Frequent thinker, occasional writer, constant smart-arse

Tag: New York Times

A billion dollar opportunity with video

When Google made an offer for On2, I was dumbfounded. I wrote to a friend working at Google the following:

Phat. But I’m confused. How does Google benefit by making the codec free? I understand Google’s open culture, but for 100million, really? They help the world, but what’s the incentive for Google? (Other than of course, controlling it).

The reply: “incentive = greater adoption of HTML 5 = apps are written for HTML 5 = apps can be monetized using Adsense”.

Interesting perspective from a smart Googler who had no real insider information. But no cigar.

Newsteevee posted a follow up article today on what Google is going to do with this technology, quoting the Free Software Foundation. What really made me get thinking was this (emphasis mine:

Google’s Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona had previously argued that Ogg Theora would need codec quality and encoding efficiency improvements before a site as big as YouTube could use it as its default video codec. The FSF now writes in its letter that it never agreed with these positions, but that Google must have faith in VP8 being a better codec if it invested its money in it (Google spent a total of about $133 million on ON2).

The open source advocacy group apparently realized that Google wouldn’t switch codecs from one day to another, which is why it suggests a number of smaller steps to make VP8 mainstream. “You could interest users with HD videos in free formats, for example, or aggressively invite users to upgrade their browsers (instead of upgrading Flash),” the letter reads, adding that this would eventually lead to users not bothering to install Flash on their computers.

Think about that for a second: video on the web finally becomes free for real and open, becoming a core infrastructure to the online world – but the default is crappy. Don’t like crappy? Well Mr and Ms consumer, if you want High Definition, you need to pay for a subscription to a premium codec by the already dominate Adobe or another rising star. Assuming you get the whole word watching video and only 1% convert – holy crap, isn’t that a brilliant business model?

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times the following recently:

The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files”

Simple but profound insight from the famed entertainer. So with this fairly obvious logic, why isn’t the movie industry (backed by Google and Apple) innovating business models in this area? Value comes from scarcity – and quality is the best way of doing it. The reason why box office sales and Blu-ray broke a record in 2009, is because the quality is worth the premium for consumers.

What’s the incentive for Google, to answer my own question? The return on investment to be associated with a default open technology that you give the option to upgrade to users, is a billion dollar business waiting to happen. Doing no evil to the world and securing future growth at the same time sounds like a Google business in the making,

An invention that could transform online privacy and media

The University of Washington announced today of an invention that allows digital information to expire and “self-destruct”. After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts, word documents, and chat messages would automatically be deleted and becoming irretrievable. Not even the sender will be able the retrieve them, and any copy of the message (like backup tapes) will also have the information unavilable.

GmailEncapsulated

Vanish is designed to give people control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. All copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of a person, third party or centralised service.

As the New York Times notes, the technology of being able to destruct digital data is nothing new. However this particular implementation uses a novel way that combines a time limit and more uniquely, peer-to-peer file sharing that degrades a “key” over time. Its been made available as open source on the Mozilla Firefox browser. Details of the technical implementation can be found on the team’s press release, which includes a demo video.

FacebookEncapsulated

Implications
Advances like this could have a huge impact on the world, from controlling unauthorised assess to information to reinforcing content-creators copyright. Scenario’s where this technology could benefit

  • Content. As I’ve argued in the past, news derives its value from how quickly it can be accessed. However, legacy news items can also have value as an archive. By controlling the distribution of unique content like news, publishers have a way of controlling usage of their product – so that they can subsequently monetise the news if used for a different purpose (ie, companies researching the past for information as opposed to being informed by the latest news for day to day decision making)
  • Identity. Over at the DataPortability Project, we are in the finishing touches of creating our conceptial overview for a standard set of EULA and ToS that companies can adopt. This means, having companies respect your rights to your personal information in a standardised way – think how the Creative Commons has done for your content creations. An important conceptual decision we made, is that a person should have the right to delete their personal information and content – as true portability of your data is more than just reusing it in a different content. Technologies like this allow consumers to control their personal information, despite the fact they may not have possession, as their data resides in the cloud.
  • Security. Communications between people is so that we can inform each other in the ‘now’. This new world with the Internet capturing all of our conversations (such as chat logs and emails threads) is having us lose control of our privacy. The ability to have chat transcripts and email discussions automatically expire is a big step forward. Better still, if a company’s internal documents are leaked (as was the case with Twitter recently), it can rely on more avenues to limit damage beyond using the court system that would issue injunctions.

