DISQUS

Isn't this whole issue just good old "overcapacity in a down cycle sends the weakest to the wall" stuff? Its playing all over town right now :-)

Nic

I've studied new tech waves in some detail. A pattern The new in the early days is always more expensive/harder/less reliable than the old initially, but then inevitably some key factor emerges that gives it an advantage (ones that don't get it die). Finding that factor is the key, its usually economic but can be forced.... for eg, the Green Power Tech area is getting a lot of heft right now from the whole global warming thing which is pushing it far faster. Wars (or threat of wars) drove others.

Btw, steam was initially too expensive to use in textiles, it required the development in the mines to get it to the level where it was useful for rail

Also, thought you may like this graphic of the 30 year history of digital social networks.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/images/content/...

Nic, I think that study doesn't quite "get" the dynamics of Twitter. It came about about a week ago, here was my analysis at the time:

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1726-Things-that...

And imagine if MSFT packaged Bing as default on all its browsers - no one seems to have picked that up, except me of course ;-)

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1725-Bing-is-thi...

Mark, thanks for noting I avoided jumping the shark (shark jumping being very risky :D ) - as imho this is normal evolution as a system grows.

But, if I may be so bold, the title and gist of my post was basically "is this a scaling issue?" which I very strongly suspected it was, being a network infrastructure guy. I will of course now claim "I woz right", 'cos you have to take your wins when you get them :-)

Nice curve.

I've been thinking about this river of news thingy after reading your post earlier. I can see 2 raditional systems:

1. Broadcast - dynamic content but you know when and where to tune in

2. "Old Meedja" Web based - you know where to tune in, content is fairly static so "when" not an issue

3. "New Meedja" - is not static and neither is there a "when". The @ and DM signals collate stuff aimed at you, but you cannot tune in to find the stuff you want at time X. Also, the where is known - eg Twitter, but it is only at a high level - the real "stuff" that happened is in a flowstream which is only easy to pick up if metadata exists ( say hashtags. )

Which brings us to the metdadata and filtering issue that interests me - it doesn't really exist yet in new meedja, whereas it does for webpages (google), TV programs etc (epg's).

I agree with you, Nick, I've been arguing for a while that this will work in Europe and the OECD - after all, Habbo uses it - see here for eg:

http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/1014-The-rea...

One word: Jaiku

Nic - I think the smartphone/cheap laptop fight is going to get very interesting now. If you look at low internet penetration of large developing countries, this makes for a major gamechanger

Thanks for the link - re your comment, I originally thought the same would be the case (ie the actions of the majority would mediate the excessives) but the more I've looked at it, the more it seems to me that the actions of small cadres of highly active people distort these systems significantly, as the majority typically remain silent - aka far less engaged.

Thanks for the write up Nic - we think video (mainly due to the rate of bandwidth increase) is several years behind audio, but it will probably see some similar patterns.

One thing that will change the time available that the "pirate world" has for dominance in the video world is The Crunch, which has reduced the speculative funding available for "Freeconomic" plays. Also, video is intrinsically more expensive to operate, so needs deeper pockets - thus it is harder for the "Web 2.0" free-for-all-to-gain-traction bootstraps to sustain.

In fact, with iPlayer, Hulu et al and YouTube's radical shift in strategy over the last 4 months, the New Order is emerging rather more rapidly than in music.

I have a basic rule with any estimate for Mobile numbers - divide by 2 for every year the forecast goes out by ;-)

Nic, you are right re the Long Form trend, we picked up on this before - see here

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1357-YouTube-on-...

and a bit more depth in our Online Video report precis here

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1370-The-Future-...

Nic, that Long Form Media trend is a key development, I picked up on it in an earlier post - see here:

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1357-YouTube-on-...

...And its one of the key findings of our Online Video report - assuming its not rude to quote oneself twice in a comment, here is a link:

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1370-The-Future-...

Hi - thanks for picking up on the Online Video Distribution report. Just to be clearer though, what we did was model what Hulu and YouTube's positions potentially were, based on public domain data plus what we know of such business's structures.

Thus the numbers are what I would call "indicative" - in the region of - rather than totally accurate.

The really interesting thing was, once modelled, one can look at the impact of various changes eg CPM rates, Ad % inventory sold, distribution rates, even the YouTube move in screen outputs.

It also makes it immediately clear why YouTube has to change its model to offer more Ad fundable content, and why companies such as Joost are in for a tough ride.

@ Lorraine - what seems to work is to offer good quality content to well understood audiences, and thus get good Ad CPMs.

Now that "the Crunch" is here there seems to be far less appetite for speculatively funded ventures based on User Generated or "Pirated" Content plays.

There is also a small market emerging for subscription based services, mainly run via IPTV businesses.

Nic, there is a fascinating study out by ComScore that shows banner ads are more effective than credited, I wrote a short note on my blog about it here.

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1445-Theres-life...

(I still agree with SocNet ads though - large inventory + low attention means not ideal place)

Hey Steve, no need to apologise - I luvz a good argument, its what this whole thing is about :)

Up till that, I would probably have agreed with you. The difference was quite marked though - I don't know why. Further down my post you'll see that I've quoted a guy who is looking at creating anonymous commentary on Twitter. What he's found is that although people believe they will "stand in front of their words", they don't if they believe powerful people are watching and anonymity can be a better way of getting to the real situation.

As a continuous partial attendant on Le Web TV (which was a fascinating experience in itself by the way - well done on doing that!) I missed the no wifi, food and cold so I was fine :)

But well done on Le EuroTED :) Some of the non web stuff was fascinating, other stuff wasn't, but thats what a Conference is all about

As Tom Morriss says, you have carte blanche to give the presenters a harder time - the IM backchannel certainly was :-)

(I blogged about that - it was a fascinating lesson in itself - see thoughts on that here

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1431-Asymmetric-...)

Fred, some good stuff there that even my kids hadn't heard of - I got some kudos back :D.

A very good rule of thumb from Dotcom experience - if the CEO is taking his/her money before you, run for the hills!

Nic

I used to do a lot of turnaround / biz redesign work - the worst were the companies that had once been successful doing what they did, but then something changes and it don't work anymore.

Problem is, the old way is ingrained - I liken it to setting course on a big sailing ship - you can't just turn the wheel, you have to have crew skilled enough to reset all the sails - but in stable times people tend to forget (or companies get rid of those people )

Re intellectual honesty, I am also concerned about the tendency in Tech to hype stuff and to drink kool aid without observing (or admitting to) contrary evidence..

Not just the Tech - the ideas etc around it are renamed every time as well. In 1906 it was Pareto's law, now 100 years later we have the Long Tail - and that's just the beginning of the tale............

Predicted :-)

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1391-Social-vs-A...

Absolutely re log scale - in fact I've seen graphs of comms efficiency that go back further (to the printing press) that are near-linear on log scales.