A few days ago I read through the speech Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 Conference a few weeks back (there’s also a video ). Apart from being a fabulously captivating read, it also touches on a few ideas that I feel are pertinent to working with and marketing brands online. A lot of what follows is bulk quoting followed by commenting, I honestly don’t have much to add to Shirky’s thinking, but rather just felt like putting his ideas into the context of what I do. So, from the top (he’s talking here about Western society at the onset of the industrial revolution)…

This is an important parallel that, as we go trundling through the digital revolution, not enough attention has been paid to. We’re all aware that what we’re participating in right now will, in retrospect, be looked back on as something as important as the industrial revolution. Yet very rarely has anyone dug through the history of the industrial revolution and found the key lessons that can be applied to what we are doing in the current day.

There is the argument that the industrial revolution is so different to the digital revolution that this knowledge would be useless. There is no massive population shift, no drastic shift in employment arrangements, and far from creating a new economic system the digital revolution has only furthered capitalism. But what there is in common is the effect on both culture and on the broader idea of how people spend their non-working time, an idea Shirky frames as the “cognitive surplus”. Essentially, people are waking up after spending the last 50 years on the couch. And they want to be engaged.

100 million hours! What’s amazing is that while we’ve spent the start of this decade becoming aware of just how powerful and huge a thin-sliced market can be on a global stage, numbers like this prove that we haven’t really begun to tap into and engage these markets. We might think we’re quite clever with our user-generated branded content and social networks built around albino-marmot farmers, but now it seems like we’re hardly even breaking the surface of engaging this newly-awoken audience. This doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going about it wrong, it just means the waking up is happening slowly. It’s certainly not about to slow down, so the lesson here is that we need to effectively measure and evaluate everything we’re doing, because as time rolls on and we gain larger and larger slices of this cognitive surplus, it’s going to be easy to miss the boat.

The experiments have begun. Just go have a look at TechCrunch if you need proof. A lot are failing, but some are working. And the great thing about using technology to consume the surplus is the low coefficient of friction (data is almost free, bandwidth is only getting cheaper). The challenge here though is that as people abandon passive media, they go from pure consumption to something more.

And it is at this point that anyone working on marketing a brand online faces their biggest hurdle. People are producing and sharing more and more. They are consuming the same amount of information, but they are choosing what they consume. And they obviously aren’t choosing your 30 second TVC (unless you’re Nike, or Sony, or selling Blenders ). So why do we keep on creating what is essentially a 30-second TVC in all our online communication?

In a perfect world there wouldn’t be a single piece of digital communication for your brand that didn’t include all three events; consume, produce, share. And the perfect world needs to start becoming a reality. The audience is changing, regardless of whether or not we’re ready for them. The myriad startups out there are providing engagement for this audience, and if brands aren’t doing the same then they just get left behind. The kids are just doing it. The kids are also growing up, and they’re not buying your product. They don’t care, nor do they realise, that what they’re doing is utterly revolutionary.

Looking back on what’s been done in digital so far is, in a sense useless. Looking back on how advertising and marketing has functioned throughout history is, in a sense, useless. There are certain things we can learn from looking back, and I’m willing to say that some of these lessons are critically important, but it’s from holding on to the past that we are disallowing ourselves to really engage with our future consumers.

I’m sorry if people feel I’ve hijacked what is a culturally aspirational idea and turned it into a discussion on advertising. I realise that what Clay Shirky is talking about is way bigger than how we can sell more soft drinks/cars/insurance. So instead of finishing up with some quasi-prophetic marketing 2.0 pontificating, I’ll just finish with a couple of the best paragraphs I’ve read in a long time.

There is a shortage of brilliant creative digital ideas in Australian advertising. Media agency bosses and publishers have recently been claiming that they have been leading the creative charge in the digital space. To a degree, sadly, they’re correct. But it is premature to say that media will be driving creative any time soon, and somewhat unfair to ask creatives to shoulder all the blame for the dearth of great work.

Media agencies have had a relatively easy transition into the digital space. For media agencies digital is a channel, it sits alongside print and radio and television as an avenue through which advertising space supplied by various content creators can be sold. Advertising agencies however, have had a harder transition into the digital space. For agencies, and specifically creatives, digital is not a channel, digital is an evolution. This distinction has been lacking in our creative thinking.

