Technology and the Web
Technology and web communication has changed the way we do almost everything. That's still quite the understatement. In the process of doing so, it has ravaged certain older ecosystems, spurned new ones, and raised a whole lotta questions. The way we communicate, the way we see ourselves and others, our identity, our humanity. Ok, a bit of exaggeration there, we're not quite at the Bladerunner/Ghost in the Shell/Matrix point just yet. But in the meantime, debates about media, web 2.0 and a slew of other issues are keeping a lot of people occupied, if not employed.
Excess content flooding affects not only the online news sphere, but also the book publishing and academic publishing industries, now that self-publishing tools are so readily available.
Bowker, a company that tracks industry statistics, calculated that, in 2009 alone, new titles published outside of “traditional publishing and classification definitions” numbered 764,448. Yes, you read that right: upward of three-quarters of a million books in a single year. Not all of those books were intended for a general readership, but if, say, two-thirds of them were, you could just barely manage to read the first page of every single one of them in the course of year — provided you also gave up eating, sleeping and bathing. (I calculate about one page per minute; your mileage may, of course, vary.) And this is the situation even in the days before we’ve come close to hitting the crest of the new, technology-driven self-publishing boom.
At the same time, libraries are straining under the burden of paying for an explosion of journals.
From 1978 to 2001, libraries at the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, saw their subscription costs alone climb by 1,300 percent.
The amount of material one must read to conduct a reasonable review of a topic keeps growing. Younger scholars can’t ignore any of it—they never know when a reviewer or an interviewer might have written something disregarded—and so they waste precious months reviewing a pool of articles that may lead nowhere.
The content problem isn’t going away.
The Economist explores the world of social networking in a special issue, everything from Twitter to Yammer.
When I’m not blogging, my day job is at Viewsflow – a startup that aggregates economic and financial analysis. We also have an impressive technology platform behind it that obsessively tracks all those that dare to leave their footprints in blogs and the Twitter-sphere.
Impressed yet? Or maybe just a bit scared?
Anyway, with all that Apple iPad madness and all, at Viewsflow, we’ve decided to give away an Apple iPad in the coming three weeks.
I’m pretty sure working for Viewsflow will disqualify me from ever winning, so readers of my blog, go forth and snatch the prize! Seriously, I am giving up my wages for this, go get it!
Seriously.
Here’s the link where you can find another link to sign up for daily our newsletter (or just click and sign up here directly), which is what you gotta do to quality.
Here’s more about Viewsflow. And, against all odds, we are actually based in London.
I have trouble keeping up with my blog, not because there’s a lack of subjects I want to explore, but because of lack of resources – in both time and knowledge, to find a satisfactory ending to the questions at hand. Here are some thoughts that never got finished and made it to the blog. Maybe in 2010, I’ll be able to figure out a better way to articulate them in full. I cannot be the first to ask such questions. So, please share if you have opinions, theories, or answers to the below.
- What drives one country or region to excel in painting, and others to writing, and yet another to, say, architecture? What kind of geo-political, cultural, social, and economic tour de force were in place to allow for one area of arts to flourish over another? For its size and population, Ireland has produced a disproportionate number of brilliant poets, playwrights and writers, known for their caustic wit and insight into human nature. Is literary genius somehow correlated with economic misery? That could explain how Russia also pumped out a whole generation of writers that produced account of sufferings and tragedies on an epic scale. While for Germany, philosophers ruled in the 18th century, in response to the nation building tasks or merely a coincidence resulting from a cluster of highly intelligent and timely chatters within a single linguistic group at that time? I would like to know what makes Scandinavians such greater designers, is there a history of industrial design in the region?
- There are books I read for the pure linguistic pleasures rather than the stories. For books like, say, Lolita, what would translation into another language mean? On the flip side, how much of the nuance, wordplay, and irony is lost when we read books translated from Russian, French, or German literature? If our mother tongue do not belong to one of the more widely published languages in the world, and much of our readings is dependent on the success of translations, then how much gets lost in translation? Read more...
When we think about our web presence and connectivity, many of us have a number of overlapping networks roughly sectioned-off – public versus private, personal versus professional, all-encompassing versus interest-based.
This is all too obvious for a large group of professionals that leverage LinkedIn to network, generate sales leads, recruit, and get hired for jobs. LinkedIn effectively brought recruiting to the 21st century, by mirroring our offline behaviour with online equivalents. Work experience? Check. Education? Check. References in the form of recommendations? Check.
LinkedIn took offline professional networking online, thus creating a space where all the schmoozing can take place, plus it stores your Rolodex for all to see. It works extremely well on many levels – its popularity and profitability is a testament to that success. But I wonder whether if it will be comfortable with its current demographic profile – middle-aged, manager-and-above wealthy clientele, or innovate along with its younger generation of users.
The biggest flaw I see with LinkedIn, is how closely it parallels our offline career trajectory and all the limitations that come with it. A resume is backward looking, because it reflects choices we’ve made in the past, whether they be our educations or careers. And it can be incredibly constraining, because it doesn’t open one up with more opportunities, should they want a chance at a non-typical, cross-industry move. At least not without a degree or piece of paper to signal that intention.
