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.

Image via Wikipedia

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?

- Musing more on linguistics, are English-speakers increasingly living on the inside of a one-way looking glass, where rest of the world is able to access and understand our vantage points, but our inability to master or penetrate others’ cultures, en masse, will increasingly prevent us from communicating with the rest of the world on equal footing?

- Developed countries seem like they are run by politicians that climbed up the system through careers in law and local politics (US, UK), whereas many prominent developing countries (China, India) are run by technocrats.  Power at the top seem to dictated choices the next generation makes in universities.  What does this mean for the future?  Will there be a dichotomy where the west will increasingly focus on social progress, approaching global issues from the perspective of justice and political frameworks, where others will make decisions based on more quantitatively defined metrics?

- You’ve heard of the guy in Japan that married a video game character?  This set off a whole set of science fiction-esque questions for me.  What if (and in my view, inevitably) robotic technology one day can produce an extension of a virtual character?  In inanimate-object friendly Japan, where a hybrid society of human and robots seem more palatable than one that must integrate immigrants, where will this lead?  If the idea that inanimate objects can also possess a soul, then human-robot alliances, including eventual marriages in physical forms, is not out of the question.  Artificial insemination and adoptions will no doubt be possible for children to exist within those marriages.  So what will a child raised by a human-robot hybrid think like?  How will that affect their reproductive choices in the future?  These are not altogether implausible in Japanese society, where masturbation has become a sport, where human contacts are increasingly marginalized by interaction with machines or payment-driven relationships (hosts and hostesses), where women are reluctant to wed and bear children, single men and women ages continue to rise through the roof, and gender issues are on the rise, where adults sleep with pretend-partners in the form of plush pillows, and where wedded couples have sex at less than half the global average, where robotic technology is on its way to perfect human movements, and the population at large impassive at the challenges on hand.  Will Japan show us the way?

- Everyday, some minority culture, or cultural practice disappears from the world.  Do you know about the story of “burnesh” in Albania?  Me neither, until I heard this podcast (search for burnesh, and open the podcast, it’s not broken out from the rest of the report). And Googling “burnesh”, the podcast was the only link, in English, that I can find.  I don’t know what commercial value there is in capturing cultural tidbits like these.  But it’s kind of an obsession with me.  How many more of these practices don’t we hear about?

- How self-critical are countries of themselves?  Self-awareness is most likely not even across all cultures, and I would really like to know how a country’s perception of itself may impede or push along progress.

- I know English is now the minority language on the web.  But it doesn’t stop me from feeling like it’s the only one that matters.  I have access to endless sources of awesome content in every subject imaginable, and operates with the subconscious prejudice that English-language content triumph above all others in quantity and quality.  I’m sure that’s not the case, but I wonder if the same is felt by native Russian, Chinese, Spanish, or German speakers.

- Things happen, everywhere, all the time, whether they make it to the front page of the newspaper of our choice or not.  I would like to know what’s going on across the world at any point in time.  BBC Europe checks out what major papers across Europe talk about every morning.  More news outlets should be doing it.  This is less a question, and more of a challenge.  Is there anyone out there doing it?  I would love to know.

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.

For example, many companies return to the same university campus to recruit year after year, because they are after that ultimate “fit”.  And the school – through its molding and cultural immersion, will more likely than not spit out the type of candidate the firm is looking for.  Some even go as far as putting a premium on applicants belonging to a specific sports team or fraternity, all in that illusive search for fit.  Surely, the signaling effect of attending a certain institution, belonging to certain clubs, and playing a certain sports is strong.  But as recruiting matures in a post-campus environment, there are more signals that can be, and should be taken into account when it comes to assessing candidates.

Right now, LinkedIn does little to facilitate and gather signals of change, should one become curious in an area outside of his/her immediate career path.  That is a great shame, because so many of us are, in every age range and point on the career ladder.  And given an outlet, a channel, and a community, many of us would take the plunge and invest our time and energy into learning, participating, and even contributing to a knowledge base of our “curiosities”, that may or may not eventually blossom into a change.

There are a number of networks out there that cater to our self-expression outside of the professional realm, even if they are not treated as such at the moment.  The sharing capabilities now available in GoogleReader, the vast information net that is Delicious, and the inherently social tool that is Twitter, all in one way or another, operate as outlets for our interests.  And with such tools, what it giveth – information, it taketh – indication of our interest and keeper of our input.  And it surprises me that professional networks the like of LinkedIn as not been able to filter, absorb and internalize its members’ other social activities as part of their data set.