Traditionally, creatives working in the digital space got away with the channel view. This has been reinforced by media agencies, who come to advertising agencies with media plans that drive these sub-par digital ideas. This has created a loop which reinforces the creative’s view that what they are doing is effective, and that their ideas are the limit of what is possible in the medium.

Treating digital as simply another channel is not the extent of the problem. There are a few key issues holding back the great digital ideas.

The first issue is the lack of skills and knowledge that are required to create great integrated digital work. This issue lies squarely with the creatives. It’s clear digital is here to stay, and with each day it becomes a greater part of our industry.

The second issue is the lack of clients’ understanding and willingness to go with great digital ideas. This is an issue that is partly to do with budgets, and partly to do with familiarity and comfort within the digital space.

The third issue is the lack of process in integrating creative digital thinking into broader campaign ideas. This issue exists because of both a lack of understanding on behalf of the creatives, and a lack of true integration within agencies.

The fundamental idea that underpins these issues is that digital is a channel. Radio was a new channel. Television was a new channel. Digital is not a new channel, digital is a new world. It is an evolution of media that has taken with it the advertising industry. It is an evolution that, in the relatively short history of advertising, has not happened before.

The solutions to these problems aren’t going to turn traditional agencies on their head. But they do require everyone working together to achieve the most creative, most effective, and most rewarding work possible.

In terms of process, the role of digital needs to be considered at the outset for every idea within an agency. Media agencies need to be involved so that they can bring the best possible media solutions to the table. A fundamental part of the process for agencies should also be learning from their digital work, and this reporting is an area in which media agencies have a long way to go.

Media agencies won’t always have a role to play in digital ideas, some ideas simply don’t require any media. But another role media agencies can play is to actively promote the opportunities they can provide to agencies. Both media and advertising agencies also need to work closer at the initial creative stages in terms of data; how we can gather it, how we can optimise it, and what we can do with it.

Obviously creatives need to make an effort to understand the digital space. Once they have this fundamental understanding, the challenge is then to keep up to speed with it. Creatives need to understand what is possible, what’s not possible, and what role media can play. Traditionally creatives are brought up on big ideas for big awards. In the narrowcast world of digital, the big ideas are not always the most effective ones.

The worst thing anyone could do right now is start pointing fingers. Digital is the future of our industry, and it’s a future that will present some amazing opportunities, so we need to make the most of it.

I’m now in Sydney. In the past week I have packed up my old house in Melbourne, loaded it all into a truck, and driven up to Sydney to then unpack everything. It’s not the most fun thing to do, but I did it because I’m excited about what I’ve come up here for.

A few weeks ago I was offered the position of Lead Creative at NetX. I had a tough decision to make. To say the digital team at M&C Saatchi were awesome would be a gross understatement. They were, and I know they will continue to be, the duck’s nuts. The agency as a whole has taken to the whole digital integration thing like a duck to water (sorry, just had to keep the whole duck theme going), and I know they are going to do some amazing stuff in the coming weeks/months/years.

I’m sure the guys at NetX are going to be equally as amazing. I dropped in on Friday for a beer and it was already evident that there’s the same vibe, one soaked in awesomeness. In about 12 hours I start, and I’m damn excited.

So hopefully that explains why I’ve been a bit quiet. It might explain the direction of what I write in the future as well, I’m not sure about that. I do have quite a few ideas and observations half-written, so no doubt you’ll hear something soon.

In the first part of this post, I talked about the changes we are already seeing to mainstream entertainment and news media. It wasn’t long ago that people were watching their TV’s and reading their papers. But now people are using the internet, and it’s replacing all other forms of media and entertainment at a cracking pace. So in this second part I’m going to discuss what this means exactly for advertising and brands online. There’s only 2 parts, and it was all written as one, but I just thought I’d break it into two because it’s rather long for a blog post (ironic, really).

Traditionally brands have advertised above the line, in entertainment and news media, while utilising marketing and PR for conversations with their consumers (when and if they actually ever happened). In the future however, the conversational (PR) and entertainment (advertising) overlap. This means future digital advertising has to be part of the conversation, while at the same time the brand conversations have to work as advertising. This presents a few issues, firstly that conversations are personal and honest whereas advertising is often perceived as neither of these, and secondly that brand communications have to be truly unified.

