they all have in common? P2p? Piracy? File sharing? Not really. At the heart of the debates lays the ignorance of governments about the digital medium and their stubbornness in dealing with it as if it were the physical world.
Is in the physical world, where everybody agrees that culture exchange is necessary for the common progress, that no one seems to have any problem at all with information sharing.
For that matter institutions have been providing us with information exchange networks called libraries.
In such a network anyone can borrow information, be books, DVDs or CDs, and no one is considered a thief for sharing them with members of his immediate network.
Are goverments who build libraries and create networks around them liable of piracy? Or, on the other hand, this is something necessary to give equal opportunities to everybody granting people access to culture?
Dear governments, copyright institutions, judges and other XIX century nostalgics, here’s a tip that should help you understand digital information: think of libraries. Bigger, larger and ultra-efficient libraries
When you deal with information exchange online think of the internet as the biggest library mankind has created, an analogy that has been around since the first days of the web and not too difficult to understand.
And if you’re happy with people borrowing from libraries I don’t see why shouldn’t you be even happier with people doing the same in a larger library and in a much more efficient way.
Business Week, with the help of Don Norman, John Maeda, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman among others, just published an excellent article with the 10 commandments of web design.
Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.
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