From left: Loren Feldman with Mike Arrington, Loic LeMeur, and Robert Scoble during happier times - photo by Loic LeMeur.

"#SoMe" is video maker Loren Feldman's long, funny, witty, insightful, and beautifully melancholic movie, recalling a time when social media was in its infancy, barely out of diapers but growing fast with the promise of becoming a force of nature, transforming us and our institutions into a future meritocracy, a democracy of transparency and rainbows.

We're still waiting for the rainbows and the rest. And the melancholy ending of #SoMe is a metaphor for what we lost, and maybe never had.

When I left the Financial Times in 2004 to become a "journalist blogger," there was tremendous hope that the rise of blogging was nothing less than an uprising of an army of citizen journalists, sweeping away the media gatekeepers in newspapers and TV, who were more interested in protecting corporate interests and profits than looking out for the people.

Sadly, social media became a less interesting place, where people shared artificially blemished photos, and shared links to articles in mainstream publications. Instead of challenging the establishment, social media became a way of promoting and extending its reach.

Social media became Social Distribution of Mass Media (SODOMM).

Oh well. 

We lost the promise and excitement of those times in Silicon Valley and we lost Loren Feldman, too.

For a while, Loren and his sock puppet creations that mimicked local personalities, such as Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Loic LeMeur, Shel Israel, and others, charmed and entertained - until they didn't. Suddenly, he was seen as "anti-startup," far too critical, and not funny -- his former friends turned on him. 

How bad can a sock puppet be? You would think that the skin of the above personalities would have been hardened into that of a rhino's after all the time they'd spent in full exposure to the UV glares of the trolls on the interwebs.

Yet who knew that those skins were delicate membranes, requiring constant soothing mists of baby lotion and "like" buttons? The rough texture of the sock puppet, with its always-on, built-in-New-York-City bullshit meter, was too much... and soon, Loren was gone.

I miss Loren, he was the jester in the court of Web 2.0.

- - -

#SoMe has some wonderful scenes. The last reel is extraordinary. The Shel puppets's attempts to find meaning in life following the death of his best friend are wonderful. The last call to his mother is incredibly touching and hilarious, the Jewish escort service, the swimming pool scene, the descent into drugs, and the final loss.

Great writing, great acting, great story, and no stuffing, it's all hand-made.

#SoMe has some wonderful scenes. The last reel is extraordinary. The Shel puppet's attempts to find meaning in life following the death of his best friend are wonderful. The last call to his mother, (59 minute 40 mark) is incredibly touching and hilarious, the Jewish escort service, the swimming pool scene, the descent into drugs, and the final loss.

Great writing, great acting, and no stuffing -it's all hand-made.

(I had a small part in the movie, I guess you could say I had a hand in its making :)

More info here: 

#SoMe - The Movie

A movie about friendship in the age of Social Media.

http://lorenfeldman.com/some

Competition for software engineers is incredibly intense and Silicon Valley firms are pulling out all the stops to recruit and retain top talent. A great software engineer is a very scalable asset.

Every company can offer perks of free food and high salaries but where can an employer get ahead of the pack and offer something no one else can, what is the ultimate perk? How about life extension.

That's where Google is headed.

Earlier this week, at a Commonwealth Club Inforum event on the topic of HR and what Silicon Valley companies such as Twitter, and Cisco Systems are doing to attract the best people, panel member Todd Carlisle, Director of Staffing at Google, had the last word, by teasing a possible future scenario.

He asked, what if a perk of working at a company was that it extended your life? He said that people would likely never leave the company, they would be incredibly loyal. 

If you connect the dots that's exactly where Google is headed.

Late last year it hired Ray Kurzweil (above) a vocal proponent of an idea called the Singularity, which predicts life extension technologies will eventually extend people's lives indefinitely. This will start happening in earnest within this decade.

Here's Google's recruitment slogan from the future: "Come work at Google and live longer. It's a Singular Experience!"

How can other companies compete?!

Google can make sure its engineers have a seat on the Singularity bus. It already has the driver of the idea in Mr Kurzweil, and the Singularity will require the world's largest, most powerful computer system, which is exactly what Google is building.

It's an incredibly compelling scenario and software engineers would probably accept lower salaries for the chance to be among the first to benefit from the Singularity. It's also a message that doesn't need to be directly stated, but can be implied, as Todd Carlisle clearly did earlier this week.

What could competitors come up with? There is no amount of salary, free food and beer, that could rival Google's leadership in lifespan extension technologies. 

Rivals may have to resort to this recruiting slogan: "Come work here --  the work is so dull that it'll seem as if you are living longer!" 

[It's cribbed from Joseph Heller's novel "Catch-22" where one of the World War II bomber pilots seeks out the most boring things to do in his free time, so that it will feel as if he is living a long life, rather than the reality of the shockingly short life expectancy of bomber crews -- just six weeks.]

"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society;

and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies,

to secret oaths and secret proceedings..."

- - -

"…there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.

That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control."

- - -

"…that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution

-- not primarily to amuse and entertain,

not to emphasize the trivial and sentimental,

not to simply "give the public what it wants"

--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect,

to state our dangers and our opportunities,

to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold educate

and sometimes even anger public opinion."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em8cuv_a0gU

(Thanks to Donovan Seow.)

Please listen to President John F. Kennedy's speech on secrecy and a free and democratic society. It's short and incredibly relevant.

Here is the transcript: 

"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings.

We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions.

Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.

That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control.

And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed."

"No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary.

I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers-- I welcome it.

This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: "An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed-- and no republic can survive.

That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy.

And that is why our press was protected by the First (emphasized) Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution-- not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news-- for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security...

And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of mans deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news-- that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will
be what he was born to be: free and independent."

The flow of money says much more about the truth of any action in this world than anything else.  Snooping on emails, phone calls, Facebook friend networks, whatever else, pales in comparison to the intelligence gained in knowing the money trail.