A year ago this time, I was stuck in the middle of a career transition.  After two and a half years of working for two companies since graduation in a very stable, but not terribly dynamic industry, feeling restless but not knowing what else to do or where else to turn, I packed my bags and headed back to graduate school.  After one semester, it was clear a future in academia was not in the stars for me, and I had to re-think the plan.

LinkedIn was not much help.  It presented my profile in a chronological and two-dimensional state.  The career possibilities open to me were almost identical to what a recruiter offered – the same industry as what I worked in before, in the same kind of role I performed before.  It was infuriating, because breaking out of an almost arbitrary trajectory that your graduation job put you on, seemed next to impossible.  And there came the limitation of LinkedIn: it binds you to the same network you already belong to.

And then Twitter came in and opened up a whole new world.  Once I navigated my way through the noise, opening up dialogue, learning and participating was not only possible, but inevitable.  And it serves just as effectively in signaling someone’s interests and intention, because keeping up with a social network, day in and day out takes the level of engagement and passion on a project that you cannot pinpoint on a resume alone.

Some would say Twitter flip, it’s glib, and it’s not deep or insightful.  But it’s a starting point.  Output from Twitter is not something easily digestible without some major filtering. There’s a torrent of other firehose one can readily plug into to probe further.  You can find out a lot by about someone by reading their blog, tweets, their Delicious bookmarks, shared GR, and favourited Scribd or Slideshare files.

So on the professional side, our activities and participation across a wide spectrum of networks can very effectively augment our professional profiles.  It can take the lifestreaming model of FriendsFeed to the next level, by having it serve a more impactful goal.  On a more personal level, why aren’t online dating agencies crunching data from their members’ online profiles to provide better matching?  If we are already online and sending out signals on a daily basis, why aren’t more services capturing that information and sending it back to us in a packaged business model?

source: popix

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:

• 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.
• Recommendations should be provided based on both one’s social network, customizable settings, and automated filtering.
• 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.
• 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.

• MySpace and Facebook make money from advertising, and on-site sales of “gifts”.  Nobody pays to use those services.
• Twitter has no revenue model just yet.  But it’s likely they will capitalize on premium subscriptions and partnerships with the likes of Google or Yahoo, by integrating the Twitter network with their respective systems. The recent deal with India’s mobile carrier is an indication that putting the service in front of as many users as possible is the primary goal at the moment. I’m a loyal user, and I would be prepared to pay.  I’m not sure about the other 75% inactive users though.
• Evernote, Spotify, Last.fm, etc have revenue from premium subscriptions.
• LinkedIn has revenue from premium subscribers, mostly those that rely on networking to make their living.  Majority of subscribers do not pay. But those that do keep the lights on, and some.

A few quick observations can be made from the existing networks.

• First and foremost, some services started with little thoughts given to business model, in an attempt to build now, and think about money later.  The idea of making something cool and flashy, more often than not, supersedes sincere attempts at profits.

• Secondly, people are reluctant to pay actual dollars to socialize.  The best you can get from them is time, and eyeballs, if you are lucky.  But even that is pushing it.

• We are all reluctant to shell out dollars for content.  A micropayment system is difficult – it’s cumbersome, not enough value for money, causes consumers to hesitate before consumption, the miniscule ongoing cost and maintenance versus set up cost, etc.  A premium system could work, but content providers may need to jump through a large number of hurdles.

1) Most people do not consume so much content, nor do they want to consume so much content.  The market is still large, but it is niche – an important fact to acknowledge.

2) Those that do currently consume content so voraciously as to justify paying for such a system to organize their consumption habits, will need something overwhelmingly great to justify paying for something previously free.

3) The type of content presented must be of either such immense entertainment value, or professional value, that it makes the proposition worth considering.

Looking at the direction of social networks and social profiles in general are moving to, on a scale of public to private, leisure and entertainment versus professional , what do we see?

I think the instances where we pay with little hesitation, can be reduced to two rough categories: to get away from work, or to get ahead at work.  The first one is when the service provides tremendous entertainment value, in its purest form – that is to say, not as a distraction, not as a time waster, but has a pull versus push approach.  Consumers happily open their wallets in order to get away from work and life in general.  In the second case, people are happy to pay to get ahead in work.  LinkedIn has tapped into this need for upward mobility and networking, literally bringing a previously expensive and offline activity online. Needlessly to say, it is not shy about charging, and corporate and private clients have little issue with paying.

