Mike Butcher - mbites

Here are my recent appearances last week on Sky and Channel 4 News talking about the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. It was a crazy Friday involving getting across London twice in one evening. Kinda fun though. (Thanks to Paul Walsh for the videos).

On Sky News: http://qik.com/video/14393


On Channel 4: http://qik.com/video/14385

People in the TV business are some of the most creative people you will ever meet. So why is it that the body set up to market the major broadcasters to advertisers (Thinkbox) allows you, via their site, to watch some of the most creative, clever adverts you will ever see... but you can't embed the ads in a blog post or share them on a MySpace on Facebook profile.

Like, er, duh.

This would be obvious to anyone working in the 'digital media' business, but to the TV guys? Computer says no.

When Twitter started out it seemed like a cool new web application to update your 'status' (what you are up to) for friends and, well, the world in general. Like Facebook status updates, but out on the Wild Web. But when people started having conversations via their Twitter status updates using the "@" symbol (e.g. "@mike Yeah, I thought that")I was initially quite annoyed. I even direct-messaged some people to tell them to stop it! Go get a chat room! This was not the proper use of Twitter, I told them.

How wrong I was.

It quickly became apparent that this was turning into the best use of Twitter of all. Not for long, winding conversations you might have on instant messaging, but short, to the point wise-cracks between people interspersed with a little status update here, a small observation on life there. Twitter was no longer about 'status' or 'what are you doing'. It was about conversation, 'what are you thinking', 'what are we talking about'.

The key difference is that people who say "take this conversation over into IM" don't get it. IM can't do what Twitter does. You can't instant message into "the cloud". With Twitter you can. You can shout or whisper whatever you want to say out into the ether and anyone online can hear you. And anyone following you, even if you don;t follow them, can reply - then you may well become connected.

Of course, the problem comes when people abuse this. They Twitter constantly. The worst are those who Twitter their status all the time (making tea, reading paper etc). According to one statistics site I saw, I Twitter roughly every 2 hours. Too much for a status update but about right for an ongoing conversation.

Status updates - unless they are funny - now seem irrelevant and boring. Status updates are dead for me. It's all about conversation now. I'm on Twitter here.

As I was reading the free daily Metro on a train the other day I was daydreaming about a different kind of newspaper but similar in form to the Metro. Instead of giving me a brief run-down of the news which lasted 20 mins, my "New Metro" would have similar stories, but also print lots of URLs so I could go and find out more information. And I don't mean URLs which pointed to the paper's web site. I mean real links to both the paper online and other reading. The Guardian's printed Technology Section is already doing this a lot (using TinyURL.com)and it really helps the experience.

But what my idea about a New Metro also suggested to me was that this, ultimately, would be a newspaper in reverse. Instead of printing stories on paper and having further material to view online, my New Metro would actually be the online product slowed down and freeze-framed for print. Because the chances are I would have seen a few of the stories online already - but I'd still consume plenty more in print because it's a different medium. I can see a time when a device like the iPhone will just replace most of my currently printed reading, but a 'freeze-framed' print version could still offer me more in terms of quick scanning and... well, just a different, more tactile experience. It would probably be a smaller paper and different in terms of story selection, but there would be no reason for print to die out. It would just adapt. (In fact in the early 1990s I wrote about a Guardian project to have an A4 newspaper printed by your home printer, along these lines).

I was reminded of this daydream today as I caught up on the battle currently raging between the Guardian's Roy Greenslade and the National Union of Journalists (I came to it via MessyMedia). Greenslade argues here and here that the NUJ now stands in the way of journalists taking up their digital tools and running with them. He says the survival of an organised media and journalistic business depends on the Union coming to terms with the fact that newspapers must now invest in online and get journalists to keep the web site updated every day including weekends - you name it. If they don't then other players who aren't tied down by lots of rules and regulations will just do it, and win the audience and the advertising.

It seems particularly appropriate to read and blog about this subject now since, in the last week or so I have felt like hell due a heavy cold, but still kept posting to TechCrunch UK, even breaking the odd exclusive and even (horror!) posting on the weekend and at night. If it was that sort of blog I might have uploaded photos and video too. I even went to Barcelona and back this week, using WiFi at the airports and hotel to keep the blog going. I know that is a no-brainer for the average blogger but it's a world away from the average journalist, who has to wait to submit copy when other people are in the office to edit it.