Money transforms intent into action.

Brute-force spying

The NSA and its foreign counterparts, are collecting vast databases filled with personal data from wherever they can harvest it, which is essentially from the Internet traffic that crosses between the world's servers. Their goal is to identify terrorist and criminal groups intending to harm their citizens.

They face a data mining nightmare. They need to identify potentially nefarious patterns of connections between individuals and predict their intent to do harm. Big business has trouble enough predicting a person's intent to buy a washing machine -- imagine the task that spy agencies face.

Fortunately for them, the same Moore's Law that provides us with ever cheaper and better smart phones and computers, delivers digital systems that are cheaper and more powerful on an exponential scale. But a brute force approach to finding the bent needles in the haystack cannot hope to be as efficient as focusing on signals of intent.

"Put your money where your mouth is," and "Money makes the world go around," are popular sayings because they are true observations about money and action. 

If it's possible for the spy agencies to collect the masses of personal data that we know they collect, why would't it be possible for them to hack into global financial networks, and individual banks?

Silicon Valley's war on cash...

Cash is anonymous but it's difficult to use without attracting attention. And the future of cash is under pressure from numerous Silicon Valley startups promoting "frictionless" financial transactions of all sorts. What's good for commerce is good for spies because anything digital leaves a trail.

Bitcoin is a digital technology that offers the anonymity of cash but it might not be quite as secure as it's portrayed. It could act as a signal to flag suspicious activities.

It's the same as people using one-time "burner" cell phones to mask their activities - calls made between phone numbers with no known users are a bright beacon amid an ocean of known numbers.[See Steve Gibson on Security Now 408.]

And what do we know about the origin of Bitcoin? Incredibly, very little. Its origin is as anonymous as the anonymity it promises.  

It appeared out of nowhere in 2008 from a "Satoshi Nakamoto," a pseudonym that's never been traced to any known person or group, which is as you'd expect from the developer of an untraceable digital currency.

What we do know about Bitcoin is that its an extremely sophisticated mathematical construct based on prime numbers. Prime numbers are essential to digital security, our most advanced encryption technologies wouldn't be possible without them.

What do we know about the NSA? It employs more mathematicians than Wall Street, and it knows more about encryption than any other organization on the planet.

Is Bitcoin an NSA construct designed to help focus its surveillance systems? Whatever its origin it does a great job in flagging activities that want to be hidden. 

Signals intelligence

What's clear is that "follow the money" has to be in the playbook of every spy agency. And it has to be far more detailed than the current systems monitoring tax evasion and money laundering. It's by far the quickest way to pinpoint the activities of suspicious networks of people and organizations.

Crunching through the Mother of Big Data being collected daily, to surface patterns of concern in phone calls and emails, is not a feasible strategy.

Even with the prodigious computing resources that the NSA possesses, data mining on such a scale is a poor way to generate actionable intelligence.

Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and author of The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency. "The intelligence people I've spoken are warning of data crunch - a polite way of saying they're drowning." 

NSA's desert home for eavesdropping on America  guardian.co.uk

If you can overlay networks of financial connections, you can disregard the 99.99999999999999999% of the useless data that's masking what needs to be monitored.

People, especially in the US, will likely be far more upset about security agencies spying on their money than on their emails or phone records. People will happily talk about their healthcare with others but are extremely guarded about their finances. 

No one has yet come forward to whistleblow spy agencies snooping on personal financial information but there's really no need. Follow the dots... follow the money is where you'll always find the truth of any story.

- - -

Some of the latest PRISM revelations:

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program - The Washington Post

New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies | World news | The Guardian

Facebook's outmoded Web crypto opens door to NSA spying | Politics and Law - CNET News

(Steve Blank, left, next to Deborah Magid, Chair of SVForum, and Ray Kurzweil, at Visionary Awards press conference.) 

One of my high points of the year is attending the SVForum Visionary Awards because it's a chance to spend time with some of Silicon Valley's aristocracy in a relaxed summer party setting that brings out some great stories.

This year's winners represent some of the leading US tech-optimists but are not necessarily Silicon Valley's own. There was a strong showing of Singularitans, including their leader Ray Kurzweil, who recently moved here from Boston, taking a job at Google to be closer to his son who works as a VC.

Over the past few years I've noticed more and more Singularitans in Silicon Valley, in its companies,  and at various events. That's certainly been true at SVForum (formerly SDForum) where every year I've been meeting more people associated with "The Singularity." It describes a future utopia where humanity has transcended the age and health limits of its biology and is living in a world where reality is indistinguishable from man-made worlds. 

Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil were each honored with a Visionary Award - both are co-founders of the Singularity University, (and both are not from here, or much associated with Silicon Valley unlike past honorees.) 

Businessweek reports that followers of the Singularity "have turned Kurzweil into a quasi-religious figure. He’s the grand prophet." I was told it was just a coincidence that two Singularitans were chosen — fair enough.  

The two other Visionary Award winners are:

Steve Blank, one of Silicon Valley's best examples of a successful serial entrepreneur ( eight startups over 33 years) and who spends extraordinary amounts of time teaching and mentoring other entrepreneurs.

He has three books published: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost and The Startup Owner's Manual.  He teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, Columbia University and the California Institute of Technology.

- Padmasree Warrior, Cisco System's Indian-born CTO, who masterminded the acquisition of 15 companies in 15 months, and has such an enormous list of achievements, talents, and hobbies, that I thought it might be endless when VC Ann Winblad mentioned them all in her long introductory speech for the "Innovation Warrior."

I loved what she said about the nonsense in finding a balance between work and life. She talks about integration because balance implies opposition in equal amounts and that's not realistic.

