Media Quake

Loving a new thread I’ve been pursuing this morning. It starts with Nokia trying to become a content provider (again) and ends with a proper view of why letting people talk absolute bunkum with each other is the key to digital gold.

See if you can follow this:

1. Nokia launches Ovi – a new strategy at the heart of which is to be the firm that provides mobile content, applications and services to its customers rather than operators, service providers or content businesses (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/03/nokia_portal_analysis/). The Register points out that this strategy is fundamentally flawed because…

2. The biggest technologies get scale when they enable communication, not content. (http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/). To focus on owning and broadcasting content is to completely miss what drives consumer adoption. For example, the telephone was first envisaged as a broadcast channel, not a communications channel.

3. The vast bulk of our communication is complete personal guff ((Also in http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/). So letting the masses talk sh*t with each other has proven to be the biggest driver of consumer adoption (cf the telephone, reality TV, Facebook and Twitter). The mass adoption then offers companies a platform for commercial gain.

4. Then I see this (twittered by Jemimakiss) – a video about a Twitter-like service called Tumblr, which is purposely pushing its facility for enabling eedjits to share their worlds (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/06/22/tumblr_the_video.html).

In Circus Street sessions we get businesses – often media owners – to have a good hard look at themselves by getting them to think about what all the biggest sites have in common. We say that it is that they (Facebook, MSN (i.e. Hotmail), Yahoo, Google etc.) are applications, not content. They let people do things, not read things.

After this morning, I would change all that. It is the share function that makes all the difference – after all Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all the rest, do enable us to consume content – it’s just the kind of content that’s so different – it’s the content that comes from enabling anyone to find and share it. And, it is enabling the crapola – the mass – the mush – that draws a massive amount of people. Each user then finds what they want in the mush all by themselves. Their own personal cream rises to the top.

Yes, yes, yes – I know that’s all user-generated content – a fundamental part of web 2.0 but, previously, I’d thought of UGC as just a function of web 2.0, not its most defining movement. And I like thought processes that take us to the same conclusion via a different path. And it makes me all the more impressed with the BBC’s new mantra ‘Find, Play, Share’.

Of course, making money from those ideas presents some major challenges – and a proper head-change. But, I’d definitely start by having another look at http://www.helium.com/. I’d try to map the idea of sharing revenues (for example, ad revenues) with users on to the Tumblr model – and the idea that its users already care immensely about how ‘followed’ they become. How much more would they care if they could make money from being most followed too? Here lies a route to both scale and cash, which is the problem that, thus far, only Google (pretty much by accident) has cracked.

Filed under: Mobile, Publishing, web 2.0 Tagged: | Helium, Mobile, Twitter, web 2.0