Maybe I'm odd. Maybe I do it because I am passionate about the subject. Maybe also I could take advantage of the flexibility of a blog to post, especially this last two weeks, when I felt physically up to it, not when I was 'in the office'. To me, 'the office' is when I am online, so the office is the nearest WiFi, regardless of where I am physically. But I am still, at heart, a journalist/blogger/storyteller/whatever who gets a kick out of the scent of a good story. So in that respect the same rules would apply to a journo on a local paper who felt like cracking out a story in the middle of the night rather than waiting for 'the office' to open in the morning.

When I wrote for a US-owned magazine (The Industry Standard), the house style on almost any story, for example about a company closing, was like this: "John Smith looked at his watch. As the seconds slowly passed, he knew it was time to step up to the plate and tell the board what was going to happen in the next six months. But something stopped him... yada yada."

This was totally different to the British style which was basically: "CEO John Smith today told employees they would be out of a job inside 6 months." Now I notice a great letter to The Washington Post, which basically suggests that in the age of the Internet, mobile phones and a plethora of digital media we now no longer have time to sit down and read what in journalism we call a 'drop intro'. To quote:

"Newspaper circulation in the United States has been sliding for about 20 years. I have an idea that might help these papers get back on track. If the average paper has about 200 stories and the average reader has about 20 minutes to read it, he can spend only about six seconds on each story. But stories are often written in the meandering style of William Faulkner. If the headline reads, "Bridge Set to Close Down for Repairs" the story might begin with: "Bob Wilson gazed down at his empty coffee cup and listened to the patter of rain falling gently against his window pane." Then, after reading about two paragraphs of fluff like this, the reader is told to "See BRIDGE, C21, Col. 1" to learn when the bridge will be closed. We clearly need a newspaper digest that will get to the point more quickly. I'm sure that it would be a huge hit for any publisher smart enough to offer it."

There's no doubt that blogs now offer that fast filter, which is perhaps why they took off so well in the US - where readers became tired of the Faulkner style, and have not been so dramatically big in the UK, where.... ahem... the media tends to get to the point a lot faster. As in the The Sun's "Gotcha".... I rest my case...

Last May, at the PSFK Conference London 2007 I gave a talk on how media owners are on a race for survival against technology companies that put the power to publish in the hands of the ‘audience.’ Here it is, including my embarrassing stall half way through where I need to go get some water:

Click To Play

PSFK are running some much better speakers than I at the PSFK Conference Los Angeles on September 18 2007 in West Hollywood - www.psfk.com/psfk-conference-los-angeles so check it out if you can.

I just need to blog this while it's still in my head. I'm sure others have come to the same conclusion in a more erudite manner, and posted longer pieces. But I'm starting to wonder if the "User Generated Content" revolution, which was supposed to be taking over the world somewhere around about now, may not hit the heights it was predicted to. Why? Because social networking could well take over from where content creation left off. Ok, that is a massive generalisation. Of course that won't happen for all demographics all of the time. But think about it. Even the biggest bloggers of the last 2 years - Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur etc - are now producing almost as much content and getting possibly more interaction inside social networks than they did out on the wild-web or blogosphere. Of course, I'm referring in large part to the enormous pull of Facebook right now. But I'm also thinking that it's specifically proprietary social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, which are not open platforms in the way blogs were, that will have this effect. We all have a limited amount of time. If the former Live Journal member or Blogspot Blogger switches to Facebook, then they are going to spend a lot of the time which they used to create content now socially networking (writing on walls, checking mini-feeds, staling people's statuses etc). I'll try and add more to this later...

UPDATE: I added more in my comment below.

Head of digital for the Guardian Media Group Simon Waldman hits back with both barrels today at John Duncan and his assertion in a previous issue of Press Gazette that online teams have ‘conned’ unsuspecting newspaper boards into making investments in online publishing.

Here are some key quotes from his piece in today's Press Gazette:

"The current forecasts for growth in the UK market indicate that, on average, digital spending in the UK will grow from a £2bn market to approximately £4bn over the next two years. In other words, there is likely to be some £2bn of new money coming online. But isn’t much of this going to search engines (particularly, Google)? Well, even if 50 per cent of it is, that still leaves £1bn of new money left for us to fight for...."