Last year's recipients (former Visionaries?) were Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX); Salman Khan (Khan Academy); journalist David Kirkpatrick; and top dog VC Jim Breyer (Accel Partners). [SVForum Visionary Awards 2012 - Photos]

The real Silicon Valley

There was a pre-event press conference for the small group of media and much was said about how great Silicon Valley is and what it represents to other nations.

Mr Kurzweil said that he travels a lot and people are very proud of their local innovation centers, and they are usually described as the "Silicon Valley of India," or "The Silicon Valley of Israel," or whatever country he is in, each one has its own "Silicon Valley."

Mr Kurzweil said,"But only we have the real Silicon Valley and it's a potent symbol of inspiration to the rest of the world."

Very true. I pointed out that since it is such an important symbol shouldn't Silicon Valley make sure that its communities, its public schools especially, are extraordinary? 

We can't keep saying we're changing the world when locally nothing much changes. Silicon Valley continues to suffer from terrible public schools and broken communities such as East Palo Alto -- a violent urban ghetto in every sense of the word – smack-dab in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Mr Blank said that there were bigger problems, that people were stepping over dead bodies in India. Well, people are stepping over dead bodies here, too. 

Here's a recent news story from the SF Examiner: "Two weeks ago, eight people were shot in eight days in East Palo Alto. Among them was a 15-year-old boy, killed in what appeared to be a gang-related shooting."

Change the world, ignore the neighborhood…

I'm of the opinion that learning how to take care of yourself is the best way to learn how to take care of others. Silicon Valley needs to learn how to take care of its local communities so that it can use that knowledge to enable change on a global scale.

Let's start with making all of our schools showcases. It's a hard problem, but as Peter Diamandis said at the event, "I believe there is no such thing as a hard problem that can't be solved."

He managed to jumpstart a multi-billion dollar private space industry with the promise of a $10 million prize. It attracted many multiples of that $10 million in research and development investments as teams competed to win and in the process created a thriving business sector.

The genius of Mr Diamandis was further revealed at the event, when a colleague of his said, "He didn't have any of the prize money."

He took a gamble that when the time came to award the prize sponsors would come forth and stump up the money. Why can't we do the same for public education?!

A $20m Silicon Valley XPrize

I have some ideas, I know other people do too, it's time for a Silicon Valley XPRIZE for public education. Let's increase the prize money to $20 million.

If half that amount can get a rocket ship into space then twice that amount should yield a great payoff in sparking innovation that transforms public eduction.  If we can fix it here we can probably fix it elsewhere, too.  

What are you doing about it?

At one point in the press conference, Mr Blank understandably grew a little irritated at my insistence that Silicon Valley fix its schools and neighborhoods, and asked me, "What are you doing about it?"

I told him "This. This is what I'm doing, hassling people like you."

I've been doing it for years, harassing the the influential, the people with access to resources, the great Captains of Industry, to pay attention to what's under their feet and next door. To ditch the hypocrisy of changing the world and change Silicon Valley into a place where all its residents benefit tremendously from the incredible visionaries in our midst, and the world-changing technologies created by our local companies.

Silicon Valley envy

Every nation envies Silicon Valley, every government including our own looks to Silicon Valley to help it create new jobs, and to solve difficult problems. But why? What benefit is there for the San Francisco Bay area to have the original and genuine Silicon Valley?

Our local schools are basket cases instead of showcases, and our local cities struggle with the same problems of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and decaying infrastructure as any city anywhere. 

This hypocrisy has to end. Silicon Valley can't claim to change the world for the better when it's unable to change even a small part of the world here in Northern California.

Muckraking…

My contribution is to try to shame the rich and powerful to do something about it. It's what newspapers used to do: muckraking, pointing out blatant hypocrisy and campaigning for the improvement of their communities.

I've challenged John Chambers, CEO of Cisco on these points in the past. About six years ago when we were both on the same Silicon Valley panel, he told me, "Tom, we tried to improve public education here  but it just can't be done."  I was shocked that he gave up so easily. 

Techno-optimism without activism

The Visionary Award winners, Steve Blank, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Padmasree Warrior -- all spoke glowingly about their techno-optimism, and their books about techno-optimism.

I'm a techno-optimist too but I believe technology doesn't create the future – people do. To ensure we get the right kind of future you have to work for it, not wait for it.

Techno-optimists have to be techno-activists and I don't see them doing much except pointing to their Amazon links. Every armchair techno-optimist is getting a free ride on the exponential growth in the game-changing technologies developed by others. Yet they claim the credit.

Techno-optimists have to be social activists in every sense of the word to ensure the future turns out right.

People are noticing that Silicon Valley's talk should match its walk but that it doesn't. George Packer, an award winning journalist currently working for The New Yorker, says that Silicon Valley companies should shut up about changing the world because they aren't.

Let's make Silicon Valley into an example of what a potential future might be like for everyone on the planet, by showcasing the tremendous benefits of technology when it is used the right way.  

Predicting the future of technology is easy — figuring out how to live in that future is much harder. 

- - -

Check back for more stories, photos, and videos from SVForum's 2013 Visionary Awards.

Update: Here is some video from Silicon Valley Business Journal from the press conference:

Is "The Singularity" The Geeks' Version Of "The Rapture"?

The Ray Kurzweil Show, Now at the Googleplex - Businessweek 

Bashing Silicon Valley Sells Magazines And Books

This relentless doubling of computer chip capabilities every 18 to 24 months described as Moore's Law, has created a warp-speed acceleration in the capabilities of all our digital technologies. It's made possible cheap iPhones, tablets, servers, and a host of desirable digital electronics. Gizmos and gadgets get ever better and ever cheaper because they can.

Our entire modern society, its incredible advances, its innovation, is directly driven by the engine of Moore's Law. Every digital thing gets better and less expensive, automatically.

We get cheaper smartphones, and governments get cheaper surveillance systems. Both are improving at the same exponential rate.

But what about storage? More powerful computing means more data processed, and lots more data is generated, which means more storage is needed.