In the case of personal and honest conversations, the medium may be the solution. Many early examples of online brand conversations failed due to perceived astro-turfing, resulting in the public turning on the brand and creating a huge amount of negative noise. However the use of video in these conversations will lend a sense of authenticity and honesty that, if done well, could be extremely positive. An important point here is that a brand cannot just manufacture authenticity and honesty, they will actually have to believe in it.

This authenticity will also require a unified brand message. This point may seem a bit contradictory to what so many analysts and futurists have been talking about personalisation and localisation being the biggest future trends. The real art here will be taking that message and personalising it for each individual conversation. This personalisation of a unified message will result in consistency of the brand experience, and this in turn will support the authenticity of the conversation.

Loic Le Meur, the creator of Seesmic, actually used Seesmic to ask his users what they thought of advertising on the site. The question wasn’t purely theoretical either, it was posed by a Loreal marketing executive interested in how brands could be integrated into the service. The responses from Seesmic users predictably started with a lot of “No, please don’t do it!”. But as the conversation evolved there was a realisation of the potential to rethink advertising, “turning participators into the advertisers”.

Google has already showed us how these conversations can be used to create a positive brand message. Loic Le Meur began by asking a few questions about whether his company should join Google’s OpenSocial. Seesmic users replied with comments, opinions, and more questions about both Seesmic and OpenSocial. The conversation that resulted culminated in a Google representative posting a video offering answers to all of the questions posed. While this was all happening it was simply a conversation, but once over it was a truly succesful and authentic ad.

So how do we get started? Firstly all the brand custodians need to be aware of, and preferably utilising these technologies. Without understanding there is little chance that any real value can be found in these new channels. From there, brands just need to get out there. Look at the media opportunities on these new channels and get your message in there. If you’re reaching your market then you’ll no doubt illicit some form of response, and this is where there is an opportunity for a positive conversation. This is the simplest way to succeed, simply participate in the conversation and make your brand experience innate to your conversation. If you want to go even further you will be able to instigate conversations. Give people a reason to talk, ask questions about the brand, products, your competitors, or about the attitudes of the segment.

To take this even further we could start considering Captology in the area of advertising. This would require massive paradigm shifts in the brand/marketing/agency relationships and is still a long way off, but the idea that by changing communication with users to optimise so as to influence people is extremely exciting (and hopefully positive for both advertisers and consumers). Take this idea further still to location aware mobile aplications, and suddenly you’re providing a localised, customised, positive advertising experience to your customers.

We’ve known for a long time that the way people experience their entertainment and news is going to change. Finally the exact scale and nature of this change is becoming apparent, and we need to begin considering how marketing and advertising is going to operate in this new space. We’ve already seen the emergence of brand conversations on a macro
scale through the corporate greening of recent years, and in the future
a simple conversation between real brand representatives and real
consumers could be far more powerful than a $500,000 TVC.

Links
Seesmic World Project
Loic Le Meur discusses advertising in Seesmic
Physics lectures online. This isn’t a surprise anymore. It’s just awesome.
Google Open Social questions and answers on Seesmic
Stanford Captology Studies
The absolutely nutty Seemic lads talking about integrating brands into their platform.
Rumours of Yahoo launching a life-casting service are starting already

Thanks to the internet, people are soon going to start abandoning both traditional media and entertainment outlets. These traditional outlets catered to large segments, offered little localisation, almost no personalisation, and few options on how and where we could consume them. More importantly however, is that they were one-way. What we are seeing emerge now is that localised, customised, portable media can be both conversational and entertaining. Which one it is depends entirely on the viewer. As more and more people access more and more channels there will be two significant issues for brands and advertising. Firstly with this broadening of media choice traditional advertising approaches will be diluted, partially because it will be harder to get on to all the relevant channels but also because the messages won’t be relevant enough. Secondly there is the element of community and discussion in these new channels, an area that is full of land mines for pretty much any brand that doesn’t seriously understand the space they are participating in.