But back to the business of content delivery, the issue is to position the content, and the delivery system to a quadrant that actually makes money.  And before someone compares the success of iTunes and its ability to deliver a previously free-ish product for a fee, here are some thoughts.

• A large part of iTunes’ success resulted from Apple’s clever intertwining of hardware and software.  Without the iPods and all the advertising and sex appeal attached to those little white cords, iTunes might not have taken off the way it did.  What kind of dedicated hardware or platform is available right now for content?  There is no clear leader.

• The kind of content that gets passed through the system matters too. Information in the form of text is something we try to extract value from – whether it’s advice, wisdom, or insider-info.  Much of the content consumed outside of pure professional duties (I’m thinking information that can have a direct and immediate impact on profit and loss, i.e. trading data, real time market-moving news) are digested quickly, and discarded even quicker.  This kind of consumption pattern is incompatible with micropayment options. With music and movies, the clear end goal is entertainment.  It makes you slow down to enjoy. It is a cost one can justify a little easier.  It’s not to say that a subscription formula would not appeal to a particular group of content consumers.  But I think it might be a hard sell.

• Music is something that one can preview prior to making a purchase decision.  Nobody can compact a 40 minute album into a 2 minute fast-forwarded version.  This is easy and common, with content.  Because a blog can easily come in, and provide a 2 paragraph summary for free, which people might actually prefer over the five page original source report.

• The idea of free content is getting closer to being institutionalized, than free music ever got to. Quality and entry barrier has a lot to do with it.  Shitty music doesn’t sell, it never has.  Shitty content, well, when bundled up with a paper, has sold for decades.  More and more, people are leaving destination papers the equivalent of radio stations, to bloggers and columnists regardless of where they reside – equivalent to downloading artists and tracks individually, whether through iTunes, pirated, or directly from the artists.  When it comes to time-sensitive, headline heavy news, it matters even less where one’s getting it from. The value is lost as soon as it’s read.

So where does that leave us?  I’m not sure.  I think the content delivery business will have a hard time with business models if it stays within the confines of its traditional revenue streams – namely, advertising and subscription.  There might be some great opportunities just outside of that box, but some imagination is needed to connect the dots.

Source: rrratapating

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.

What has helped in stemming this tide of content torrent are the various features which allows social sharing, and a couple of short-cuts I take in outsourcing this tiresome hunt for interesting content to other people. GoogleReader – the RSS feed reader of my choice, allows me to see what my contacts and colleagues are reading.  I trust them, and I know they have good taste.  Therefore, content that they filtered through get my attention.

Some people look to Twitter for solution.  Admittedly, Twitter is great at breaking news, passing around viral information and picking up trending topics.  It is a great tool for keeping your finger on the pulse that is cyberspace.  When it comes to specialty content discovery, however, Twitter is too scattered, noisy, and time-consuming to do that job effectively. Even when I apply some “straining” applications to filter, group, and scan tweets that come my way, the switching time that my brain requires to process random chattering, self-promotion, re-tweeting content from people I don’t know, feeds from their own blogs, from truly interesting links, is just too much to make this exercise worthwhile. Especially when there are easier ways.

Bloggers that I follow closely post links on their blogs that have a high click-through rate.  Whether professional or amateur, bloggers arguably spend more time reading than they do writing.  So whom better to curate content in their area of interest or specialty than themselves?  It is no wonder many have now taken on the role of content curator and distributor, in addition content producers.  What used to be quietly embedded links within blog posts have now emerged confidently in the form of daily link-fests.

Source: JanaDillo

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.

Reporters write to spread ideas, to inform, to shock, to educate, and to communicate.  To threaten to barricade their writings behind a paid wall does little to solve the problem, as most will sooner have their breadline cut off, than their reputation and influence diminished, to which the accessibility of their work is based upon.  The world of blogging has opened a floodgate to give voice to academics and those previously toiling behind closed doors, whose impact has been so profound that the CSM has bravely argued that without special skills, reporters are not worth the high pay that many had taken for granted.

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Having grown up in the digital age, I take the spread of the information and all that is intangible online – from downloads of every possible kind, to the free and somewhat socialist dissemination of information on the web, for granted.  For the same reason that anti-piracy campaigns have largely failed to resonate with my generation and ones that follow mine, to even suggest the idea of paying for online activities, no matter how crucial it might be (i.e. Facebook), is blasphemy. So the subscription model is pretty much out, unless you pedal the kind of information that people would be willing to pay for its timeliness and exclusivity (i.e. real time financial news).