"...Last month PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast that we will move from 50 per cent of households having broadband this year to 80 per cent by 2011. All the evidence shows that the longer people have a connection, the more time they spend doing things online. So internet use in the UK is set to grow for many years yet..."

Waldman's conclusion is that while "print has many healthy decades ahead.. those will be about gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, decline." Waldman has also been blogging recently about whether the Dialy Express will simply close as a result of the change in the media landscape.

The online world, meanwhile, "offers smart media owners potential for growth – in reach, reputation and revenue. That’s not a con. It’s a fact. And it’s time to learn to deal with it."

Today I've been reading Rex Hammock's Weblog (thanks Voidstar for the link) who writes about how Facebook it's not really the Holy Grail for either social networking or being the ultimate tool for collaborative working and tracking. He calls it' "geek play", and I agree. He says:

Facebook is not even close to being what will ultimately be that thing which alters fundamentally the way in which we relate and communicate. It may show us the way, but there are some important factors related to personal identity and social interaction that Facebook — or any platform that requires us to create community that is locked inside a wall — will not be able to overcome if it is to become the next be-all, end-all.

He also mentioned Ning which was previewed last year at Content 2.0 here in London when Marc Canter got up on stage and pointed out that MySpace users couldn't own theor own profiles or move them around networks. Well guess what? here we are again with the same old issue all over again, this time with Facebook.

Meanwhile over here, "A VC in NYC" agrees with Jason Calacanis that "Facebook Bakruptcy" is where you have total overload of friend requests and incoming stuff to deal with. Plus FB is becoming so successful, startups are wondering if they should just build an application for Facebook rather than build out a whole web service.

My view is that building a site is a marathon not a sprint. If you can't control your content then you have no business long term. Sure, market your site on Facebook - but don't for pete's sake put your whole idea into it.

There are some fascinating lessons to be learned from the closure of BackFence.com in the US. I think the most salient come in the comments to this story, namely that:

• "Hyper-local is about utility and networks of people, not citizen journalism"

• "they approached the problem from the top down rather than working to organize and shape existing natural local networks and chatter"

• "See the existing 72,000+ public ‘neighborhood’ Yahoo Groups (and who knows how many private groups) and the fast growing Facebook Regional networks as proof points of scalable hyper-local models...and the focus of these services isn’t even hyper-local!"

It's clear to me, having watched the debates about citizen journalism (effectively ordinary people acting like reporters) on the one hand and social media (like MySpace, Facebook, even YahooGroups) on the other, that in every scenario social media wins. Why? Because of time. The simple fact is most people don't have time to create content around their local area. Believe me, I've done it (professionally as a local newspaper journalist, and privately as a local activist). It's a pain!

The only thing that makes it easier is being able to do it in "gulps" as in "Here's the local phone number for this service" or "here's where you sign up for this". That's it. Most people can't do much more and those that could don't have the time. Microblogging and Facebook status updates are literally a gift from heaven in this scenario.

That's why social networks which give local people the tools to connect and create knowledge selfish/selflessley will win in this game. That's also why local newspapers are potentially screwed.

The BBC reports on research by Danah Boyd which found that Facebook users come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college while MySpace users tend not to have gone on to further education. While "class" in the US does not map directly to income it is more about social life and networks. Hence Facebook users tend to be white and education oriented while MySpace teenager tend to come from families from immigrant backgrounds.

This rings true in my view, and maps to my view that in the future the really powerful networks will be closed ones. You can't get to a Facebook profile unless you are registered and it's not open to the Web. On MySpace anyone - logged in or not - can reach you, and it also reflects a teenager's general "posture" to the outside world much more because of its public nature.

This is thin stuff. "There is increasing buzz around buzz." Oh, come on. You guys need to realise that online identity in the form of a MySpace or Facebook profile is as much content as anything someone might 'upload'. Furthermore, microblogging a la Twitter is the tip of the ice-burg. When 'uploaders' include those who are happy to blog in just 140 characters (many more than the blessed 8% I daresay), that's when you will see what social media is really capable of. I expect better from Agency.com.

