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...
In my radio column at RAC1 and in many debates and conferences more often than not I’m faced with people that either fear, loathe, ignore (or all of them) internet / the web / mobile phones / social networks / blogs / twitter / wikipedia / open source / free contents / bit torrent / you name it.
This puts me unwillingly on the advocate’s side for the issue at stake. Of course everything is subject to criticism but provided you know what you’re talking about. A blatant example is the many pundits who criticize twitter and have never used it.
These people fall into different categories:
Newspaper editors and publishers
So called intellectuals
Professors (some of them of new media!)
Musicians and writers
Talk hosts
Inevitably at some point in the debate they’ll start a sentence like this:
The internet has brought us many good things and changed our lives but…
which coincidently has the same structure as the pitiful:
Ubiquitous technology, long battery life, known interface, touch sensitive, highly customizable, plug and play, speech recognition, interoperable and above all mobile.
There’s quite a stir about the issue of copyrights and how to force anyone who listens to music, reads a book, etc., to pay her fee. I just do not understand how you can maintain this situation.
The author of an anthem, music or lyrics of a song, the writer of a book or whatever work, sets a price for the buyer and collects a sum according to her contract. And this should end the matter. Exactly what happens to those who build a bridge, a landmark building, a monument or sculpture … I do not recall of any established fee for those who enjoy watching them.
From this direct compensation, from the commissioner of the work or the buyer, it might be more honest for an artist to ask herself what price should she pay for receiving for free, abilities, skills, and creative intelligence, something people can’t choose to receive and neither can be manufactured.
When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true”. Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important”. Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new”.
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.
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.
Impressive demo by Blaise Anguera at TED talks of augmented-reality maps, a blend of Bing Maps and user generated photos glued together with Microsoft’s Photosynth technology.
In simple words: take Google Street View and a gazillion of geolocalized pictures from Flickr (made by people like you and me) and put them all over the place according to their coordinates and orientation.
You get up to date pictures of every imaginable corner of our (digitized) world plus the ability to navigate inside closed spaces which I guess makes Google quite envious.
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