When I was in university, we had a bunch of career counselors that implored us to develop “transferrable skills” by telling us how people our age will have more likely than not, have between 5-10 different careers throughout our lives. Not jobs, not industries, but careers. That seems fantastical, even in today’s economy, where fluidity is at its peak. Moving into an entirely different career path without connection, a huge break, or getting further educated in that field, is next to impossible. Read more...
Why the content delivery business is a hard business, if subscription and advertising’s all you got.
For something truly disruptive to occur, the current system has to be broken beyond repair, and the incoming “disruption” has to be powerful enough (momentum driven by adoption), and sustainable enough (financially feasible, as far as business models are concerned), to overwhelm the status-quo.
A lot of individuals and businesses are fawning over the demise of “old media”, by attempting to deliver content in a way that’s fast, unique, exclusive, customizable, or pushed and pulled in whichever direction that users want. Most are convinced that money can be made if only the formula is tweaked just so. I’m not so convinced. Remember this, “just because somebody destroys an existing business model, doesn’t imply it is itself, a good business model.”
Bearing in mind that all of the below already exist and are available for free, the next generation of content delivery platform will have to have all of the following wrapped in a free package, and more:
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It will need a Friendfeed-esque system that floats the best of the best, aggregating someone’s social media profile along with their friends’, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, RSS readers, and direct web surfacing.
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Recommendations should be provided based on both one’s social network, customizable settings, and automated filtering.
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The quantity and quality of the content should both be adjustable. One should be allowed to set both thresholds according to their needs. After all, you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the quantity, nor underwhelmed by the quality.
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The content should be personalizable, but not so personalizable to the extent that it prevents you from discovering cool new things out there.
If and when this technological and design feat is accomplished, it’s time to worry about the business model. Consumers are hard to please: they are fickle, prickly, cheap, and worst of all, not all that loyal. This is all but spelled out in the success, or for some, the lack of, that many social networks have encountered. Read more...
Blog post at my company’s corporate blog, making a case of what I’ve been up to for the past half year. Click here to read it!
While talking to someone today, I realized how far we had come in terms of the way we consume information online.
We used to be destination driven. Which is say, we used to visit sites directly, bookmarking sites that we visited frequently or going straight to the url. RSS changed all that by pushing news out. The services like delicious made the task of bookmarking thousands of interesting links online more manageable, by taking it to the cloud.
Still, we are constantly looking for better ways to reach more information that’s pertinent to our lives – both to enhance our professional life, and to keep us entertained. I still go to a few sites directly both on the web or through my mobile – a few of the mainstream sites where quality and quantity are consistent. Everything else I read online comes to me through one of a number of ways.
For breaking news, one of my favourite sources is BNO News, which also comes with a highly recommended iPhone app that I haven’t had the chance to try out yet. It’s short, it’s to the point, it’s consistently 10-15 minutes ahead of sources like the CNN and BBC. As far as keeping up with fact-based, time-sensitive, large-scale events, this is nothing different than the hourly bulletin we used to get on TV. Only it’s on demand, and takes 10 seconds to scan.
I still spend a significant amount of time scanning through my RSS reader, though I wish there could be something better. The quantity of content I get in a reader is sometimes too overwhelming in quantity and underwhelming in quality, with the number of unread feeds easily surpassing 1,000 if my account is not scanned for a day or two. To keep this under control, I’ve set up a number of folders to organize feeds by topic, which can then be prioritized when reading. I’ve also unsubscribed from a number of high-post sites. Time is limited, either it goes off the radar completely, or I go to the site directly. Read more...
Many have argued that content aggregation is the way to go for the internet. Some have gone so far as to claim “aggregate, or be aggregated”. So far, no one’s disputing the inevitability of such a future. Under the radar, WSJ owns All Things Digital, and NTY runs Blogrunner. Both are experimenting with those ventures to hopefully work out some kind of business model.
This is done, despite venom spouted in the background that claim those aggregators tapeworms or parasite, siphoning off the hard labour of old media whose only mistake is playing by the rules. Aggregators in the meantime, have taken off.
Digg started the trend off, by promoting a system of voter-sourced news that is real time, streaming, and democratic. A slew came on board soon after. Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn, and many topic and industry-specific Diggs have sprung up to varying degrees of success. In the last few years, Twitter – broadcasted in 140 characters or less, is the service that keeps on giving. It is now becoming the tool people turn to break news, do status updates, and my favourite use: alternative social bookmarking service.
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The news media is now scrambling to find a feasible business plan that could replace its print readers, and to stop the cannibalization of its content, indexed and marketed by Google, without any monetary compensation. Media moguls have blasted everything from Google, bloggers, to those aggregators for egregious use of their content. The proponents have told those old guards to bugger off. Those old men retorted by threatening to cut access.