The most visible examples currently of this phenomenon are Qik and Seesmic. Qik allows users to stream video live from their mobile phones. The video is displayed on their personal ‘channel’ page, and anyone watching at the time can type comments, which in turn display on the users phone screen while they are videoing. The spontaneousness of this service is amazing, and the applications in both entertainment and journalism could verge on revolutionary. But the important element of this technology is that while it is entertaining, it is conversational. People don’t just watch, they participate.

Seesmic is essentially a video version of Twitter. Users post up short videos of themselves, usually doing nothing more than offering up a quick thought. Like Twitter, Seesmic allows you to follow certain people and reply to their videos. As a result, conversations very quickly develop, not just between two people but between a whole swarm of users. This is essentially flash-conversation with no geographical restrictions. Like Twitter, a brief explanation of the site results in one of two responses, “that’s amazing!”, or “so why would I bother?”. But like twitter, it’s only really upon using the service that you realise how enthralling this collective conversation can be. Add in the element of video and you have a serious competitor to almost anything on TV. Also interesting is that the addition of the video element to the conversation in Seesmic results in far more ‘real’ conversations happening in Seesmic as opposed to Twitter.

This shift will happen simply because of the accessibilty of such services. Fragmentation, understanding the idea of choice on the internet and not being locked into mainstream media one-way conversations are all things that we have seen happen relatively recently, and the accessibilty of these tchnologies should be the final piece. Things like Joost, Hulu & Facebook Groups introduced this idea to mainstream thinking, and it has taken off. The increasing use of mobiles as convergent media devices rather than just phones will also drive this adoption.

It’s not hard to realise how quickly this could all take off once people see how easy it use to use their mobile to post a video asking a question on a site like Seesmic, and immediatly be having a conversation with the whole world. At the same time it’s not hard to see why people will gravitate to these services for entertainment & news. The ease of content filtering means we become our own news and entertainment editors, moving forward with the collective meme. There’s also an element of the 90-9-1 rule, meaning the majority of people will simply be viewers.

We’ve already seen examples of these ’spontaneous entertainment channels’ in things like the Seesmic World Project, where one Seesmic user and his son wanted:

What resulted was a stream of videos from people all over the world, telling everybody else about where they live and what it’s like. Yes, this guy and his son could have just looked up Wikipedia, but the personalisation and engagement of video is what makes this sort of idea really special and watchable.

As for news, we’re already seeing dwindling staff numbers at newspapers, and more and more we see traditional media outlets simply following what’s happening online (in the case of the French press, embarrasingly so). Services like Twitter have already been responsible for breaking reports of earthquakes and for reporting on protests , so combine this thinking with services like Qik and Seesmic, the citizen journalism pioneered by sites like Norg, and flash-forums like Tanglr and it’s easy to see how news media could change immensely in a very short amount of time.

So everyone is busy talking about what’s going to be the big thing this year. There are going to be some cool things happen on the digital frontier, but what will cause possibly the biggest impact online will likely be nothing more than how people use the internet. People are finally realising how cool the internet is. It’s not something in their peripheral vision anymore, it’s something that is unquestionably and unremarkably part of people’s lives.

The thought of a computer as a singular object that we must dedicate our full attention to in one session will shortly be gone from the mainstream mindset. Not long ago you were an uber-geek if you pulled out your mobile at the pub to pull up wikipedia and settle an argument (more to the point, you were an uber-geek for having internet enabled on your phone). Today it’s almost second nature, and these people aren’t geeks in the slightest.

Sometime in the not too distant future you’ll probably start to get sick of how often you hear 23andme.com mentioned. It’s sites like this that perfectly demonstrate what I’m talking about. Or perhaps the fact that the ESPN NFL mobile site had more views last week than the regular site (4.9M views in 24 hours). Or maybe Apple’s projected sales of 10 million iPhones. People (real people, not just geeks) have absorbed the online world into their mindset to the point that online services and information are front of mind when they need anything.

The flurry of internet-based startups and mountains of cash poured into them in the last few years means that the tech industry is well and truly ready for this. Yes, a lot of these companies will die, but a significant amount will rise to the top and join the ranks of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to continue to challenge the oldschool media empires. Unsurprisingly this industry is already a few years ahead. I’m pretty sure my parents won’t hear about twitter, seesmic or etsie for a while still, but the technology and general way of thinking that services like this will produce will probably affect us as much as Amazon, Google and eBay have up to the present day.