The good news is that data storage technologies are improving even faster than Moore's law. Doubling about every year or so, and falling in price. 

Relentless progress…

The beauty of the Moore's Law conveyer belt is that the double-power chips it delivers make all the apps more powerful automatically. Software gets a free ride, there's no need to invent new programming languages, there's even no reason to write tight code because the lazy code gets better, faster, too.

Businesses have been snooping on consumers for decades and benefiting greatly from Moore's Law. Multitudes of companies collect and sell personal data because knowing the timing of a consumer's intent to buy is an el dorado for merchants, it means they can save on their costs of sales, they can sell more at a lower price.

Business snooping versus government snoops

We often forget that government systems are riding the same exponential graph as business systems, they benefit from the same doubling in performance and lower costs. 

Google reads peoples' Gmail  but when government agencies read peoples' email, there's an outcry. Same data, same activity, one is acceptable while the other is not, why?

Snooping by Big Business has a mundane objective: to sell you more stuff. Big Brother snooping is about judging you. And there's the rub. 

With Moore's Law Big Brother is getting better and better at judging you, your character, your ideas, your connections, your trustworthiness (esp. with Manning and Snowden). Everything about what makes you human can be measured, quantified, and judged.

Jam tomorrow…

There's another difference: Big Business isn't much interested in what you did, said, or wrote, a year ago, two years, ten years ago, it throws away much of that data. Big Brother keeps it all. What it can't use today, because the files are strongly encrypted, or distributed across many databases, it knows it can use tomorrow.

Tomorrow's computer systems will be able to decrypt those files, tomorrow's computer systems will be able to analyze and cross-link data in a myriad of databases, they'll be able to know more about you in ways that are impractical today.

Historical data grows in usefulness to Big Brother because it makes possible a more accurate digital simulacrum of you. With every doubling in computer performance, the simulation of you grows closer and closer to the real you. The computer models get better at predicting what you will or won't do. Big Brother gets better at predicting intent.

The horror of George Orwell's 1984 was the government's ability to uncover and punish "thoughtcrimes." Tomorrow's Big Brother will have the means to predict thoughtcrimes before they become actual crimes. They are designed to discover intent. 

To be judged on the privacy of your thoughts is bad enough, to be judged on your future thoughts and the crimes that they will likely lead to, is far worse. 

And that's the difference between Google and the NSA: Big Business is purely interested in your wallet. Big Brother is interested in the purity of your soul.

Welcome to this unstoppable future brought to you courtesy of Moore's Law.

I was walking along Haight Street and spotted a poster competition for the upcoming Haight Street Fair, June 9, which has always been one of the best San Francisco Street Fairs. For a long time it was organized by the wonderful Pablo Heising, a good friend and one of the neighborhoods best community leaders. 

Pablo was a former Digger in the 1960s, and saw the neighborhood fall apart, and be torn apart, by drugs and violence following its "Summer of Love" season on the world's stage. Pablo was one of the protectors and caretakers of the community, guarding kids from predators in the park, helping to bring free medical care into the community, and so much more.

Pablo's Haight Street Fair was instrumental in bringing the neighborhood back to life. It showed that it could be a safe and fun place to visit, instead of a reputation as a violent, crack and speed infested no-go zone. The Haight Street Fair started in 1978 and quickly became the best loved and the best attended street fair in San Francisco, and an important community resource.

My wife and I used to publish a local neighborhood newspaper in the late 1980s called "The Street - A View From The Haight." It was a perfect excuse to get to know Pablo better and celebrate his life in a feature interview, calling him "The Mayor of Haight Street." It was a title that stuck well, and struck true to his thousands of friends.  

A dark and troubled time...

Pablo was always a modest man, quiet and unassuming; he achieved so many good things, and without any fanfare. He was a gentle giant in his community. His passing at 61, was a shock and we lost a kind man. And we lost a first-hand witness to an important period in the neighborhood's fabled, but also deeply troubled history.

The Haight-Ashbury story is as rock & roll as any cautionary tale of a rock star's life. From the heady thrills of life on an adoring world stage, there is the inevitable fall from grace and the slide into a bottom-less dark place of drug addiction and mindless acts of self-destruction. And then the painful, gradual rehabilitation, a reawakening, a blinking into a harsh sunlight but at least back on track, back onto a track of work and slow, gradual improvement. The Haight-Ashbury is no longer a neighborhood of crack houses and cracked kids, and Pablo was very important in the resurrection of what was a very damaged community for most of the 1970s and into early 1980s.

Pablo lived very simply, which probably was due to his Digger background, a radical group that ran free stores, and free community kitchens, and whose egalitarian philosophies are a key influence in the software engineer culture of Silicon Valley and beyond. Pablo should have bought some crack houses and flipped them to provide himself with a little bit of security as he grew older but he didn't. Many people, such as my landlord,  made fortunes in the Haight-Ashbury real-estate market as the neighborhood moved well beyond  gentrification.

In the mid-1990s, Pablo was forced out of his rented apartment and came to live with me and my wife and two kids,  for a couple of weeks up in Forestville, which is about an hour or so north of San Francisco. He was a long-time friend of my wife Mervana because both had worked for many years at Bill Graham Presents; we were very happy to have Pablo all to ourselves for a short while.

Pablo worked with many other city neighborhoods showing them how to organize and provide local services.  And he also organized the other great San Francisco street event -- The Castro Street Fair.

- - -

You can learn more about Pablo here in this profile from the San Francisco Chronicle: Pablo Heising -- 'Mayor of Haight'

Here's an interview with Pablo shortly before he died from Haight Ashbury Beat, one of the more recent in a series of publications from the Haight (which includes Rolling Stone): Watch 2006 Pablo Heising Interview | haight ashbury beat Episodes

- - -

Pablo's spirit can still be found at events such as the Haight Street Fair, which always seems to mark the start of a yet another great San Francisco summer season of street events and music festivals. This city has a wonderful cultural life and it doesn't require money to enjoy it. 

