A nice vision of the near future from BERG. It is focused on Magazines but makes me think about web content more. What is the role of a web site, a web page, a post and a tweet in this world?

The UI concepts are nice, but functionally limited. And the discovery of content doesn’t seem to exist, it assumes subscriptions to publications – which I’m sure will only be part of the story, and a small part at that.

Take a look yourself:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Hat Tip to CrunchGear

Discussion at TechMeme

Huffington and Mathias Döpfner (CEO of German media empire Axel Springer) discuss the future of news. The moderator is Christine Ockrent, CEO of France 24, a TV broadcasting company.

In the context of Rupert Murdoch declaring his intent to take his content out of Google this is a timely exchange.

Clearly there are many sides to this issue, but – bottom line – the cost base of old media is not sustainable, and the news gathering possibilities of the distributed masses together with curation and aggregation present a powerful alternative.

I recommend anybody interested in the future of news and aggregation spend the 50 minutes watching this.

Glam hired a new guy today. Techcrunch, VentureBeat and PaidContent all posted about it.

All of the reporting on this hire focus on Glam’s coup in getting their man, and on their profitability heading into Q4. There is little in the way of analysis, which is probably quite reasonable on a news-filled Monday morning here on the West Coast..

As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports:

Glam Media has scored a major senior hire, landing Josh Jacobs, Yahoo’s Vice President & GM Advertising Technology Platforms who currently runs Yahoo’s entire display ad platform and previously ran the portal’s publisher network. Jacobs will be joining Glam as Senior Vice President of Brand Advertising Products & Marketing, where he’ll run all of Glam’s brand advertising products, as well as marketing and communications. This is a major win for Glam, which has shown strong growth through the economic downturn as it eats away marketshare from the likes of Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

However, there is a more strategic conclusion to draw from Glam’s recent trajectory and from this hire in particular. Glam is unique in having successfully built a new model that is far more focused on the evolving landscape of publishing and reading habits than any of its competitors. Samir Arora – Glam’s CEO – grasped very early that the growth in the number of publishers on the Internet would lead to a changing landscape for advertisers. By grasping the trend early he has succeeded in building a most impressive business. A woman’s content site, with virtually no original content, where the majority of the traffic is not on glam.com, but is on the several hundred publisher sites that make up the Glam network. By realizing that the audience is already there, and that the business is to take advertising to it, rather than to seek to capture it for a destination portal, Arora has figured out how to grow a large business, even in hard times.

I wrote about deportalization quite some time ago, and spelled out its implications. As we move from the era of deportalization into the new era characterized by the real time stream, Glam are positioned to continue to grow. Display advertising is a major element in Glam’s strategy and rightly so. High value audiences are found clustered around all major topics. Ad networks typically fail to realize the value of those audiences, or adequately facilitate a brand from engaging with them. Glam is simply a small indication of the potential for passion-focused distributed advertising.

Here is a book I wrote in 1988 for Penguin. It is available free on Google books. And as of today I can embed it in a web page.

With the recent rise to prominence in the UK of the BNP, it may be an interesting read again. At the time I used a non-de-plume (Keith Tompson) because it was actually dangerous to be an open and active anti-racist.

It also has some relevance to the internet debate about race hatred.

Jean-Marie Hullot and Gilles Samoun have – today – launched fotopedia.com. It is the culmination of the work done by the fotonauts team over the past 2 years.

fotopedia is both a web site and an optional downloadable client. At launch the web site brings together awesome images covering more than 4500 subjects. It allows those who download the client to create encyclopedia pages for subjects of their choice, or to add images to the already existing encyclopedia pages. Users vote for their favorite images (either on the web site or in the client). Each subject is produced dynamically from the votes of the contributors and the users and will likely change over time.

The subject pages bind to Wikipedia content for the same subject.

