using my head

At this year’s ad:tech there were a few decent seminars, but one speaker’s comments in particular has stuck in my mind long after the event. Umair Haque was part of the Chinwag panel discussion called ‘Micro Media Maze’ and he drew parallels between the current financial crisis and the state of the online landscape. Now that’s something you don’t usually hear at these types of conferences, so I was intrigued.

Haque explained that the reason for the huge crash in the financial markets was that Wall Street had sliced, diced and rebundled securities and sold them on, to the point where it was no longer sustainable. What made them fall is that they were doing this ‘remixing’ within an old paradigm. He drew a parallel between this scenario and the new online trend for widgets: after all, most widgets simply take existing content, and slice it up, mix it up, chunk it up and then spit it out for consumption. According to Haque (and I’m in pretty close agreement), most widgets today are just glorified redistribution methods for the same old junk, just streams of ads no one wants, repackaged with the shiny badge of being ‘widgetised’.

Haque went on to say that the media needs to shift out of its old paradigm if it is to survive; the old paradigm being the practice of shoving ads down customers’ throats. In an age where consumers don’t have to watch ads anymore, using widgets as ads just doesn’t fly. Tomorrow’s ads need to give value to consumers, tomorrow’s communication needs to improve or enhance the customer’s skills, not dull them with ’stupid passive zombified entertainment’. That’s a shift indeed, but I do have (perhaps naive) faith. I’m just not sure how long it will take for media to catch on to the idea.

There are some great widgets out there – for example, the last.fm / Google Maps mashup that shows where the bands you listen to on last.fm are playing live. But widgets like this are usually created by the developer community, not the big media companies. And with services like Widgetbox allowing people to create widgets without the need for a developer or any understanding of code, the ratio of rubbish to brilliant widgets is only set to get greater.

What media owners need to do is take a leaf out of the book of Creative Commons and the blogging community, where people regularly give things away for the sheer joy of giving or being helpful to another human being. Take for example, the coolest thing since free wifi itself: Londonist’s free wifi map of London. It’s been created and made public for free, is constantly updated by the steady stream of reader comments in the original post, and is the sheer essence of sharing something useful: ‘giving back‘ without needing to be ‘given to’ first.

Whether or not this concept will fly with the business and revenue models of most media companies, is yet to be seen. I guess that’s what Umair Haque meant when he called for a paradigm shift. I only hope that it happens before the days when today’s young people, who have grown up living their lives online, take over. Because I will probably be too old by then to even remember what the hell a widget was in the first place.

Part 2 in the ad:tech London Follow-up posts

Last night I went along to Chinwag Live’s final event of 2007, and as usual it was chock full of interesting people and ideas. The event this time around was focused on the future, and those jolly Chinwag chaps & chapettes asked some of the UK’s leading marketing and digital media folks to tell us what they thought things would be like for marketing, PR and all things online in 2012.

I won’t post a full summary here, as I’m sure the podcast will be available soon (and I can smell my dinner in the oven calling me), but some of the choice nuggets for me were:

• Nikki Barton’s predictions for the way user interfaces will change, perhaps even leading to the death of the mouse. She said that in future we would need different UIs because we would be accessing the net primarily through mobile. I think she’s spot-on, especially after my recent trip to Japan where none of my relatives used their computers (if they even had one) to go online, they all used their mobiles. In fact they used their mobiles for lots of things other than phone/SMS, the most useful for us being the Japanese-English dictionary.
• Guy Phillipson’s predictions that as information becomes cheap and readily available, people would have more space and time in their lives for creativity. He predicted that in future (not by 2012, mind!) we would have in-brain search engines where all you would need to do was think about something and the answer came to you. Kind of like Neo’s learning in The Matrix, but without the need for a socket in your head or an ‘operator’ with data stored on discs – discs are sooo last century .
• The panel’s consensus that ‘digital’ is still a ‘ghetto’, a niche where specialist geeks reside and do their own thing; but a positive change for the marketing, PR & advertising industries in future would be that by 2012 digital natives would be reaching Board/Director level of these agencies, and so digital would inevitably become more integrated and taken more seriously.

After this came the Q&A, and I have to admit I must have done a pretty poor job of asking my question, because I think the panel got the wrong end of the stick. I made a comment on how no one had really talked about virtual worlds, and I also wanted to pick up on something Guy had commented on earlier in the talk about privacy issues in social networks, as I felt that in virtual worlds, most of the appeal is the privacy/anonymity factor. I personally think of Bebo, SecondLife, there.com and other true virtual worlds as simply another form of social network – which is why I place MMPORGs like World of Warcraft in another category (the core purpose of WoW is gaming, not just hanging out).

Unfortunately, the panel seemed to interpret this question as a question about the future of virtual worlds specifically in terms of platform (ie. who would ‘win’: SecondLife, there.com, etc), which is not what I meant at all – but it probably didn’t come out that way. To me, it’s pretty obvious that the future of virtual worlds is being able to move seamlessly from one world to another… but this is exactly where it starts to cross over into the troubled privacy waters social networks like Facebook are facing now. In order to port your data (or avatar) between systems, you will need to have something like Open ID, which will tell the system who you are and what data/inventory/avatar is associated with you. While I’m a big fan of Open ID, I’m also intensely aware of the fact that much of the appeal of virtual worlds is being anonymous, or keeping your FirstLife identity private and separate from your virtual life.

A lot of the backlash I’ve been hearing/reading about Facebook is tied to the fact that Facebook knows who you are, as a real person. And as they don’t seem to be uber-keen on keeping that data private, it also means that quite a lot of people can also find out who you are & what you’re up to: (potential) employers, retailers and of course some people whom you lost touch with over the years for a reason.

So my question was more about what impact the social networking privacy issues would have on virtual worlds in the future. Would a single identity system come into play within virtual world social networks, as well? And what would that mean to people like the members of Second Life’s umpteen support groups, who are only able to exist because they offer the comforting cloak of anonymity? These groups convene in the safety of virtual worlds to talk about rape, mental health, abuse and other very private issues that are very difficult to talk about in real life. In fact, I’ve found that general conversations with many of the people whom I’ve met in Second Life  or overheard in open chat are intensely personal, and disclose deep feelings and thoughts that would rarely be revealed to even the closest of real life friends.

Things are already changing in Second Life, when the introduction of voice chat inevitably changed the landscape massively. After all, it’s quite hard to keep up the facade that your female fairy avatar projects when you have a voice like James Earl Jones. So what next? I guess only the misty advance of time will tell.

A post I wrote following up on the Wobble 2.0 event, hosted over at the NESTA blogs. It’s about the fact that I don’t think Web 2.0 is necessarily about solving the big problems of the world, but instead solving the little problems that make you think “There must be a better/easier way of doing this”.

Andrew [Orlowski from The Register] stated that the big returns on investment would come from ’solving the big problems of the world’, and that Web 2.0 was never going to do that. I take his point, but who ever said that Web 2.0 was meant to be about solving major problems? In my mind, most of the ‘web as platform’ side of Web 2.0 is about solving small problems…

… So much of what we think of as innovation is about simply tackling an old problem in a new way; the Dyson, long touted as a leading example of innovation, is a pretty straightforward exemplification of ‘building a better mousetrap’. That’s what I think Web 2.0 does.

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>