This is the text of a speech I gave at the PSFK London conference on Friday, June 1, 2007. It's about how media owners now face some very harsh realities against both technology companies that put the power to publish in the hands of the ‘audience’ and smaller, cheaper to run media startups.

There's a little story about the first stirring of how a new kind of cheap to produce, easy to distribute media would start to affect both the existing, traditional media and the society around it.

I'm not talking about what happened when blogs appeared on the scene in 1998/99.

Instead, let me take you back to one summer in early 19th century England, June 1817 to be precise.

At that time there was great poverty and distress created by the conflict between unplanned economic industrial expansion and the older way of artisan life.

On dozens of occasions weavers and other workers in the midlands and the north assembled with a few guns and home–made arms to attack the authorities that enforced rigid and terrible working conditions.

But nothing much came of these uprisings until a man called Jeremy Brandreth gathered 200 or 300 men from Pentridge to march on Nottingham.

The organisers connected with other groups and urged them to join the uprising.

But these other groups frequently failed to show up or were broken up by the authorities before they could get to any kind of assembly point. The distribution of the information was going out fast in some places and slowly in others.

The WEAK POINT in the organisation was always the LINKS between them.

Eventually the Pentridge group just marched on Nottingham alone. Brandreth was arrested with 36 others, imprisoned in London and hung. The event later became known as the Pentridge Uprising, and largely disappeared into obscurity afterwards.

BUT - only a few years later, with the invention of an affordable letter press, factory and farm workers were able to start affecting the course of public debate by printing and distributing weekly newsletters (including The Political Register or "The Two Penny Trash" and the Black Dwarf). These became a rallying point for insurgency, not just because they were printed and distributed, but these pamphlets - not unlike blogs - were read to the workers in 'reading rooms' (the RSS feed of its time).

Only two years later The Peterloo Massacre in 1819 began as a protest rally, which saw 60,000 people gathering to protest about their living standards, but was quelled by military action and saw eleven people killed and 400 wounded.

Those pamphlets had become the backbone of demonstrations that eventually led to the freedom of the press and parliamentary reform.

I'm no historian, but it would appear that this was one of the last times in history when the existing system of information distribution was undermined and radically changed by a new system. The new technology, the pamphlet, was CHEAPER, FASTER, and was not designed to support any kind of full-blown media enterprise - it was a means for social discourse and social change.

Digital media is cheaper to create, so it has the potential to undermine traditional media which, although creates a more polished product, is slower and more expensive. In the past these economic were masked because not enough people were online to consume digital media. But now they are.

We got a taste for the emergence of this trend last year when the UK Press Gazette magazine closed. It turns out that the magazine's website, at 110,000 unique users a month, was much more popular than the printed version which only managed 4,639 in sales. Of course, all the effort went into the printed title.

Admittedly its readership - journalists - were used to getting it free so subscriptions were hard to maintain.

But it faced two key issues, which faces the media today. Firstly, a smaller, cheaper to run competitor - holdthefrontpage.co.uk - which could undercut it on classified advertising.

The second issue was a fundamental inability to realise that despite their relative success online, the high costs of a traditional media structure (sub editors, art editors, photographers, expensive offices, an MD on £133k, a finance director on £82k) could not be supported.

Anyone who has ever read an A-List blog like TechCrunch or Guido Fawkes, knows that online publishing long ago found in blogging a very low-cost, high impact model of publication - but like PG, few publishers are able to deal with the reality of this fact.

Meanwhile in the US and elsewhere, tiny blog sites are being networked together to create fascinating new media models of the future - Gawker, TechCrunch, PaidContent, GigaOm, Weblogs Inc, The Register. There remains many publishers who just don't realise that their businesses - with parking slots for the CEO and lavish expense accounts for the ad sales staff - could one day be under threat from this "digital pamphleteering".

But the Classified advertising world, long associated with the news media and a substantial revenue source, is not sticking around for old times sakes.

Craigslist - which has taken £60m of ad revenue a year out of the San Francisco newspaper market - and GumTree.com in the UK, are examples of how classified advertising is becoming virtually self-organising. No one needs media companies in the middle any more. In fact media companies can't create the really smart tools for classifieds any more. That's why over 60% of the online advertising market is in sectors like Google Adsense - a market created not by media people but by a technology company which in fact owns no media production of its own.

