Via Ars Technica

Various “media-components” are provided in a “multi-media center.” In modular architecture, a module-controller communicates with media-modules provided for various media-components. A media-module can include or obtain data pertaining to a particular media-component, identify media-player(s), and access information related to their media. However, the media-modules are isolated from each other, and the module-controller effectively controls output generated in response to user input. A user interface library is provided for the media-modules. Media-modules can obtain a template or other tools from the library and construct their user interface (e.g., menus). Media-modules can also identify a media-player that can be initiated in response to user input. Subsequently, the media-controller forwards user input to the media-player.

I’ve been having conversations along this line, with friends, for years now. There are many pieces of the puzzle sold in separate chunks, but never the full picture. Difficulty — Apple’s DRM stranglehold (EMI press release aside) impedes any UI, design, simplicity, and connectivity strengths they can bring to the table. Perhaps all the hub bub about DRM stems from the knowledge of this?

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

See a 2002 article on piracy by O’Reilly, resurfaced in a post by Chris Anderson that says he’s happy his book has been pirated…. I love that.

Lots of interesting noise around the “size” of Second Life. And it’s bizzare that there is so much noise when the actual signals can be published at any time. The debate steams from the Shirky camp that believes Second Life doesn’t rate all the press it’s getting (due to the overinflated population/usage numbers) and the reaction of anyone who has a vested interest in Second Life defending its value (where value can diverge beyond the topic of size/usage).

I came across this from GigaGamez:

Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%— a percentage so low, it shocked me. (“[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.”) When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)— “12-15% and has remained steady over the last year… we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly changing content that people do come back to see. ”

The stats above are going to be the crux of some back of the napkin calculations I’ll throw out later (need to verify some data sources first). But there’s probably an easier quick litmus test on the hype factor — the concurrency data. How many people are online at a single time. Let’s assume the following are generally accurate (sourced from Linden’s feed once a minute) — (see graphs). Eyeballing it, it looks like 10-12k concurrent users is the average — with spikes up to 20,000 or so during peaks. If we go back to Shirky’s statements about marketers and press not asking the hard questions to parse out “cool story” versus “does it matter”, it seems to me that in terms of scale, this is a non-story. Especially when you look at this:

So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC! American Apparel! Adidas and Toyota!, etc.) count as news, since it’s not clear if this is just a gimmick, or if they’re actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars.

But even in the Gigagamez post, Wagner James Au admits that measured on scale alone, this isn’t so newsworthy.

So here’s my take:
Second Life, in itself, is never going to reach the mass adoption or generate the impact MySpace and YouTube have. The wild assumptions on Second Life adoption and growth will never materialize without dramatic changes — incremental improvement won’t do it.

However, Second Life is worth looking at, watching, and playing in. Even if you are a marketer. I think it’s definitely a Faint Signal on the Fringe — what is happening in terms of:

Design for user-generated content
Design for user-generated commerce
Community Design
Rights of digital content and creation
Rapid prototyping and immersive design
Government regulation of global virtual property and content
3D social application design
Etc

There are lots of newsworthy elements of Second Life… but in typical hype fashion, money, size, and sex sell.

Web2.0’s value comes from the user. The engine of value is constructed through an architecture of participation. User generated content, mashups, social networking – when done right, get better and create more USER value at an exponential rate. This is nothing new. We’ve been saying this for the many years. And companies are starting and being sold based on generating this kind of value. But what hasn’t changed? The business model.

Back at The Future of Web Apps earlier this year it became obvious that the dichotomy of the web as a business model hasn’t been solved. There still is a huge chasm between user value and business value. There’s plenty of innovation around what the web is delivering – but very little innovation on how money is made.

I know. You’re thinking I’m completely ignorant of all the innovation regarding contextual advertising, search advertising, etc. But take a critical view of these models. They are just more targeted ways of delivering billboards and coupons. It’s better than it has been, for sure. More relevant advertising is better for a company and for the consumer. But this is incremental change.

BusinessWeek walks through the online ad models of Google, Yahoo, and niche players. And as TechCrunch states, it’s true, more competition should generate better pricing and innovation. But it’s still about inventory, views, and clicks.

Most simply, advertising is NOT user-centered. At its best, it is about companies that want to achieve certain business goals, agencies that can help create campaigns to achieve those goals, and media agencies that can help place the campaign in the most efficient (and sometimes most effective) places. It isn’t about solving consumer needs, creating more consumer value, and generating incremental profit from that value.