- - -

More posters...

My favorite in this year's Haight Street Fair poster competition is the one above. This first poster below, is one of my favorites from past years. It was designed by Kathleen Bifulco, one of the art editors on our publication "The Street." [Kathleen's husband Chris Dichtel wrote a historical column for the paper and many of our other friends were involved too -- "The Street"was a close knit editorial collective.] 

Here are the other posters from this year's poster competition from a Haight Street store window, (my apologies for my feet!):

[A note about the Culture Watch section: Startups should make sure that they expose their staff to as much of the local cultural life as they can manage because it builds a diversity in ideas and in services opportunities.

A business that doesn't take an interest in its communities will not be in business for long. Culture is constantly being disrupted and replaced, it is innovative and wildly creative -- and it constantly generates new languages of expression, and these reflect how society thinks about things, and what it thinks about itself. To understand "social" you have to be in it, you have to go out and about, and you need to be social. Social media is not enough.]

Google Glass has a promissing future -- although not in the markets that Google thinks it's targetting: urban early-tech adopters -- they are a fickle bunch at best.

Where Google Glass will make its mark and find a large and loyal customer base is in helping families and communities deal with the ravages of old age.

We have a very large population of Baby Boomers. This is Generation A -- Aging on a massive scale, a population that's on a collision course with all the ills and predicaments that an older life brings.

Generation A is doing pretty well so far, but it can't live forever, even though it secretly thinks otherwise.

The realities of old age are well documented. Such as: brittle bones, difficulties in walking, small falls that can break hips, and many other injuries that were trivial when younger now become deadly. Prolonged physical inactivity due to injuries are a quick slide towards mortality. [Acturial tables are the original "Big Data" app.]

Older age brings other challenges such as muddled thoughts and for some, a slow slide into dementia because of Alzheimer's, or because of the effects of powerful medications.

With special Google Glass based applications, however, we could soften the problems that Generation A is facing. And it can be done at a very low cost -- probably for about the same amount of money as a monthly cell phone bill, which makes it affordable to nearly every family.

Here are some examples of Gen A Google Glass applications:

- Google Glass sensors can track a person's gait, and identify mobility problems that signal a potential fall and broken bones in the near future. Early warning signs can trigger preventative treatments and healthcare providers would be motivated to try stop a fall before it happens.

- Reminders for taking medication and preventing double dosing -- a big health problem. Plus reminders of family birthdays.

- People beginning to suffer from dementia would find Google Glass based apps tremendously useful. For example, the device could recognize family members and offer simple messages such as, "This is your son, his name is John. Say, "Hello John, how are my beautiful grandchildren?"

- When John asks his aged mother, "Do you remember the trip we took last year to Las Vegas?" Google Glass can run a quick replay video of the highlights. Not only would John's mother recall the trip but she could use John's wireless printer to print out her favorite photos for him, right there and then.

- Families are often separated from their older members because of jobs thousands of miles away. They could check-in with their parents very easily. With Google Glass-type devices, they could patch into what they are doing, even what they are seeing (there would be a "courtesy" filter to screen out any embarrassing scenes).

- And if there were a problem, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up," aid would be on the way in seconds.

- Finding old episodes of "The Rockford Files."

The possibilities for Google Glass are huge in this older market. Why do companies chase the 19 to 25 year old demographic? Those kids have little money and the entire generation has lousy job prospects.

The Baby Boomers of Generation A are the largest and wealthiest demographic of them all. They will love Google Glass.

- - -

Google's rush to Google Glass makes perfect sense, if you consider that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are 40, and 39 years old, respectively.

With every day they have more and more in common with 60 year-olds than with 20 year-olds. Google Glass is an exercise in future-comforting their old age.

[And so is the hiring of Ray Kurzweil, it's to ensure that Google's founders get a front seat on the bus ride to the Singularity, and its promise of immortality. (If you are in the back seats you might not get there in time. (It's a different type of digital divide.))]

My 2013 prediction warned of the continued fall in the value of online content which would lead to the production of ever more content as media companies tried to maintain ad revenues.

You can think of it as a towering tsunami of content, or as a massive bubble of content inflation.

Just as inflation devalues currencies, content inflation is devaluing content.

Ryan McCarthy, Deputy Editor of Reuters.com, and the former Business Editor of the Huffington Post, comes to a similar conclusion.

In: Another blog post that won't make any money | MediaFile | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com

He writes:

The dirty secret about the web media business is that there's a massive oversupply problem. Everyday, content creators are producing more journalism, more think-pieces, more interactive graphics, more photo galleries, more tweets, more slideshows, more videos, more GIFs, and more deviously socially-optimized Corgi listicles...

This creates more supply for display ads, web media's favorite and still growing revenue generator. All that supply, however, drags down ad prices.

He points out a troubling reality:

...if you're working in media now you shouldn't be worried about getting your website to hit 20 or 30 million uniques -- if ad rates continue to fall, even websites of that size may not be economically viable. 

Keeping up is getting tougher.

What's important to note is that new media companies could now be disrupted almost as fast as old media companies -- maybe faster because they don't have legacy revenue streams to provide some support.

To generate more traffic, more content is needed but that content has to be produced as cheaply as possible.

However, online advertising revenues for everyone are directly affected by the advertising rates set by giants such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft, etc.

Their content production costs are tiny compared with traditional and new media companies, which have to use people, not just algorithms and user generated feeds.

Most online media companies can't compete on those terms because they need people to produce much of their content, and so their costs of content production are so much greater than advertising revenues can support.

So what's the solution? What's the funding model for journalism? We still don't have it. But we know that advertising is not it.

Reuter's Ryan McCarthy thinks it might be Gawker's affiliate links model.