Craigslist is now in 192 cities, and only charges for want ads in three of them, and only $25. Craigslist competitors, like the New York Times, charge $300. Craigslist has little overheads. It employs 18 people in a run-down office in San Francisco and turns over about $10m a year. And there is no indication that he will sell his business to a "real" media company. The New York Times owns a massive building, employs around 10,000 people. You do the math.

Craigslist is not the only way people are connecting. Take for instance the growth of Freecycle on Yahoo Groups. All for free, all facilitating the exchange of goods, monetised for Yahoo! by contextual advertising.

Now, admittedly, the media business can get it right. Everyone considered it a very smart and shrewd move when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580m in 2005. Much cheaper than the $165bn Google paid for YouTube less than a year later.

And News Corp has been quick to try and monetise it put it in the service of the wider media group of which it is now part.

This April MySpace said it was joining forces with online recruitment site Simply Hired to launch what it claims will be the UK's largest online jobs channel. The deal is expected to feed around 1m job ads to the local UK version of MySpace. IN the US Simply Hired aggregates around 5m job adverts for the social networking website.

However, the problem is, is that advertisers themselves tend not to want to pay. Advertising jobs is notoriously expensive for businesses so they typical try to route-around any obstacle, looking for a free or cheaper route.

How many people here are now getting frequent emails from their LinkedIn contacts advertising jobs? LinkedIn is a social network where in theory you have to pay to really promote a job, but people easily get around the restrictions.

Linked in is typical of social networking sites, which are simply putting buyers and sellers together.

The similar Facebook is also taking off in the UK. What are many of the groups being formed there? Ones where people can buy and sell goods and place advertising in Facebook Marketplace. All for free.

In the public sector too, Media business face increasing pressure because of the simple economics of digital publishing.

Job searches on the government's Jobcentre Plus website have now reached a new high. The website now handles over 70m job searches a year, accounting for over 14% of the overall recruitment market in the UK.

Then there is the increasing threat from search engines.

Last month Simon Waldman, director of digital strategy for the Guardian Media Group and chairman of the Association of online publishing in the UK and group, pointed out that members had experienced 67 per cent growth in turnover of their digital businesses in 2006, with aggregate turnover for AOP organisations now standing at £575m - equivalent to the size of UK radio advertising.

However, he pointed to Google’s UK revenue of £872m (an 81 per cent increase year on year). In other words, the old media business is not in any way leading the market, it just happens to be part of it. You'll note that Channel 4 made similar noises about Google's increasing domination not long ago.

The old media business must now contend with technological giants, as well as nimble, low-cost start-ups on the west coast of the US and in Europe. And many of those startups are fascinated by, what? Classified-style advertising. In the US last week Trulia.com, a residential real estate search engine, closed $10m in financing. Here in the UK were have several startup equivalents, Zoomf.com, Nestoria, OneOneMap. All after the same revenues and all hungry for classified data to either upload or crawl on other sites. Rightmove has been quoted at £320m. Zubka.com, where you can advertise jobs and get a commission for recommending people is gaining in popularity. In areas like travel, startups like WAYN.com are happy to answer the need for travel coverage by allowing the users themselves to create it.

Waldman even predicted more court cases between publishers and search engines as media owners struggle to protect their intellectual property.

The trends highlighted in the US are being reflected here in the UK. The Pew Internet Foundation has shown that in the US there's not a great appetite for reading newspapers among 18-30 years olds. Meanwhile, the existing newspaper readership is slowly dying off, newspapers are cutting expenses and sacking journalists.

The rot has even set in at the august Time magazine.

In January this year Time Inc said it would cut 289 jobs in an effort to rein in costs so it can invest more heavily in the Internet and new media. The cuts include 172 editorial employees. Last year it shed about 550 jobs. Ann Moore, Time Inc’s chief executive, told staff the world’s biggest publisher was making progress on the internet. But she added: “We need to continue to evolve to meet the cost pressures and challenges presented by our rapidly-shifting industry.” It's also put 18 smaller magazines up for sale. The core of her strategy has been to take Time Inc’s best-known brands and move them on to the internet.