This carries about as little weight as the paper it’s printed on. People that used to make a decent living from writing and reporting, have of course, been squeezed between a rock and a hard place. No one likes to talk to themselves. So the goal of any self-respecting reporter is to get exposure, and engage with readers. Blogging has taken much of the prestige of reporting away. Nowadays, anyone who has the patience to sit down and write may win a sizeable audience in due course. Read more...
In 1966, the Harvard Business Review introduced the idea of “paperless clearing houses”, in reference to the emergence of digital data storage. Since then, the microprocessor industry emerged, personal computers were introduced, and before we knew it, everyone is connected by the web. The delivery and the digitization of data is no longer a fantasy.
But the implementation and eventual realization of this inevitable “paperless” world, however, is taking longer than expected. Ten years ago, we were told that every participant in the information age is marching towards the digital world in more or less uniformity. But despite the obvious technological leaps, we are still far from a paperless world.
Paperless for some
So far, we have managed to scrape a layer off of perfunctory bookkeeping. In areas such as online tax filing and the digitization of our numerous monthly financial statements, the quick and convenient source-to-records applications have surely saved both cost and time for all parties involved. In the case of communication, personal letters are replaced by the superior email deliveries. In those cases, paper as the medium of communication has been eliminated.
Now with various access points for information, cheap storage devices, accessible scanners and various other forms of affordable technology, all of which are competing to drive paper out of our lives for good, what is the outlook for paper?
Professional uses
The term “paper-pusher” was coined for a reason. Knowing that, it should not be surprising that paper is far from disappearing, particularly within some of the older professions. In legal and business communities, for example, cyber security risks, as well as legal concerns still mandate paper record-keeping for a period of time.
From my own experience in a corporate setting, printing is not something you can move away from quickly. Most businesses operate from desktops, thus short of sharing your desktop – which many more tech savvy businesses do on a regular basis, one need to print off documents in order to discuss and demonstrate. Plus, even when performing numbers-related tasks, where computer applications are assets, printing documents for review is deemed mandatory as a last check-up. Read more...
A lot of ink has been spilt over the future of newspapers and the journalism profession. Everyone is decrying the death of newspapers and print media. Some blogs are writing daily obituaries for professional journalists, others are squaring blames. Will the century-old tradition withstand the quick sands of the internet age?
The problems with old media
The key here is of course, as Clay Shirky artfully argued, that the current publishing industry is no longer solving a problem for its consumers. That problem used to be the distribution of complex pieces of information. Now with technology playing its part in leveling the dissemination process, reaching ever-more people at an ever-faster speed, traditional means of news circulation are becoming obsolete. Nothing has worked yet to save the industry because most strategies have been aimed at preserving the industry-that-was.
The web has transformed the way we get information, to the extent where we don’t need to pay for someone to tell us about an earthquake in Italy or the bombing in India anymore. Bloggers, micro-bloggers, and wired services can do more than enough in pushing that information out. Besides, how many times can you spin the same piece of data as is? Then what? The world wants to know the why, what, how behind it. If not, what would differentiate a journalist from just another amateur blogger that can Google and milk a few quotes?
Back to the newspaper business, what’s happening, is the utter transformation and re-organization of both 1) the medium of news reporting, and 2) the way people are re-assessing the value of news. Economically, this spells disaster. This is a situation where the demand of the product is low, while the cost of supplying the product is becoming increasingly unsustainable. When the bill-paying third party disperses, this model inevitably blows up.
Sorting out financing issues Read more...
With the collapse of Wall Street and Detroit, self-promotion is the only industry America has left. Owen Thomas [Gawker]
There are no more passionate or enterprising individuals in the world than Americans. No other people in the world have embraced the idea of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement with same level of enthusiasm, shamelessness, and let’s face it, success that even closely rivals the Americans. Over the centuries, a distinctly love/loathe relationship has formed between the public and its tireless marketers.
Ultimately, marketing is a push activity. Unless you make extraordinary products like iPod, or Maserati, or limited edition Nike shoes. In that case, you push in indiscernible ways to create demand, and then sit back and manage the pull. Or you could just make a kickass product and sell it. That’s how it used to be a couple of hundred years ago. Then marketers realized there’s money to be made by hype and mass-production. Then soon enough, everyone was doing it, because not doing it was like surrendering before the battle even starts. Advertising became the bugle that signaled the legitimacy of a product, and we accepted it as so.
After decades of marketing, spearheaded by the Madison Avenue machine and sponsored by its corporate clients, the symbiotic engine began to sputter. Consumers got tired of having products pushed to them by conglomerates. The previous marketing mix management and product line expansion gimmicks started to see cracks.
Then the information revolution descended upon us. Soon enough, everyone had a voice, and everyone started talking to everyone else. Corporations realized that they were no longer in charge of their brand image, and it became increasingly difficult to hide behind PR campaigns. Many disastrous marketing campaigns and ineffective “customer outreach” programs later, businesses looked to young, hip, and mostly self-educated and self-branded social media gurus for help. Soon enough, those guys sprang up everywhere, advising dinosaurous businesses on the proper management of their “social media presence”. Read more...
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