SCARY, EXCITING FUTURE

EPIC 2014 is eight minutes of online presentation that's one part intriguing, one part exciting and a couple of parts scary as hell. Adrian Holotavy describes it as "an incredibly cool and thought-provoking presentation about the future of online media."

The piece, by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, is a exceedingly well done "report" from the year 2014 that describes how we arrived at a mediascape that included none of what we consider media in today's world.

A couple of warnings. You'll need broadband access for full effect. And it will provoke you to think very deeply.

SOURCE: PUBLIC JOURNALISM NETWORK
11:12:03 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

SAVING PVT. RADIO

While I was tracking down Peter Hershberg's funny QuickTime videos (item below), I came across a post he'd written that helped gel some of my thinking. Hershberg wrote:

There's a lot of great radio out there, but the radio is one of the worst places to find it. As a distribution channel, radio is an ever more narrow and annoying pipe that has to homogenize and consolidate its product in order to save its business.

Over the past month or so, I've been amazed that the current "star" of the internet isn't multimedia, television or any of the sexy new technologies. It's radio.

I've pretty much stopped listening to radio except as background noise on the rare occasions when I'm the a car. Radio is such a dated idea: information tied to a specific pipe and a time.

Podcasting blew that up in a couple of ways. It lowered any barriers there were to creating content and wiped out concept of pipe. I can listen to what I want, when I want.

But there's more. Podcasting is a platform for more than enthusiastic amateurs creating their own shows. Bloggers are using podcasts, major media (NPR, BBC, KOMO, etc.) are dipping a toe into the waters.

And the sudden interest in potential for audio is drawing attention to sites like The Public Radio Exchange, which features hundreds and hundreds of independently produced radio programs. Bloggers like Tod Maffin at I Love Radio are charting the developments and the possibilities.

I can load my laptop up with hours of good radio from all over the world — music, documentaries, hard news, whatever — and listen when I want. (When I can afford an iPod, it gets even better: iPod becomes my "station" with all the audio stuff I like, playable not only at any time I like, but in any combination I like.)

The internet hasn't really blown up radio: it's reinvented it. Amazing.
10:26:19 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

NYC AND BLOGS

Peter Hershberg has a couple of great QuickTime videos (broadband highly recommended) he produced after walking the streets of New York and talking to folks about blogs and bloggers. The second video, which "stars" a New York shoeshine guy, is great. Stay tuned during the short blackout after the main piece: there are more responses from New Yorkers, including one who defines a blogger as "someone with way too much time on their hands and way too much to say."

SOURCE: DOC SEARLS' BLOG
5:21:53 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

LOSING YOUTH

Under the headline Newspapers should really worry, Adam L. Pennenberg writes:

Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.

Pennenberg, an assistant professor at New York University and the assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the department of journalism, explores how newspapers are threatened by a young generation far more at ease with the screen than with newsprint. In the article, at Wired News, one of those he quotes goes so far as to predict the death of the newspaper as we know it within the next 30 years.

Chilling stuff for newspaper publishers trying to come to grips with the steadily falling circulation numbers.

SOURCE: OTTMAR LIEBERT
4:51:49 PM  LINK TO THIS POST