Of course, in this country newspapers and magazines are clamouring to try and make their web sites really work and earn more. Of course, if you're Richard Desmond, owner of the Daily Express, it's easy. He is happily upping his salary while largely ignoring the Internet. It probably won't be around much longer as a result and will die with its readers fairly shortly no doubt.

Meanwhile the new readers, the new viewers, are going behind the back of the old media, and taking to each other. That's what social media is, and there are plenty of technology firms - Digg, Blogger, Flickr, Vox, Facebook - which are happy to facilitate that conversation, and more importantly the real commerce that results from this. Some are even suggesting that Twitter, the very simple tool for public messaging across IM, SMS and Web could easily monetise via classifieds.

The media can of course fight back. The newspapers can make a case for being the right place to hold that conversation. Sites like The Guardian's Comment is Free , or the Telegraph's new "My Telegraph" blog initiative.

As Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts last year: "This is the beginning of a complete inversion of the newspaper model. It's not us telling you it's us saying to you 'why don't you take part and we'll give you the space.' " That's Comment is Free.

The alternative is the New York Times, where comment sits behind a subscription firewall, which probably makes less than $10m dollars a year.

Now, granted, I doubt Comment is Free is making that much money either. At least it sounds like it's on the right track.

But meanwhile, the media business still faces the problem of what to do when digital media just doesn't bring in the same amount of money, even as more of their readers and viewers consume it.

Rusbridger has a graph he likes to trot out at speeches which plots the falling revenues of old media against the rising revenues of digital. The problem is, he points out, is that there is a black hole between the two where no one knows if the new revenues coming in will match the revenues of old, and thus maintain the old infrastructures.

In some respects all of this may be irrelevant to brands, marketing and advertising people. Who cares how the consumers get to learn about your product, right? It doesn't have to be via a site or service run by an old media company, or one that perhaps also reports the news.

It could be via a cute campaign on a social networking site, or a clever YouTube video, which goes viral. The 'old' media business as was does not have a God-given right to survive, it needs to earn its keep and deliver the audience if it’s to survive.

On the cold facts, this is unarguable, but there is also the fact that for a society to work well, citizens have to be informed across a range of subjects. Politics and culture is always worse off with citizens who aren't informed. Sure, we would try rely on 'crowdsourcing'. We could hope that Digg.com could keep us up to date on current events in Iraq, because there are a lot of bloggers with a balanced view out in the green zone, right?

It may not be that extreme a result of course. It may be that the media business, and especially media businesses connected with news gathering, shrink to a new leaner, light-weight model propogated by the A-List bloggers of the world. Anything from less parking spaces for the board directors right down to getting rid of large offices, staff and capital outlays altogether.

Whatever happens, let's hope the new models to come serve our democracies and our markets as well as the old model.

Justin Kirby over at dmc.co.uk has created a new site around how the theory and methodology of "Connected Marketing" is evolving and also being put into practice. He's published a series of new podcast interviews for the site including ones on "Open Innovation, Trends and Engagement" marketing. Check it out.

Put this button on your blog in a show of support for BBC Reporter Alan Johnston who was abducted in Gaza on the 12th of March.

I'm organising a panel discussion provisionally titled "The Dark Side Of Social Media". This is going to be about how Social Media (MySpace, YouTube etc etc) has a 'bad' side, and it is not quite the new media nirvana some make it out to be. The Kathy Sierra incident is just once recent, extreme example.

For instance consider these issues surrounding social media which remain unresolved:

• Child safety remains an issue
• Anonymity can promote bullying and a distopian environment
• The ability to "game" social media (Asking people for Diggs, begging for Myspace links for a crap pop band etc) means the currency of social media is falling
• Identity theft - Anyone can create be anyone's MySpace page
• Privacy - if you expose yourself to the world via blogs/twitter, doesn't the world bite back? What about Government invasion?
• Google - gradually it will know everything about us and our relationships - does this 'hard wire' out reputations? Your mistakes, your accusations are always there to haunt you, and worse still, they don't date. Are Life Streams and Life Caching really a good idea?
• Brands and their reputations in the social media space - are they playing with fire?
• Online campaigning, lobbying and hi-jacking of political websites - how it can backfire

If you have some thoughts on these matters or are gagging to be on the panel (more later on who it's for) then get in touch (see mbites.com/contact) and I'll have a think.