Here is one I did earlier, for Manchester United. I am using the embeddable widget feature to put it here on my blog.

fotopedia brings to the Internet the photographic equivalent of what Wikipedia did for text. It is inclusive and community driven. And above all else it is beautiful.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in fotopedia…and I am very biased. But it truly is wonderful.

John Borthwick has captured in words what many have been grappling with in a less articulate way for about 18 months. The new paradigm we need to think about the internet has finally emerged.

This snippet outlines the broad trend:

Start with this constant, real time, flowing stream of data getting published, republished, annotated and co-opt’d across a myriad of sites and tools. The social component is complex — consider where its happening. The facile view is to say its Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or FriendFeed — pick your favorite service. But its much more than that because all these sites are, to varying degrees, becoming open and distributed. Its blogs, media storage sites (ie: twitpic) comment boards or moderation tools (ie: disqus) — a whole site can emerge around an issue — become relevant for week and then resubmerge into the morass of the data stream, even publishers are jumping in, only this week the Times pushed out the Times Wire. The now web — or real time web — is still very much under construction but we are back in the dark room trying to understand the dimensions and contours of something new, or even to how to map and outline its borders. Its exciting stuff

John draws a single, and important, conclusion from this:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.

With this insight I believe John has just moved the needle to a place where we can begin to talk about the third phase of the internet.

The first phase of the internet was about portalization. It was the age of Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek. This was the era in which DoubleClick came into its own as an advertising platform, with lots of big accounts on both the advertiser and the publisher side.

The second phase was what Fred Wilson characterized as deportalization. This was the era of the rise of user generated content – blogs, social portals like MySpace and Facebook, aggregators like Digg and an ad network built for lots of small advertisers and millions of web sites – Google AdSense.

The third, and new phase, is about real time data streams that emanate from the users and the myriad publishers. Blogs and rss remain important (sorry Steve) but added into the mix are Twitter, Friendfeed, and other forms of messaging. This third phase has a number of big consequences:

1. Search changes. Searching static pages remains important. Indexing and parsing the stream becomes a must have addition.

2. SEO takes on new meanings also. Having your URL’s in the stream means that those who attempt to index and classify the stream will find you. Using RDFa or Microformats to enable your data to be understood will also become important as semantics meets the stream.

3. Advertising changes too – in ways we cannot see, but it clearly involves the sources within the stream and the stream itself being made available to an advertiser who wants to target an audience.

4. Aggregation moves from a simple combination of sources created by users (DIGG) or by algorithm (Techmeme) into the need to parse and filter the stream into meaningful buckets. In this world bit.ly and other URL shortening services are simply adding a new signal to the pool that allows a filter to distinguish between an important and a less important URL. Managing and understanding the content they carry is the big challenge. (see http://www.seriouslywine.com and http://twitter.com/seriouslywine for an example of how John Merrells and his team are thinking about this. seriouslymedia is an experimental and as yet un-launched service in which I am a founder).

Erick Schonfeld has a great post on TechCrunch about this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

Columnist Henry Porter is generally considered to be a wise observer of the human condition. Today, in an article in the UK Guardian owned Sunday, The Observer, he blew it ….. badly. As a newspaper man he ought to have been aware of his almost certain bias and perhaps counted to ten before pushing “send”. And, given that he didn’t,  his editor should have saved him from himself after the fact, perhaps by asking “are you sure?” But then I would have nothing to say… and neither would others.

Mr Porter’s key contention is one that is being heard more and more from the seriously wounded media industry:

“Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.”

Let’s take this apart:

“Google is … a parasite” – Well, clearly Google has a dependency on the existence of content…. it is, after all, a search engine. So, no content, no Google. But is this parasitic, or is Google more like a librarian… an essential organizer, making discovery of content within a vast mass of it, possible. Do I need to answer?

” Google ….creates nothing” – Nothing? What is the vast index and the algorithms that make the index produce search results. Is it nothing? Again… no answer required.