There is potential for true innovation of the radical variety. Imagine a model that transforms the strengths of advertising into a user-focused model. Imagine we coupled the power of an ad agency, a media agency, a Google or Yahoo, and a network of niche web developers that actually generated profit for clients rather than expenses? The product of the coupling would be new communication tools, products, services, or social glue that solved customer needs in way that the customers themselves would pay for it.

More to come on this topic for sure. If you’re up for answering the call to create this with me drop me an email. Let the user-centered revolution begin.

Woke up this morning. Turned on the Mac. Put water on to boil. Set the beans to grind. Picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly, and flipping backwards, landed on this article: Get Me Rewrite, by Michael Hirschorn.

This would seem like the moment to get on my high horse and defend the daily newspaper, with its omnibus approach to everything from your town to the world, its high/low pastiche, its editorial ordering function that allows readers to weigh and sort multitudinous news inputs into a coherent worldview. But this is what I would call, to borrow a Wall Street term, sell-side logic. It flatters the people who have a vested interest in preserving the gatekeeper function and the economic margins provided by dead-tree media, or who see news­papers as a cultural bulwark against the barbarians. The barbarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to care; they’d rather get the news they want, not the news the mandarins say is good for them.

I’m reading about the decline of mainstream media (news media to be more precise) in a print magazine, prior to my morning ritual of perusing news and content on the web. It’s interesting. It’s a topic I’ve thought quite a bit about. And, as interesting as EPIC is (a future look back at the history of media, from 2015 backwards) is, along with Hirschorn’s thoughts, incomplete. There’s so much left to say.

Hirschorn warns against the “sell-side” logic, yet doesn’t really flesh out the demand side. And all the examples in EPIC are too mainstream themselves. Oddly no mention of Digg, Slashdot, or Metafilter. What about The Well or Salon in it’s early days? The “Faint Signals at the Fringe”, a thought piece my innovation partner and I have continued to develop and refine, tells a story of the future through the little guys, the startups, the renegades. Yes, Google, is a big guy now, but the way to tell its story is through the acqusitions trail. They’ve gobbled up the faint signals that were increasing in amplitude and frequency.

So here’s my pledge. Read the Atlantic article, and watch EPIC, and I’ll work this weekend on putting a little “faint signals” seasoning on the Death of MSM discussion. You can find threads of this in the non-MSM on a site like Kottke, or at Technorati, or Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. And I don’t intend to rehash all those arguements. I think there is another angle in to this story… and another way to paint the future.

19 December: I’ve been doing some background reading prior to laying out my perspective. There is too much rhetoric regarding this and I don’t want to mindlessly add to it. I’d like to put a framework, assumptions, a theory down that can help advance this whole Media Futures debate forward. Something will come in the next week or so.

Troubling ’07 Forecast for the Old-Line Media but Not for the Online is the headline of the New York Times article that captures industry speculation on where advertising dollars are flowing. Nothing new here: impending doom for “old-line” (3% growth) and wild spending (27% growth) for online (excluding search).

In my day job I help make sense of things like this for companies. So I won’t do that here. But one of the lessons you learn about sensemaking–especially as your aim moves further to the future, is understanding the limits of the language you’re using. We are entering an era where we don’t have the right language to make sense of what is happing.

Offline, online.
Old, new.
Analog, digital.
Measured, unmeasured.
Above the line, below the line.

Some comparative words get closer to helping:
Broadcast, interactive.
Long-form, short form.
Audience, users.

Then it gets blurry:
Subscribers, visitors, audience, users, consumers.
Push, pull, targeted, mass, personalized, personal, social.

I think the difficulty in making sense of advertising now and in the future is that we just don’t have the right language. We’re using terminology that no longer helps make things clearer and more usable. We have to go back to the basics — the patterns and forms and architecture of communication, attention, and motivation.

Television and all the marketing/media terms that come with it aren’t so helpful anymore. What makes television television? I can watch Lost on my 36″ Sony Television, my 20″ Sony monitor, or my tiny Ipod screen. Is “Lost” still a television show? I can find characters and places from the “show” on the web, in forums, on blogs. And the “story” is broader and deeper in those places.

You can interpret forecasts of shifting media and marketing dollars across channels/mediums like most will — that people are spending time and attention in different places and ways and advertising must follow them. I think if you use the same language as everyone else, you’ll come to that same conclusion. And that conclusion leads to an undifferentiated advertising space where the competition for attention and relevance eliminates more and more value for company and customer alike. Finding the right language is the first step to change the playing field and make the goal seeding, tending and growing value, rather than hunting and capturing it. It’s all about the language.