Meanwhile, if you have a more positive outlook than me, check this out:

"Goodness 2.0: How can wikis, blogs, social networks, virtual worlds and other web 2.0 tools create new and innovative ways for charitable and campaigning organisations to work internally, to communicate and to engage?"

"The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams..." is a new series of films by Adam Curtis ("The Power of Nightmares", "Century of the Self") that tells the story of the rise of today's narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. It was then taken up by genetic biologists (like Richard Dawkins), anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists, until it became a new system of invisible control. Highly recommended. Here's a review, the Wiki page and the BBC page. The end result - says this vision - is that governments are no longer in control and the market can't save us either. Fab.

I'm currently doing some blogging for the New Statesman New Media Awards web site. Come on over if you are interested in entering the awards this year.

So I got my Virgin Media customer pack today. They must be sending it to everyone who has ever touched Virgin (I had a Virgin mobile number once, plus I was on Telewest at one time). Clearly they are going for the whole "we'll simplify TV, broadband, phone and mobile for you" pitch. There is also a response mechanic: If you go to Knowfirst.co.uk you'll obviously have read their printed marketing material. Not just found it via a blog or something. Oh no. To cap it all, in the small print on the back of their slick marketing material are the tiny words: "Security features not available to Mac users." Hmmn, so much for the Apple-esque marketing material then.

Time magazine is among the latest large media owner to realise that the Internet is not a place where you spend a lot of money. In fact, it's so efficient at disintermediating the income streams of traditional media companies who mainly play in print, that they are having to cut staff and put what resources they have left online. This something UK Press Gazette failed to realise and paid the price for last year.

I have written about the media business in the past - and still do, though usually about how the media is getting trashed by the tech business - but the below YouTube video pretty much sums up how some - admittedly not all - media agencies conduct themselves.

I wish I'd gone on this.

Here are two fascinating posts from VCs:

“The fact is that watching video on the Internet is superior in many ways to traditional television, even with a Tivo. You can’t engage with TV delivered via a set top box. How do you email a TV show to a friend with a set top box? How to you comment on it? How do you favorite it? How do you subscribe to it? How do you embed it on your myspace page, blog, etc?”

“Set top boxes - no need for those in the future. PCs will be connected direct to TVs.... The notion of ‘Channels’ disappears... Timeshifting appliances - VCRs, DVDs, PVRs - these relics of the channel model will also go... As broadband networks improve satellite will be priced out of the market... Payment models - ... The content part will, if I am right, splinter into lots of different pieces... Getting advertising to work in this world will be challenging”

I'm writing an article for a magazine (The New Statesman), provisionally titled “What have videogames ever done for us? A look at the economics of videogames in the UK”. I'm looking at the variety of jobs, how old the industry is here, who's involved, what research is being done here (both in terms of R&D and possibly academically), investment, numbers of companies, exports, and what they are doing to make money. Plus, possibly the things the government has done, should do. etc. And is it possible to include online games in any of the above? If you have any thoughts, contacts or opinions on the above, email mike at mbites dot com (thanks).

Azeem has an interesting post about how Digg has now overtaken Cnet.

I'm organising an event for NMK, called My So-Called Second Life. It's an afternoon seminar on the opportunities for creative firms and investment in the new world of MMORPGs (massively mulltiplayer online role playing games).

One thing that struck me while I was in Los Angles last week was that the people I met kept saying the same thing: media, entertainment and technology are converging (yes, THAT word) on Los Angeles. The simple fact that the biggest music and Hollywood players are there, and the act that it is an hour's plane ride from Silicon Valley, and an hour's drive from San Diego (where the many of the big mobile firms are) means LA is ideally placed to become the physical manifestation of “convergence”.

AlwaysOn is not your typical conference. During the two and a half days it was on, it ranged from discussions about data to user generated content to venture capital to mobile. Quite a range. This was both a strength and a weakenss, but the audience handled it all with aplomb.

First published, Future Media, June 2006: Disney launched its first massively multiplayer online role-playing game back in 2003, the success of which has inspired the company to devise similar propositions around Lost and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Just what does the Mouse see in the MMORPG? Mike Butcher reports.

Who needs courses when you can just read WikiNews. (Damn - and all those early years of slogging it through boring local council meetings, court cases and shitty magazines was for nothing).