GoogleDocsEncapsulated

There’s a lot more work to be performed on technologies like this. Implementation issues aside, the inline encryption of the information doesn’t make this look sexy. But with a few user interface tweaks, it gives us a strong insight into real solutions for present day problems with the digital age. Even if we simply get companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft ad Yahoo to agree on a common standard, it will transform the online world dramatically.

Blog posts on Liako.Biz for 2008

I launched this blog in March 2005 as a travel blog. People would flood me with e-mails about my travels, and it made me realise how powerful blogging can be (not to mention fun). I re-started this blog in March 2007 as a "career" blog (whatever that’s supposed to mean). It’s probably best now to describe it as my "passions" blog which evolves as I progress through life and think about things.

What I love about blogging is that it forces me to think; forces me to research and learn; forces me to challenge my ideas by interacting with other people. All the good stuff in life – I hope to give a bit more attention next year.

I also thought it would be good if I summarised what I wrote about this year. Heck – let’s go right back to 2005. This will be the first in a series of three blog posts progressively released – starting with 2008 today, then 2007 tomorrow and finally 2005 two days later. For those that may post comments, bear with me as I have literally 24 hours of New Year’s concerts to attend to (get home at 6am from Shore Thing, ready for Field day at 11am). It may take me some time to recover and get back on a computer!

I’ve given you a brief summary to guide you on whether you should make the great leap and click. I was going to rank my articles with a simple "good, poor, average" and I ended up getting stuck reading some and think 90% are more or less the same style (so I am either consistently crap or consistently good).

Enjoy!

December 2008

  • A milestone year in my life: Basically, a mini biography of my career. The decisions I made and the experiences I’ve had that will determine where I will be heading
  • The evolution of news and the bootstrapping of the Semantic Web: Highlighting how the New York Times is making available news data in the form of API’s. The significance of this in my eyes is a huge shift in the evolution of the news media, and separately, I mention that this might make the vision of the Semantic Web a reality in an unintended way
  • Thank you 2008, you finally gave New Media a name: I indicate how 2008 was the tipping point for the Information Age’s Social Media to finally trump the Industrial Age’s Mass Media. I researched the history of the concept of Social Media, explained what "media" really is, and how the term "Social Media" is the perfect term to describe what we’ve been calling these evolving communication trends.
  • The makings of a media mogul: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: A detailed analysis of how a nobody became one of the most influential men in the world as a New Media pioneer. Mr Arrington even thanked me!
  • The future of journalism and media: A look at the Watergate scandal as well as my own personal experience with a university publication, to understand the core dynamic of the media. I argue that what made the mass media tick in the past was a marketplace, and it’s one that can be applied to digital media going forward.
  • So open it‚Äôs closed: I make an argument that the term "Open" is being abused and has lost its meaning. We need better guidelines on what constitutes an "Open Standard" before it becomes too late.
  • Social media and that whole ‚Äúfriend‚Äù thing: A post about how there is pressure to subscribe to peoples content on various services, even when you don’t want to receive their content. The result is an unusable service. I reflect on how Google Readers friends option is a simple but more effective way of social media, as it removes this pressure.

November 2008

  • The broken business model of newspapers: An analysis of problems with the newspaper industry – too much detail in articles create extra cost, changes to the news cycle has changed their relevance, and incentives and structures are not aligned with what their strategic goals should be
  • Online advertising – a bubble: Long detailed analysis on why advertising is basically screwed in the long term (thanks to the Internet)
  • Liako is everywhere‚Ķbut not here: Some links to content I have been creating elsewhere, as this blog had been neglected!
  • The Rudd Filter: I wrote an e-mail to every senator of the Australian parliament on the proposed Internet censorship laws. As a postscript, it made an impact as I got responses from the key people who are the balance of power in the Senate 🙂
  • You don‚Äôt nor need to own your data: We live in an economy now where you don’t need "ownership" to live your life. This will certainly make you think!