That is, of course, where ingenuity comes in. Since the start of web 2.0, various parties have been exploring and experimenting with feasibilities of various business models.  The most popular and successful ones: the freemium models exercised by a lucky few, and the ad-supported model by the rest.

For most newspapers, the freemium model was first attempted, before most relented and opened the flood gate.  The thing with information is that its relevance and value is inversely proportional to its time on the market, and directly proportional to its reach.  The more time lapses, the less valuable the information becomes.  And the less people that reach it, the less relevance it holds.  Thus for any serious disseminator of information, it makes no sense to fence people off from the work of your talented writers.  Alternatively, they figured the advertising dollars they will get for eyeballs will eventually make up for the loss in subscription revenue.  After all, newspapers have always gotten bybased on the triangular relationship amongst the publishers, its readers, and the advertisers.

As economy soured, this heavily advertising reliant model got strenuously tested, and many will not survive. Some also doubted the long-term sustainability of a business model whose survival depends on (sometimes) highly intrusive messages that readers disdain. A new generation of advertisers have found limited results from interrupting people’s online presence. Many are now spending their dollars to establish their own online presence, instead of depending on media publications to disseminate its messages.

Now back to the idea of content aggregation and how they are supposed to save media. The idea is simple: nobody, not even the NYT, WSJ, or Washington Post, can come up with close to 5% of what one individual might want to consume in any given day.  Our taste of media must be tailored, targeted, and fitting with our individual taste and preferences.  Thus the age of RSS feeds and personalizable start pages emerged.  Everything from Netvines to Streamy to Skygrid have emerged to provide streaming, personalized information.

But is this a fair system?  And more importantly, is this a sustainable system? Aggregators work with the assumption that there will always be those that will produce the content available for aggregation – an assumption not altogether unrealistic in the short run. But should content providers become financially frustrated and either get out of the business of news reporting or join the aggregation party in the not so far off future, the value chain may become ever so constrained. So will we be left with the scenario of bare bone newswire services, an army of amateur and professional bloggers relying on advertising money for their livelihood, and endowments and grants for the more labour and dollar intensive investigative reports?

If and when aggregators find a feasible path to profitability, then surely, the content providers that collectively contribute to the success of such services will demand a piece of the action.  A way to fairly and equitably distribute the gains will hopefully emerge by then.

picture source: myvictoriansecret

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.

Portability of paper and paper-related products

Papers cannot die because they are portable and cheap to discard. You can carry around pages without worrying about scratching an expensive device or drawing unwanted attention, or marking the pages up and down while doodling on them. You can also make printed copies of paper and distribute them at a meeting, without worrying about whether everyone has a device on hand through which they can retrieve the information.

Holding something tangible in your hands

Smart Board got big because they capitalized on our need to create something from scratch, and the ability to transport that creation into something instantly digitized, shared and easily transferrable. It captured the appeal and convenience of an old-fashioned whiteboard, while transforming it into something fitting for the 21^st century business environment.

Sociologists think our attachment to more antiquated products such as whiteboards and paper is a generational issue. And they are convinced that the up-and-coming generations will increasingly rely on none-traditional sources of media that disseminate information. Yet in the case of digital environments that attempt to replace paper, personal experiences and observations tell me that certain activities are not best performed in front of a computer.

We are visually driven on the net

The internet started off with text, but it probably won’t end with text. The traditional newspaper industry has demonstrated its ignorance by simply moving their offline contents online. It doesn’t work that way, because readers cannot effectively consume a large portion of that information online.

The internet is a visual medium. And that explains why businesses from pornography and YouTube, to the slew of lolcat-esque visually stimulating sites have taken off. Norwegian newspapers have taken advantage of this fact to largely recession-proof their online business models.

The rise of blogging

The business of blogs is now mainstream, and the trend of micro-blogging via Twitter and Facebook is becoming an unstoppable force. It seems that information is best delivered through the online medium in snippets. Bloggers are told to follow the formula of keeping posts short, for fear of losing their audiences. The cultural snobs are huddled in a corner, decrying the dummification effect of the web, and the damaging impact it has on the devolution of our attention span.

Contents that gain traction through the online space feed on our escapism (gossip blogs and entertainment blogs do extraordinarily well), or to satisfy our need for breaking news. So now all the techies are off the race, developing the next Twitter-based platform or hacking some API to break the breaking news.

We are text averse on the net

Kindle realizes that reading, particularly something as long and involved as a book, is not something you can do while hunched over the glaring screens of a device that is hardly friendly to the eyes. For most users, net-supported devices are best at delivering information that is instantly digestible, and for the most part, highly perishable. It provides the means through which we communicate and share.