But what does this mean for those involved in the online advertising and marketing of real-world brands? Scarily, the majority of big brands just aren’t ready for this. They’re not in any position to take advantage of the way people are going to start thinking about and using the internet. They’re dismally 1.0. There are not enough great services being offered by brands, not enough integration into the social graph, and not enough conversations with customers. There’s plenty of talk about how bad the music industry has handled the online space, and the sad fact is that most big consumer brands aren’t that far behind.

The parallels with the music industry probably shouldn’t be taken too far though. The only thing we really share with them is overprotective lawyers and uninformed high-level decisions makers. In short people have been too precious about their brands and too cautious about doing anything new, with the attitude that the online space was still niche enough to ignore.

And now the time has come. The good news is that because no one has really done anything, everyone’s on the same page. There is still plenty of room to make a move and really get brands online. But if it doesn’t happen soon than a vast majority of people will become comfortable with the way they live online, and that won’t include any sort of dialogue or experience with brands.

Note: Through all of this I’m talking about developed and mostly English speaking communities. Many Asian countries are in a slightly different space right now, and Japan is on a whole different highway. Meanwhile in developing countries, further adoption and reduced costs of technology will likely make a far bigger impact on the world as a whole than being able to get my genetic profile from 23andme.com. I hope.

A few links…
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s fantastic article on RWW, “Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption”
Jeremiah Owyang’s great summary of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008.
Everyblock.com has had a lot of hype, and will probably get it’s fair share of press when it finally launches.

Next year is going to be cool. There’s going to be some ace stuff. With things like Android and the iPhone opening up we’ll start to see some really cool mobile startups; as people begin to grasp the social graph and data portability we’ll start to see some awesome tools in that space; and as marketers start to realise that a conversation with the consumer is more about offering an experience than a product we’ll get some really amazing campaigns. To keep up with this (and in fact to catch up with even where we’re currently at) digital media needs to change significantly in the next year. There’s a huge lack in Australia of media people who understand this space (especially among the traditional media agencies’ digital offerings) and as a result the creative agencies are, to a point, suffering.

So what are the media agencies doing wrong? It would be great to be able to say it’s a problem of deciding on a technology before a goal, but most of the time there isn’t even a consideration of technology. It’s simply display ads being offered up on the same predictable stable of publishers. Digital media requires a solid and sometimes instinctual understanding of online audiences and a geekish love of metrics, and it’s only going to continue down this route. In the future simply going down the path of least resistance and treating digital media like TV simply won’t cut it. Creative agencies shouldn’t (and for the most part, don’t want to) own the media process, but in the future everyone is going to have to work a lot closer together rather than just selling TVC’s and going home early.

In the past few years we have seen an increase in fragmentation of market segments, we now know more about smaller groups of consumers and media agencies need to react to this. As more and more data is gathered this fragmentation will continue (hopefully as a benefit to the consumer rather than some evil Orwellian entity), and we now have to start to consider this when thinking about the messages we create. The days of every campaign having the same over-arching brand or product message tweaked to each channel and segment might soon come to an end. We now have the knowledge, data, and capability to create extremely tailored messages for smaller segments, so we need to have the placement to back it up. But the answer to this problem isn’t as easy as “here’s the message, now show us the media”, there needs to be an almost symbiotic relationship between media and creative.

So cookie-cut responses to a media brief for a specific segment or product won’t work. No doubt media boffins in big agencies are hoping their global tools will work and they can move in and get the big slices of the massive online cake. But localisation means that some simple formula can’t be applied to global digital media. Even online, people in most areas want to stay local, and in the future this probably won’t change and likely will increase. As more and more and more users flood into the online world, it will become more important to people to have a sense of place in this space. This trend, combined with segment fragmentation and the already obvious fact that there’s not going to be any Rupert-esque media domination online means that local knowledge is essential in effective digital media buying.

Quick tactical response and effective data management are the final pieces that need to fall in to place to fully leverage the opportunities we’re facing. Tactical response will require solid client, ad and media agency relationships and will no doubt come once more advertisers see the potential of the area. Data might be a harder challenge. We are already facing a mountain of data that dwarfs the days of analog DM and focus groups, and we’re not even that good at collecting it yet. We have opportunities to collect all sorts of data regarding how, when, why, and where people are viewing, creating and interacting with digital media. Despite this there’s reluctance from most people in all facets of the industry to get out of the kiddy pool and start working with behavioural targeting, attention profiling, integrated CRM and seriously using the plethora of data consumers volunteer on social networking sites.