” Google is … merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.” – “little aggregation”; “lists”; “ordering of information”. Mr Porter has clearly never attempted to crawl, index, and scale a search interface for hundreds of millions of people. He thinks it is trivial. Sadly it is not. And Google does it better than anybody else. How many of Mr Potters readers come via Google’s lists and ordering? Please tell us…. (hint, it is a lot).

“…On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues” – This takes the biscuit. What work did any Mr Porter do to make his content discoverable by a vast and growing army of readers? The labour is all Googles. It places ads on top of its own canvas, the Google search engine. It also offers advertising to 3rd parties and according to its earnings reports, shares more than 75% back with the sites who use its advertising engine. The vast sums of advertising money flooding to the Internet are coming because of Google – because Google gave a way for an advertiser to spend its money effectively and measurably. Google makes advertising revenues for the entire ecosystem.

So.. what is Mr Porter really saying. Is it a cry for help? I don’t think so. He is way past help. Bitter, angry and lost in a new media world he finds unfamiliar.

At the root of it is the fact that the role of a media company, and its ability to serve its 3 audiences – readers, creators and advertisers, now rests almost entirely on technology. Specific technology at that… the ability to find, organize and understand data (content). Distribution and monetization are all about technology. Mr Porter’s employers – the Observer – (perhaps parasites on his writing, simply adding paper and print to his efforts) are not a contender to provide these services.

Google represents a company typical of the future of media. It brings technology to scale and serves consumers, creators and advertisers. If you want to be in the game, you need to grasp that content can not stand alone. It needs help to be discovered, distributed and monetized. Googles only fault is that it is better than anybody else at these tasks. Can it be bettered, absolutely! But not by clinging to the past. My advice – read Jeff Jarvis and his book What Would Google Do Mr Porter, you will learn a thing ot two.

Update:

Here is the TechCrunch take on the story. Here is the updated techmeme discussion

I flew out from San Francisco to Munich on Friday night. Arrived well after a great Lufthansa flight. It was nice to bump into friends and acquaintances on the flight (Barney Pell from Powerset [now part of Microsoft], Chris Shipley from the Guidewire Group, Gary Bolles from Xigi, Robert Goldberg from Crossroads Ventures and Don Levy from Sony Pictures Digital production.

We had mostly all slept on the flight and it was 6pm when we landed so there was only one option – drink and eat until tired . The Augustiner Beer Hall served the purpose well.

The first day of DLD has just finished. Some very good panels. The highlight was Esther Dyson accepting an award from Hubert Burda for her contribution to the industry over many years. Esther flew in from her cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia to receive the award.

Great fun. Here is the fotonauts album of DLD. Feel free to add to it.

It seems that Facebook has taken issue with pictures of women breast feeding their children. As a dad of 3 young boys and a photographer I know first hand that the breast-feeding picture is one of the first a new parent takes. Either somebody at Facebook has made a silly error of judgment, or the place is run by pre-parents who find breasts to be only sexual objects. (OK I’m joking about the latter, but still, this is ridiculous).

As a contribution to the protest that has broken out I have created an album on fotonuats that is entirely open to others to add pictures to. Below is a widget showing the current pictures. You can get a copy of it here – http://www.fotonauts.com/albums/00636fa0-9cdf-4990-ba19-05d0ca7d0728 – just pull down the actions drop-down and make your own widget.

Please do so and put it on your own web site.

If you want to add images to the album get accepted to the fotonauts beta process here – http://www.fotonauts.com/about/invite, download the application and drag your own images into the album.

Here is the discussion from the web:

http://www.techmeme.com/081230/p10#a081230p10 http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10129731-71.html http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/12/29/are-breastfeeding-pictures-pornographic-facebook-thinks-so/ http://www.techmeme.com/081229/p63#a081229p63 http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/29/facebook-vs-breastfeeding-moms-fight/ http://www.hothardware.com/News/Protest-Over-Facebook-Yanking-Breastfeeding-Pix