But reading and thinking have traditionally been solitary and contemplative activities. Many people have decried the ways that technology has robbed us of our patience, and subsequently our ability to concentrate and tackle more involved ideas and thoughts. It is not true. As human beings, we are just as prone to philosophizing as generations past. It’s just that the form of media presented to us have done little to facilitate such activities.

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should

So perhaps the transitory process that we are going through right now will end up segmenting the ways through which information is delivered. While some are best consumed online, whether through a computer terminal or a mobile device in a just-in-time manner, there are materials best appreciated through a medium that is slower placed.

Much of Starbucks’ appeal lie in the way it packages premium coffee consumption as an experience above all else. As consumers of information, we will have to decide soon whether we want to consume the lengthier pieces of information in the form of a McDonald drive-through (that is, digitally), or savour the content in a Starbucks-like setting (in its paper, video, or audio incarnation).

Or maybe information will be sold just like the clothes. You can buy clothes through secondhand stores or Saks, and all will serve its primary function – keeping one clothed. But the fit, quality and ease of purchase differ tremendously. Instead of having quality or brands as the differentiating factor, the mode of content delivery may become the differentiating point when it comes to information products.

Just because technology has made information available to us at a marginal price of almost zero, doesn’t mean that it is the best form through which we should choose to consume it.

Follow more discussion on this post here.

picture source: vim-alex

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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

First things first. Newspapers need to get rid of debt. Much of newspaper failures in recent months have to do with bad corporate management.  During the run-up to the property bubble, many holding companies piled on an excessive and ridiculous amount of debt, violating the holy tenement of sound strategy that dissuades reckless forays into areas unrelated to its core competency. Since when would newspaper businesses go into property speculation, other than for leasing and tax reasons?

Advertising

Secondly, there’s the issue of readership and advertising revenue. Anglo-American newspapers have traditionally relied more of its revenue from advertising. That’s an enviable position to be in when times are good. But when economy goes into the reverse, many European publishers now get the last laugh – they can still make money off of its subscription base. Perhaps it’s time to work out a strategy that spread the eggs around the baskets?

Where to go from here

One way to look at the problem is to figure out exactly what the publication wants to be. Clearly, treating the web as another distribution channel does not work.

The Norwegian paper Vendens Gang has found prosperity and fame by operating on a highly interactive level with its users. Digital arm of the paper operates separately from its print parent, with only 5% of duplicate content. This is smart. Because let’s see, do the same version of news need to be regurgitated multiple times through multiple channels? No. Understanding that, successful newspapers spun off their online presence as another facet of its brand.

The issue of integrity has so far barricaded industry elites from thinking outside the box. How does one introduce an alternative revenue model into a business that has for decades, relied on advertising that’s stayed out of its editorials? For obvious reasons, approaches like product placement and paid reporting would destroy reputations faster than you can say show-me-the-money.

European papers manage to somewhat circumvent this problem by making money through a number of sideline ventures. How about selling weight-loss club membership, or live-streaming wildly popular soccer matches? I have even heard suggestions that newspapers run online casinos. So there, Anglo-American capitalism, unleash your magic!

A select number of papers can perhaps leverage their brands by producing more complex and longer forms of reporting. That’s one of the reasons behind success of magazines such as Atlantic and Economist – which are still doing well despite bloodbath in the wider publishing industry. Instead of condensing its writing to appease digital readers with short attention spans, those magazines have carved out a section of their online real estate to blogs that inform, engage and entertain its readers through online media, while maintaining (and protecting) the quality (and length) of its its print content. With a healthy subscriber base and a lively online presence, those magazines can have the best of both worlds.

A multi-media future?

Perhaps the future of newspaper will phase out printed dailies, and re-segment the current publishing industry as we know it.  In its place, we will have fast-paced, up-to-date, and opinionated breaking news and analysis from a team of furious beat writers turned professional bloggers that compete with amateur bloggers. The digital platform will be supported by advertising and creative joint ventures with various relevant businesses.

Maybe this form of news/blogging will join force with the still successful cable network TV as well as the rapidly growing news aggregation services to provide on-demand, topic-specific, targeted news reporting, through both print and videos.  As leaders in the industry, why not buy up news aggregation services and nurture a community of its own? Why not publish more best-of/popular articles, and photography in books? On the other hand, we will get our in-depth, thoughtful analysis in the form of weekly and monthly magazines (spun-off from newspapers).