So for the media people, please jump at this opportunity. The future is way cooler than the past, and if you know and live what you’re talking about you will be an invaluable resource. For the big media companies who don’t seem to be getting it right, just get in people that know what they’re talking about. Get in geeks and skill them up in media, because it’s much harder to skill someone up on the intricacies of the digital world. For anyone else who thinks this doesn’t sound all that hard, jump in and give it a crack. Step up and start something, because there’s definitely a gap there waiting to be filled. And once it’s filled some really great ideas and great results will surely follow.

In the past few weeks we have taken some major steps in the area of advertising and privacy on the internet. I’m not going to copy and paste the press releases of Google, MySpace and Facebook, but I will quote the always brilliant (and wonderfully sarcastic) Nicholas Carr…

It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.

Yes, apparently the future of advertising arrived this week. Zuckerberg pitched himself as a 21st century Gutenberg and marketers all over the world were loving every bit of it. And to be honest, it’s not all bad. Everyone working in the digital arena knew it was coming, but now it’s here we really need to think about what we’re doing with this future before we wreck the whole thing. To quote Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsiblity”.

According to Facebook, every user now has “a way to connect with things you are passionate about.”

But this is slightly misguided. Kids will always scribble brand names all over their pencil cases, but we’re talking a very small slice of brands. There are very few brands that people are willing to wear as a badge so publicly. So while Facebook seem to be preaching to every single brand manager in the world, the impact these announcements have on 99.9% of brands just won’t be significant enough to worry about. The only significant benefit for the majority of marketers is that now any brand venturing into these waters won’t be risking to the astro-turfing suicide of the past few years. And if the venture fails it will likely just fizzle out quietly (unless you’re Wal-Mart or McDonalds of course, in which case you’ll go down in a blazing Facebook fireball). It’s a safe way for any brand that has previously been hesitant about the whole 2.0 social web thing to jump in.

So while the direction we have taken in the past few weeks is exciting, it simply isn’t the knockout blow to traditional advertising that we’re being made to believe. It is the start of something big, but we can’t now just go out and start abusing this new technology and consequently the consumer’s trust. Everyone working in digital marketing and advertising has worked hard to earn the customer’s trust, and by giving consumers a voice in the social webspace brands have also taken a brave step. So before we go utilising the data that social networks will be so happily (and no doubt profitably) providing for our advertising, we need to think very hard about what expectations people have regarding their privacy.

Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

I have written about what is essentially the Social Ads platform previously, and I still think it really is the only way for marketers to effectively and positively use uninitiated advertising on the social web. This is not to say the digital ad departments as they currently stand are going to disappear. The most effective use of the web in marketing and advertising in the future will still be user-initiated discovery. But issues will begin to arise when people are being marketed to by unknowingly using their social data.

Users are happy to go to Facebook or MySpace or Ning and have targeted advertising. Done well this may even become a key reason for choosing one social platform over another. But where a certain ‘creep’ factor (in both senses of the word) will occur is when social data is being used outside of that network. This will create an increasing public distrust for the platforms, sites and brands involved. Very quickly everyone will get the feeling that their social network platforms are some sort of Panopticon.

The danger is that once advertisers cross that point, users will simply abandon those platforms. And if that happens then we’re back to banner ads and Flash games.

A few links…
Personalisation vs. Privacy in CRM (Read/Write/Web)
replacegoogle.com, one view of the future
Nicholas Carr on The Social Graft
TechCrunch’s coverage of Facebook’s announcement
John Battelle on the OpenSocial announcement

The record labels are trying to sue Usenet. Radiohead sold more than a million online albums. OINK got shut down and made front page news. What is wrong with the music industry? How did we end up here?

I cannot honestly think of any other industry which has done so poorly out of the internet. It’s now clear that the internet is not going away, yet still the music industry tries to fight progress rather than adapt. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that the music industry was doing it wrong for 50 years before the internet starting causing trouble, so it was (and still is) near impossible to shift the mentality of the people at it’s summit.