October 2008

  • The mobile 3D future – as clear as mud: Recounting my experience from iPhone 1G to Nokia N96 back to the iPhone (3G). I conclude that the reason we never got the vision of the mobile web in the past, is because the interface has been the missing link for so long

September 2008

July 2008

  • Silicon Beach Australia – the movie!: An announcement post for the Silicon Beach Australia community which exploded in interest after I created it
  • The DataPortability governance framework: a template: An update, history and recognition post of the many months of hard work for the team that created the governance and workflow model for the DataPortability Project. It was a challenge because existing models aren’t designed for an online virtual world that we operate as.
  • Internet censorship in Australia: The responses from the Federal government on my letter six months earlier protesting against the proposed Internet censorship regime

June 2008

May 2008

April 2008

March 2008

February 2008

The evolution of news and the bootstrapping of the Semantic Web

The other month (as in, the ones where I am working 16 hour days and don’t have time to blog), I read in amazement a stunning move made by the New York Times. It was the announcement of its first API, where you could query campaign finance data. It turns out this wasn’t an isolated incident, as evidenced by yet another API release, this time for movies, with plenty more to come.

Fake New York Times newspaper That is massive! Basically, using the same data people will be able to create completely different information products.

I doubt the journalists toiling away at the Times have any idea what this will do to their antiquated craft (validating that to get the future of media you need to track technology). As the switched on Marshall Kirkpatrick said in the above linked article for Read Write Web "We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future."

Hell yeah. The web has now evolved beyond ‘destination’ sites as a business model. News organisations need to harness the two emerging business models – platforms and networks. Whilst we’ve seen lots of people trying the platform model (as aggregators – after all, that is what a traditional newspaper has been in society), this is the first real example I have seen of the heritage media doing the network model. The network model means your business thrives by people using *other* peoples’ sites and services. It sounds counter intuitive but it’s the evolution of the information value chain.

This will certainly make Sir Tim Berners-Lee happy. The Semantic Web is a vision that information on the web is machine readable so that computers can truly unleash their power. However this vision is gaining traction very slowly. We will get there, but I am wondering whether the way we get there is not how we expect.

The New Improve Semantic Web: now with added meaning!

These API’s that allow web services to reuse their data in a structured way may just be what the Semantic Web needs to bootstrap it. There’s an assumption with the vision, which is that for it to work, all data needs to be open and publicly accessible. The economics are just not there yet for companies to unlock their data and my work this year with the DataPortability Project has made me realise to get value out of your data you simply need access to it (which doesn’t necessarily mean public data).

Either way, for me this was one of the biggest news events of the year, and one that very quietly has moved on. This will certainly be something worth tracking in 2009 as we see the evolution of not just the Semantic Web, but also Social Media.

A casual chat with a media industry insider

Today I had the chance of picking the mind of Achilles from the International Herald Tribune, who last year was appointed Vice-President, circulation and development. Achilles is a family friend and I took the opportunity to talk to him about the world of media and the challenges being faced.

The IHT is one of the three daily financial newspapers of the world, along with the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It is currently owned by the New York Times, and has a global circulation of 240,000 people. I had a great chat on a lot of different themes which could have me blog about for a week straight, but here are some of the facts I picked up from our discussion, which I will summarise below as future talking points:

  • On Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal: “very interested to see if he will remove the paid wall”.
  • The IHT experiemented with a paid wall for it’s opinion content, but they will be removing that later this year
  • He says the Bancroft family sold it because they are emotionally detached from the product. It was just an asset to them.
  • A lot of the content is simply reedited content from the NYT and internationalising it. For example, replacing sentences like “Kazakhstan in the size of New York state” doesn’t work well for an international reader who has no idea how big New York state is.
  • On the threat of citizen journalism with traditional media: “they are a competitive threat because we are competing for the same scarce resource: the attention of readers”
  • The problem with citizen journalism and bloggers is the validity of their information – behind a newspapers brand, is trust from readers of the large amounts of research and factchecking that occur. They have no credibility.
  • A blog may develop credibility with an audience greater than the New York Times. But this poses problems for advertising as advertisers might only advertise because of its niche audience. Blogs are spreading the advertising dollars, which is hurting everyone – it’s become decentralised and that has implications which are problematic.
  • The IHT’s circulation is spread thinly across the world. For example, it has 30,000 readers in France and six in Mauritius.
  • Their target market is largely the business traveller, which has its own unique benefits and problems. For example, a business traveler will read it for two days but when they get back home, they will revert to their normal daily newspaper. It’s not a very loyal reader.
  • Readership is a more important concept than circulation as it tells advertisers how big the actual audience of a publication is. For example, the average newspaper has 2.7 readers per copy. However due to the nature of the IHT’s readers, despite having high circulation, they have low readership.
  • IHT is in a unique position of relying on circulation revenue more than advertising. For example, a normal daily relies on circulation revenue as 20% of its total revenue; the IHT counts on it for 50%.
  • It’s hard to get advertising because a readership of university professors is less desirable than fund managers that might read the WSJ. Advertisers prefer to target key decision makers.
  • It doesn’t rely on classifieds as a revenue source – a key thing hurting the newspaper industry currently.
  • Although they place more reliance on circulation revenue, they still get some good advertising opportunities as a lot of readers are politicians and government decision makers.
  • They get a lot of advertising for fashion
  • Psychographic data is more important to advertisers than circulation and it shows what type of readership a publication has.

Some things will never change: how to create credibility

This weekend in my office with a half dozen colleagues, we toiled away on an (academic) assignment due tonight. When you spend 11 hours in one day around one table, on something that drives you mad – conversation is a aplenty on things not related to what we were doing. And when there as no conversation, procrastination was aplenty with Facebook being the prime culprit amongst all of us.

An interesting scenario happened, which made me revisit something I have long wondered. One of the girls asked how does Facebook make money, and I went on a rant about their $200 million Microsoft deal, how they are heading towards an IPO, and other random facts I just happen to know. They all looked at me stunned, in the sense how could I possibly know such things, and I replied I read a lot – I read a lot of blogs.

“…but how do you know that stuff you are reading is accurate?” with reference to that $200 million that I don’t even know where I read that. The funny thing about the question, is that it’s smart and stupid at the same time. The answer seems too obvious – but it isn’t: how DO I know those facts I stated where true?

Why I bring this up, is because this is an issue I have long tried to come to grips with – what makes information credible? How do you know when you read something on the internet, that it is reliable? The answer is we don’t. Sort of.

This “new media” world isn’t the reason why we have this apparent problem: information credibility has long been an issue, first realised by the citizens of western democracy after the Great War when they recognised newspapers could no longer be taken as fact (due to the propaganda efforts). So its been a problem long before computers and hypertext had even been invented – it’s only that with us being in an Information Age, the quality of information has been under higher scrutiny with its abundance.

How do we know what makes something reliable? Is it some gee-whiz Google algorithm? Perhaps it’s the wisdom of the crowds? Maybe – but there is something else even more powerful that I have to thank Scott Karp for making me realise this, back in the days when he was starting out as a blogger: it’s all about branding.

Why makes an article about the New York Times, more credible than one written by a random student newspaper rag? What makes a high profile author, more credible in what they say, than a random nobody who puts their hand up in a town hall meeting? And going back to the question my colleague asked earlier – how do I know the blogs I am reading have any credibility – over say, something I read in an established newspaper such The Economist?

Simple: branding establishes information credibility. And a brand – for any type of entity be it an individual journalist or a news organisation – is dependent on recognition by others. There could be absolutely no credibility in your information (like Wikipedia) and yet you could have a brand that by default establishes credibility – just like how people regularly cite Wikipedia as a source now, despite knowing it’s inherently uncredible.

The power of branding is that no matter how uncredible you are – your brand will be enough to make anything you say, incredible.