Gawker's move to blend its content with an e-commerce platform, where posts are a delivery system for links to products, seems like it could help reverse this.

I think it has to be a "Heinz 57" business model with multiple revenue streams from: ads, subscriptions, affiliate links, special marketing packages, events, membership packages, virtual goods, and more.

That's a lot of work to manage each stream. Plus, each of those media revenue opportunities is under its own threats of disruption.

The rise of corporate media...

We are witnessing a surge in corporate media as businesses step up their production of video, blog posts, articles, thought leader columns, online magazines, video shows, etc.  

Some of it is produced at a very high quality by former journalists and TV news show producers.

The corporate media is trying to fill a space left by the declining ranks of journalists and other professional media. 

But this corporate media is caught in a massive bubble of content inflation. Huge amounts of all types of content competing with each other.

No matter how good the quality of any one piece of content -- its value declines because of the inflating bubble of all online content. 

Corporate media will get less traffic, less engagement, less visibility, because it has to compete with everything else online.

Which means it will become more expensive to reach the same results as before.

Smarter machine media

The expansion of content inflation will eventually slow but not for a good while.

There are big improvements coming in automating content production and raising its quality. We've only just begun in this area and it will help keep the bubble of content inflation expanding ever faster -- just like our universe.

Watch Silicon Valley on PBS. See more from American Experience.

The superb American Experience documentary series on PBS finally cast its focus on Silicon Valley yesterday evening in an 82 minute program largely focused on the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.

The heroes of the story are eight scientists, in mechanical, electrical, metallurgical, and optical engineering, and a chemist.

It's a story that takes place more than half-a-century ago, when the "traitorous eight" left  their employer Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory en masse because their boss, William Shockley, had become grossly egotistical and a horror to work with. He sounded like an early version of Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder.

It was shocking to leave an employer, which is why they were called traitors. In those days loyalty was expected, as were the lifelong careers that companies provided. And it's this "traitorous" culture that continues to grow Silicon Valley, as people continually leave to create new startups.

American Experience also showed the close connection to the US Department of Defense and how military spending was the prime source of money for new ventures for a very long time.

Foremski's Take:

The American Experience "Silicon Valley" story ends in early 1970s with Intel's development of the 4040 microprocessor -- which signaled the official start of the "Digital Age." It ends about the time when the name "Silicon Valley" was used for the first time by journalist Don Hoefler in Electronic News.

The Silicon Valley that these eight men helped create is a far different place today, primarily there's no silicon chips being made. Over the past 40 years Silicon Valley would have needed a name change every five to 10 years.

In the 1980s it became a "PC Valley" as hundreds of PC companies and hard drive companies each competed for "just 10% share" of the market. In the 1990s it became a "Network Valley," or a "Communications Valley," with a "Multimedia Gulch" in San Francisco.

It's all about media...

Today it's a "Media Valley" whose top companies, such as Google and Facebook are better described as technology-enabled media publishers, and where thousands of startups create media technologies and related products and services.

Intel makes chips that are better described as media processors; Apple and other PC makers make computers that are essentially media hardware platforms that create as well as publish all types of media.

Silicon Valley has a massive media industry that's leaving New York's media industry in the dust.

Companies such as Google et al, don't like to be called media companies because they work with traditional media companies who think of them as tech companies and not as competitors.

Silicon Valley has become a giant Gutenberg Machine built from a vast array of powerful media technologies.

From movable type to programmable type...

Mass production of movable type was the innovation that Gutenberg pioneered more than half a millennium ago. Silicon Valley's Gutenberg machine is based on programmable type -- the publishing of any type of media content in manipulable forms and formats that can change dynamically in real-time.

And that giant Gutenberg Machine can be accessed in micro versions, pocket sized, enabling anyone to publish anything, at minuscule cost and with minimal effort.

The Internet is an advanced publishing technology. In it's first phase it allowed any content to be published to any type of computer screen that could display a web browser.

Now, any web browser or any connected app, can publish back. We've wired up the other end of the Internet -- it's now a two-way medium. 

If you thought the first version of the Internet was amazing, hang on to your hat because this two-way Internet will blow our minds in ways we can, and can't imagine. It's an incredibly innovative and creative space. And it's happening here -- in Silicon Valley.

Early this week, Hamish McKenzie attended a memorial for Aaron Swartz, the young activist who committed suicide while being prosecuted for downloading millions of academic papers.

He writes:

Berin Szoka, the president of the group TechFreedom, offered some words that were uncomfortable for some. Speaking of the Internet activist's alleged crime of downloading millions of academic articles, Szoka stepped out of the night's orthodoxy of holding Swartz up as a hero.

"I cannot condone what Aaron did," Szoka started, about to launch into an argument about how Internet freedom should not be a partisan issue. He was cut off before he could go any further.

Foremski's Take: The future of Aaron Swartz has nothing to do with Aaron Swartz and has everything to do with agendas of digital libertarians and related activists.

I attended a recent memorial in San Francisco (above) and saw how many speakers spoke passionately for changes in the law, for changes in government policies, for many worthwhile causes, as if Mr. Swartz's death was an intentional sacrifice for a greater good.

I've had my run-ins online with those that claim to know what Aaron Swartz died for, and that seek to enroll him in their agendas.

It's not that I disagree with calls for overhauling laws, or freeing medical research data that was publicly funded. But that these calls for activism were lacking in volume and frequency when he was living.

At the recent memorial in San Francisco, I had an interesting conversation with John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about Mr Swartz's activism and the levels of support he was getting from the EFF, and other organizations and individuals.

I asked if it was his activism that led to his suicide? He said possibly it was "a lack of activism" in general around the issues and his impending trial. He wasn't able to get the attention he really needed for his activism to succeed.

Are the digital libertarians now hoisting his corpse onto their shoulders and wailing and flailing against "the Man" and calling his suicide a sacrifice for their agendas, when they could have done so much more to help him when he was alive?