Music is an artform. Just as painting or sculpture is. It is the creation of something with no rational existence, something that was produced simply because someone felt it should be. No other artform has been destroyed in the way that music has been over the last 50 years. Commercial radio exists purely with the goal of selling albums that make record executives more money.

If the music industry could simply start again, get rid of the suits, get rid of the talentless pop-stars, and exist as another art industry, it could be one of the biggest success stories of the internet. Anyone who really cares about their art doesn’t care about making the front cover of Who magazine. Anyone who really cares about their art doesn’t care if people sample or reference or rework it. And in the same way that I can buy a postcard or print of a painting I like for a few bucks, but have to make a real effort to go and see the artwork in real life, the logical model the music industry could take would be to give it all away online. Let people listen for free. Any true music fan knows that absolutely nothing compares to seeing, hearing, and experience something for real, and people will always pay for that experience.

Then, bring back the suits. Bring back the pop stars. They are necessary yes, but they are not music. They are the trashy magazines in a bookshop full of wonderful ideas.

A few links
OINK gets shut down.
In Rainbows, the positive and the negative.
The labels attempt to sue Usenet.
The moment the marketing people began to take over.

Have we maybe gone a bit too far? Has information overload gone from a speculative media buzzword to a reality? Has the pace of online development advanced to the point where just because what’s possible is cool doesn’t mean it should become a reality?

I’ll admit that it’s cool that when my phone rings I can see the caller’s last few twitters, their current location and their latest Facebook activity. It’s cool, but do I really care?

I will not be surprised if over the next two years we see a certain amount of rollback in the broader online community from the territory we’ve gained on over the past two years. So much of it is simply cool for the sake of cool. It’s a fad. And fads don’t last.

Every time I think about this I recall that historically, every generation going back hundreds of years felt that theirs was the penultimate of human civilisation. People have always felt that science and technology has finally advanced to the point that we’re about to wipe ourselves out. So my initial reaction when thinking about an online rebound is to think it’s just me getting older and losing touch. Surely the kids growing up with this technology will think it’s quaint in 10 years when we struggle to grasp their holographic spatial locator projectors on their communicators? Possibly. But right now, in today’s online world I don’t think this is the case.

I think we have possibly reached a point where the progress of the online world as a whole is out pacing our individual ability to process and deal with it. I’m going to offer two short paragraphs to illustrate why. But if you buy me a beer I promise there’s many more.

The development of the internet is unique in history. It was imagined, developed, executed, and built upon by the very people who required it’s existence. From 1969 to 1993 almost every person accessing the internet was directly involved in computer science. Every tool created for the internet was done so with a specific need in mind, and was created by the very same people that had that need. The same is essentially true today. This is how we ended up with YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and GMail. Of course the problem we’ve encountered over the last couple of years is that tools are not created to answer a need, they are created to answer a proposition. Where we once checked out a new online development and had the response “I’ve always wanted to do that”, we now usually respond with “I’ve never really wanted to do that, but damn it’s cool!”.

Dunbar’s Number. It’s 150. Dunbar refers to Evolutionary Psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar. His number refers to how many people you can actively maintain sustained social relationships with. Essentially, it’s the theoretical maximum number of people in your social network that are really in your social network. Many people have talked about this, and because Malcolm Gladwell and Duncan Watts are much better writers than me, I’m not going to elaborate more. The point is, this number of 150 is not unique to humans living in today’s society. It’s evident throughout history, and throughout different species. So if it’s essentially immovable (as much as a conjecture can be), surely pushing our LinkedIn/MySpace/Facebook/Orkut friends up towards a thousand is a waste of time? And surely once over the fad of these social networks, the majority of users will simply stop using them? After all, there’s no financial investment, no real brand loyalty, and very little emotional investment in the tool.

So is this rebound really going to happen? Would it signify the Bubble2.0 bursting, allowing ad revenue to tumble only moments after billion dollar deals go through? Should we all start looking for a new industry to work in?

Probably not.

One thing the last 2 years has shown is that online, the long tail is at it’s most powerful (and profitable). So although there might be a rebound, there won’t be digital apocalyptical horseman featuring Wagnerian overtures.

This post also published on B&T’s Big Idea and Digital Ministry Champions Blog