News = real time personalised information part II

This recent post 'How to please all the people all of the time' might sound a little far fetched to those who don't write or read blogs.
As I drove home last night an example came to me which illustrates the notion that news has no future as a mass, BROADcast model.
I was listening to the BBC's Radio Five Live. It's a news and sport channel. And I found myself wishing I could reach for a fast-forward button so I could zip past this particular piece of broadcast news to get on to the next item, in the hope I might find the next one more personally interesting.
Apply the lastfm model to news, for example. Then I'd start to get the disaggregated pieces of 'news' (read information) I actually wanted - at the time I wanted them.
And if I can activate community recommendation/introduction/reputation systems within that, all the better.
If I, a digital immigrant, am thinking this, what must a digital native be doing? I suspect they've pretty much already given up on broadcast news - and are googling for news, selecting rss feeds, specialised podcasts etc as the closest approximation of what they really want.
Seems to me there is a news-as-real-time-personalised-community-created-and-distributed model just waiting to be deployed. If it can deliver across channels (audio - for drivers, video or text via mobile phones to commuters etc, IPTV for the home consumer) then I would no longer have to sit through dull news that said nothing to me.
This requires more pervasive computing (ie mobile hooked up to my In Car Entertainment) for the audio model - but the mobile phone is busily leading us here anyway.
News would instantly be more engaging.
The consequences of this are important. If issues that matter to you can be more readily accessible it's but a small step to a more activated community ready to participate in the politics of their world.
Give people the tools to engage with information they care about and you are giving them the 'news' they need to participate in their world.

Famous for 15 people

In 1968 Andy Warhol predicted: ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes’.

It’s usually contracted to ‘Famous for 15 minutes,’ of course.

Andy was right from where he stood. But his future is now past. Now it’s about being ‘Famous for 15 PEOPLE’.

I first referred to this in the post ‘Famous for 15 minutes? Famous for 15 people is better’.

And over time it’s become clear to me that this phrase, and Andy’s, and the shift between them, offers a neat description of the way things have changed.

Once, the idea of mass media was to reach ‘everyone’. The Warhol prediction describes the last moments of mass media very well - a world of frenzied vying for attention in which the attention that’s grabbed becomes worth less and less. When everyone can be famous for 15 minutes, what is the value of fame?

A brief, non-immersive relationship with anything has little value.

Consider how that applies to content or advertising, or customer relationships.

If you are assaulted by a parade of interruptive ‘sells’ they become a passing blur (quite literally in the case of the fast-forward button on your PVR) none of them registering, none of them engaging.

Far better to be fully engaged with a small number (a niche – and please don’t take me literally on the ‘15 number’…) than to broadcast to a billion who are looking the other way.

This is the lesson of the long tail.

We're at the start of a new and even more powerful (long-tail-led) internet revolution/disruption.

Only this time... it's personal.

It’s personal because the mobile device is critical to how we will make use of and contribute to the internet from now on. The mobile offers a level of personalisation that is a giant leap up from the fixed-line web.

The fixed line net was initially grown by content providers of the mass industrial age, the mobile web will explode as a direct result of User Generated Content.

And because of the social nature of web2.0 the growth will be exponential. It will dominate the way the mobile web develops in a faster and more pervasive way than we saw with the original fixed-line internet.

The long tail will wag the mass media dog way more vigorously than it has in the fixed line internet world.

Converged consumers/creators/designers/buyers/sellers/marketers etc are setting up their own mobile sites, sharing their interests, forming their own communities, creating their own content and services and selling them. A whole new way of discovering and creating value is emerging.

Emails bounced back and forth with Communities Dominate Brands’ Tomi Ahonen (itself an illustration of the power of the network in action), helps crystalise how this can shape the way we must start to think about the emerging opportunities.

He said: “Yes, of COURSE! The long tail is an excellent metaphor for personalisation. The longer we move along the personalisation "long tail" the more we can find real opportunities in it, and discover "segments" or personalities that are ill-served by current media, technology etc. GREAT thought!”

The community of readers of this post are small in number. But they are absolutely the right ones. This post is not intended to be famous for 15 minutes. That would have little value to you or I.

If it becomes famous to 15 people, 15 people who are willing to contribute to it, share it, change it ENGAGE with it, own it... then we 15 may discover value we never knew we could share.

Tourist trap: Personalisation and limitations of convergence?

On my way to the Chinwag Media Widgetised bash in London yesterday evening, I paused in Trafalgar Square.
It's a great place to people-watch, and do it internationally because it's such a tourist draw - and meeting point.
I'd love to be able to say I gained some great socio-economic insight. But I didn't get a chance. As is usual a tourist was soon thrusting their camera into my hands with the polite request that I should take a picture of them with a famous London scene behind them.
But this simple act did reveal something to me. The young lady had taken her standard silver box of a digital camera and customised it with pretty little fake gems stuck all over it.
We know all about the personalisation of the mobile phone - but I'd never seen anyone do this to their camera.
And it made me think. I've got a great camera on my mobile (more pixels than my digital camera, for example). But while I'm happy to hand a stranger my camera to take a shot of me and my nearest and dearest in some tourist haven - I couldn't conceive of handing them my mobile to take the same picture.
Perhaps here is one limitation of convergence? When something is so personal to you (the mobile) it's really hard to let go. So, for tourists at least, the stand alone digital camera has a future.