Was it the lack of activism that pushed him to suicide? 

Where were those people that now loudly claim him for their own, when he needed them to be just as vocal in their support, on the eve of his trial and prosecution? 

I hadn't heard much about his work and the names of those that supported him, until his suicide. And I usually pay attention to these types of things. And the same is true for many others I've spoken with. Several speakers at the SF memorial admitted they had never met him.

Aaron Swartz left no explanation for his suicide. And it would seem that he has ceded control over how the world now views his life and death and the reasons for both. 

But that's not entirely true.

While we do not know his reasons for suicide, we do know that he did not want it to be used to further the causes he is now linked with. Because he could have easily combined the two in a last letter.

People should respect his decision to separate his death from his activism and not appropriate his last tragic act in life to bolster their causes -- no matter how progressive or just.

The lesson in Aaron Swartz's suicide is clear: Let's not wait to speak out on important issues, and let's help our lead activists in their times of greatest need -- when they are still living. 

Please see: Aaron Swartz Memorial in SF - Our First Digital Liberties Martyr? - SVW

Newspapers face uncertain paths to a brighter future.

The Financial Times said it would try to eliminate 35 editorial jobs through voluntary means and add 10 jobs as part of its focus on "digital" and a move away from news to "a networked business."

Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, announced the changes in an email to staff. He wrote that a trip to Silicon Valley in September had "confirmed the speed of change."

The FT plans to shift resources from the production of the print editions to its online news and services. This will be done by eliminating late editions and greater standardization between newspaper editions for the UK, US, and world.

The job cuts appear to be focused on restructuring production desks but it will depend on who accepts the voluntary redundancies. The FT has about 600 editorial jobs.

...we must stick to the tested practices of good journalism: deep and original reporting based on multiple sources and a sharp eye for the scoop. But we must also recognise that the internet offers new avenues and platforms for the richer delivery and sharing of information.

We are moving from a news business to a networked business.

Mr Barber did not explain what type of "networked business" the FT is planning to build. He stressed the importance of "serving a digital platform first" but also that print "is still a vital source of advertising revenues."

Foremski's Take:

Disruptive technologies disrupt and they will continue to disrupt companies in their path -- even if they have seen the disruption coming there is often no escape.

This is the situation facing the Financial Times, and many other news businesses, as they adapt to an online business model that can't generate the revenues needed to support serious journalism.

The FT is considered one of the leaders in the media industry for pioneering an inventive paywall, raising the price of subscriptions, and reducing expenses through job cuts. But such actions aren't enough to ensure a sustainable business and more is needed.

If the FT, with its specialist focus, and audience of high income executives and investors is having trouble, the situation has be even more difficult for general newspapers. We'll undoubtably see further job cuts and closures across many newspaper groups in 2013.

Silicon Valley competitors

The FT has a tough road ahead. The only competitors Mr Barber names in his email are "new entrants" Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

LinkedIn might not seem like a competitor but it has been investing in producing original editorial content, and it has a very large network of professionals with many FT readers.

Yet those competitors are not in the same league as the FT, their costs of content production are minuscule, mostly relying on user generated content and what they can scrape from elsewhere.

The FT cannot compete against these types of media companies because its editorial production costs are so much higher.

It operates a global network of news bureaus in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo. And it sends out its own foreign correspondents, along with their families, to overseas assignments for years at a time, picking up housing, schooling, and repatriation expenses. Such costs used to be justified because of the large advertising revenues FT newspapers and magazines once generated. 

But the editorial content its journalists produce now has far less value in online news markets.

Heinz 57 business model

Mr Barber's challenge is huge. He must build a sustainable media business that can survive mostly from what it can earn in the online world, which isn't much if it's relying mostly on advertising and paywalls.

Media companies have to adopt what I call a "Heinz 57" business model -- they have to develop many varieties of revenues because advertising alone can't carry the load or bring in a load. Subscriptions, events, special marketing programs, apps, paywalls, lead generation, staff recruitment, affiliate vendor relationships, and lots more are needed -- and it's a lot to manage.

Deflating advertising...

The value of online advertising has undergone tremendous deflation because of competitors such as Google.

Google's content production costs are small and so are its distribution costs, which means it can sell advertising at very low rates and still make large profits.

The FT, or any type of traditional media organization, cannot compete against a Silicon Valley media company that can thrive on such low advertising rates.

Restructuring production desks

There's no amount of technology that the FT could use, or any amount of restructuring of production desks, that will make much of a difference to its future if it can't find significant revenues beyond advertising. And those additional sources of revenues have to be relatively stable and safe from other disruptive technologies. 

I think that the FT will eventually get it right and develop new sources of revenues and start growing again. It will require an unpleasant overhaul of its news bureaus and a wrenching cultural shift in its editorial processes but it can be done.

This year marks the FT's 125th anniversary and the brand has a lot of value primarily because of its outstanding editorial reputation. Will it be able to survive to celebrate 130 years and still produce the same high quality journalism? 

The FT's struggle to stay in business illustrates a serious fundamental issue with the digital economy: the lack of a sustainable business model that can fund serious journalism.

The rise of the Internet and media technologies such as the web, created this situation. It's the biggest problem we face as a society, and there's no good solution yet, despite many smart minds, Mr Barber's included.

The current business model for media success requires massive scale and low investment in editorial content.

The FT's small scale combined with its high investment in editorial content are completely opposite to the economic realities of these times.

The FT won't be able to scale fast enough through its own organic efforts to stay ahead of deteriorating revenues. It will require a partner to provide it with the scale it needs to justify its large editorial investments.

Pearson, which owns the FT, has repeatedly said that it won't sell its newspaper group. But harsh business realities have a way of persuading even the most stubborn boardrooms to change their minds.

