Video and slides: A new era for specialist media

As promised, here's the video of me presenting my keynote on 'A New Era For Specialist Media' at SIPA 09 (Online Marketing and Publishing Summit) in London, last week.
It's shot on a flipcam - and mangled to add to vimeo (at sub 500mb for almost an hour of video) so don't expect a TV experience!

Topics covered:
• Why the internet-powered long tail of demand is a disaster for traditional broad mass media models but a huge opportunity for specialists
• How fragmentation means you can never hope to target all emerging niche communities - and what you can do to counter that
• Why the control of content production, distribution and user experience is now in the hands of everyone - and what that means for publishers
• Why we need to think of specialist content as 'social objects' to discover where the ROI will come from when nobody wants to pay for content and no one clicks on the ads.

You can download a WMV version here. The link is bottom, right of that page.

Below the video I've placed the slideshare slides, so you can play click-along-a-david if you choose.
Thoughts and comments all welcome.

A new era for specialist media from david cushman on Vimeo.

A new era for specialist media

View more presentations from david cushman.

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• A new era for specialist media? (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Resources: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Social Media... (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Whiteboard Friday - Ignore the Long Tail at Your Own Peril! (mt-soft.com.ar)

The User is the Destination Now

I was lucky enough to present at Widget Web Expo in London earlier this week (which ran on October 6-7).
It gave me an opportunity to speak about the eighth mass media for the first time. The title of my talk was The User Is The Destination Now: Widgets' Role in the Eighth Mass Media.
In the usual manner, I've made the slidedeck available via slideshare. And I was also recorded on a Flip Mino, so you can see and hear me talk about the topics on the slides, while you view them.
Some credit where due: The eighth mass media builds on Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore's concept of mobile as the seventh mass media. Find their work at Communities Dominate Brands. It's an idea in prototype and one I've been working on with Jonathan Macdonald.
The notion of widgets as great enablers of emulation is inspired by the ideas of Mark Earls' Herd (and particularly the Homo Mimicus reference).
The video is hosted by google, which means (unlike youtube) you can download it AND it can be more than 100mb and 10 mins (it's actually about 35 mins and 120+mb).

It's all below. Hope you'll enjoy.
It's messy at the edges - so do pick up the tools and join in.

By the way, I'm in Amsterdam today. Drop me a tweet if you are too.

The User Is The Destination Now

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cushman david)

Portability is the new pointworthy: Why links won't matter

I often advise teams creating content to focus on doing what is worth pointing at - the pointworthy.What I mean by this is that the web is awash with repeated press releases.

They don't stand out so you're less likely to have your half-heartedly re-written and rushed-out version pointed at by the fickle citizens of the web than something they find genuinely, stand-out, useful (and relevant).

Do loads of what everyone is doing and you're lost in the blur. Do the right stuff and other people will point you out.

But, with the shift towards portability in rss, widgets, gadgets, apps (etc) distribution becomes more complex; less about a central destination from which to broadcast (and to which to be pointed) and more about networks of people looking at and sharing among each other.

In the world of user as destination we have to think about a web in which links don't matter.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Links perform a fantastic task in extending networks of trust. They point people who are interested in one piece of content, or one person's view, at another they might find useful.

They did a great job at discovering people through content.

But we're entering a world in which content is discovered through people.

Here being pointed at is less important than being taken with.

Of course you still have to have something useful and relevant for someone to choose to take your service or content with them.

And your service or message should be adaptable by the receiver so they can better shape it to be relevant to the community of purpose they are currently interacting with.

The rules that make something pointworthy remain true. You can't just make your press releases into an rss, for example.

But portability is the new linking.

It's how we share stuff with each other, through our connections with and to each other.Users are off on their own journeys and if you aren't ready or useful enough to be taken with them and shared among them, you'll be left on your own.

By the way, you can take FasterFuture with you (latest posts and tweets) in the widget you'll find at the bottom of the left column.