People still crave information. People crave quality information. But they are now getting it through different channels. And while this reorganization is taking place, the delicate matter of who is paying for what, is what we are having trouble with at the moment.

By working on more creative news delivery platforms, and exploring alternative revenue models, the future of journalism is brighter, and not dimmer. Delivery methods are varied: by joining force with aggregation services to serve highly targeted and relevant news to its readers; master the use of tags and match them with user preferences; publish topical magazines and books to save readers from news clippings, etc. As to alternative revenue models: try different things. Try what the Norwegians have done, try what the British have done. It’s hard to believe all that American entrepreneurial energy comes up empty when faced with a problem like newspapers.

Picture source: ~scribbleMe

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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”.

When the now deified Web 2.0 first caught everyone’s imagination, it was touted as the tool that would revolutionize the way we communicate. It was supposed to be democratic, horizontal, transparent, and authentic. In other words: everything that the corporate-advertising-complex wasn’t. Gradually, businesses caught on this myth, and started blogging, facebooking and twittering – a domain of activities reserved mainly for greasy college students only a few years back.

Most businesses do not understand social media networking. Actually, most of us don’t. But we do it anyway, because that’s the way to stay current. Remember when Facebook first surfaced and sparked debates as to whether someone that pulled your hair at summer camp twenty years ago really counted as a “friend”? Well, that argument is hardly relevant anymore. Now we don’t blink twice before adding our mothers to our profiles, because that still makes way more sense than “following” hundreds or thousands of strangers on Twitter.

I shouldn’t complain: I got a job off of Twitter. But from time to time, I’m still befuddled as to how, or if I’m even close to uncovering its supposedly boundless potential. Most of the time, I feel like I’m twittering into a vacuum: a vacuum full of people with blogs, businesses, skills, and agendas to promote. I’m guilty as charged.

Twittering may make a lot of sense for business such as Zappos, Dell, and Comcast as an extension of their existing customer service platform, and businesses such as Amazon has nurtured and leveraged its community for years. But for every American Express success story, we see many more awkward deployment of hipness by old men in suits. We are embarrassed for them, not unlike the way we cover our eyes at the atrocious sights of rhythm-challenged middle-aged white guys getting jiggy with it at Christmas parties.

But is there really anything stopping those businesses from get their acts together to bring in young consultants, and buy their ways into some street cred? I think it is inevitable. Just as the advertising industry has transformed itself by shifting its expertise from print to TV advertising, and from TV advertising into more insidious product placement and guerilla marketing, they will find a way to leverage and benefit from the power of the crowd too.

It is hard not to be cynical and resigned to the ultimate triumph of marketers, when so much reverence is reserved for marketing gurus. Because even as they preach authenticity or tribes or innovation or communication, they are preaching marketing, and the kind of marketing and branding that stays two steps ahead of consumers, and ultimate make them do what the marketers would want them to do. And knowing these are the very message that businesses pay dearly for, is there really any doubt that the social media platform will become another well-fed, well-massaged, and well-deployed tentacle in the overall marketing plan?

Ultimately, putting the right products into the right hands with minimum pushy interference and annoyance is a sign of good customer service, and is something to be applauded. But the process of doing so is little different than the prevailing marketing paradigm, as long as the goal is to push, as most businesses are doing, versus building communication channels and transparency. More businesses are catching on, and this is a good sign. But too many are still at once confused and mesmerized by the possibilities of hyped-up social media marketing.

On a smaller scale, this is no more apparent than the expansion of the blogosphere, where branding is one of the most popular topics. As blogging crossed over (that tipping point already passed long ago) from part-time hobbies to legitimate careers, we see a consolidation and commoditization of media personalities as plausible brands, even those that exist solely through online niche. Managing your online persona/brand is now dealt as seriously with as any other business concerns.

In the past, many that became disillusioned with the corporate machine and machinations leave to pursue their own passion or work, hoping to get away from the excessive salesmanship of having to toot your horns at all times. Now they find little respite. What new media has effectively done is to make branding and marketing tools readily available to individuals and small businesses. Just like when advertising first started, non-participation in this brave new world of new media is not an option. Unwittingly, the fervent marketers in us steered “social” tools away from their originally conceived purposes. Instead, their primary purpose nowadays is to amplify our already unhealthy obsession with marketing and branding.

Where do you see social media networking and marketing headed in the near future? As both consumers and marketers, how do you think we can successfully utilize existing tools to improve transparency and authenticity?

picture source: ~SpringlighT