Disclosure: I used to work for the Financial Times in its San Francisco news bureau and left in 2004. I first started writing for the Financial Times in 1985. 

When it comes to making industry predictions I always resolve not to make any, but as you can see, I have trouble keeping my new year's resolutions.

Two year's ago I made the same resolution and failed when I wrote: 2010 Prediction: The Media Tsunami Is Coming...

The media is dead, long live the media. We now have more media, in more formats, in more times of the day and night, from more people -- than at any other time in history. And we will get even more in 2010.

When I talk about media, I mean anything and all things that are published: news stories, magazine articles, TV, radio, video, music, advertising, photos, web pages, and of course social media. All of it, all the media that's fit to print and all that isn't. 

The low cost of the tools to make media content is a big driver, more important however, are the media hungry platforms that make it easy to publish anything and distribute it widely. One-click uploading to Youtube, or Facebook, or wherever, it's all very easy to create and publish media. A tsunami of media.

Tsunamis come in waves...

The horror of Japan's tsunami showed that it's not just one big wave but a series of large waves that collectively aggregate a force of unimaginable destruction. Similarly, the media tsunami that we are caught in, has several waves, some have yet to hit the shore.

The social media wave is one that is easy to see and it's still moving fast but there's another wave close behind.

The rise of corporate media...

As traditional media organizations struggle and mostly fail to deal with the massive changes disrupting their industry, corporations are rushing in to fill some of the empty spaces by creating their own media content. 

Every company is a media company -- not because they want to be but because they have to be. They have to be seen in the world or they cease to exist, which is why they are ramping up their output of corporate media. And we are just at the start of this trend.

I've worked with Intel on some of its internally sourced media projects; Cisco Systems with its "The Network" publication; and ambitious ventures such as Nissan Motors' TV news channel, are all examples of how corporations are becoming media companies.

They know the value of high quality media content about themselves and about their industries is essential to their bottom-lines.

Since the traditional sources of high quality media, the newspapers, trade publications, magazines,TV shows, etc, aren't producing enough of it, corporations have to produce it themselves.

This trend could be viewed as stop gap measure that buys time until traditional media businesses figure out their new business models, and start growing again. But it's not. There has been a fundamental shift in the business of all media that can't be turned back.

Unstoppable and inevitable...

The reason the rise in corporate media is unstoppable is because the disruption in the media industry is unstoppable.

When your industry is in the path of a disruptive technology huge numbers of businesses will not survive -- no matter what they do. This is why disruptive technologies are called disruptive and not because it's an edgy term.

Even if a company sees the train wreck well ahead on the track they are on,  it won't save them. I've seen it time and again during my 25 years in Silicon Valley, they will slam into that train wreck. The vast majority won't be able to down size, change tracks, or reform their business model in time. Disruptive technologies disrupt.

Making cars and making news programs...

Nissan Motor Company has built a full sized TV studio and has staffed it with top TV journalists from the BBC and elsewhere. It's producing high quality news shows that cover everything that is news, even if it's about Nissan or its competitors, even if it's the riots in China over the territorial dispute with Japan, where mobs were burning Japanese cars and attacking Japanese restaurants. If it's news it gets covered, no matter what it is, as any top news organization would do.

When I met Simon Sproule, Nissan's head of global marketing late last year, I asked him why not just sponsor a TV news show? Why go through the trouble of a very steep learning curve in figuring how to build, staff, and operate a TV news show?

His answer shocked me but it also confirmed that my seven year old analysis of the global media industry was spot on. He said he didn't trust that traditional media companies would succeed in figuring out the new business models.

It makes sense. Why should Nissan invest several years of its massive advertising spend with TV networks if they won't survive the disruption? Taking away Nissan's money will certainly hasten their decline but spending that money in the same places won't help either.

The risk for Nissan is that if it doesn't take action of some kind today, its investments of money and relationships with traditional media companies over the next few years will have been for nothing, and it'll be at square one trying to figure out what to do next. It's better to start now.

If the media companies manage to survive the disruption, Nissan can use them to sell cars; if not, then it has another way to sell cars, by producing high quality professional media itself.

Corporate media Pulitzers...

If Nissan is thinking that traditional media organizations won't survive then other large corporations must be thinking about this too. Will they follow Nissan's example? This is why I've asked the question: Is Corporate Media The New Funding Model For Serious Journalism? - SVW.

It might seem crazy to think of Nissan, Toyota, and Ford Motors competing for Pulitzer prizes for excellence in reporting but it could happen. Could we trust such media sources? Yes, why not? Nissan is already producing serious journalism, and what's to stop others doing it too? Since corporations are very serious about protecting their brands, they would be highly motivated to produce high quality journalism.

The rise of corporate media is unstoppable and inevitable, and it might just be essential to society. If we can't figure out a funding model for serious journalism we will be in serious trouble, special interest groups will have more power than ever before.

Content inflation....

The problem when there is more of any thing, is that the value of that thing is less. Lots of diamonds are valued less than less diamonds -- which is why De Beers tries to control supplies.

The value of a piece of content is determined by how much money can be earned from it, via selling ads, services, etc.

Producing more content creates opportunities for more revenues. 

In the print world producing more content is constrained by high costs of production and distribution but not in the online world. For each media company, the more media content it can produce, the more revenues it can capture. As revenues fall for each piece of content, more content must be produced to keep pace with revenue targets. More inventory results in less ad revenue earned per content item.

Content inflation is devaluing all content.

It's a race to produce ever more content. For example, reporters at popular online news web sites now have to produce five or more stories per day.

Back in the heyday of print journalism, ten years ago or so, newspaper reporters were expected to produce four or five news stories per week. At some of the large national magazines such as Businessweek, Newsweek, etc, journalists could make high six-figure salaries producing five or six feature articles a year. 

More media also means that we will see more low quality media being published, it's like the dirty black water that a tsunami grinds in its wake.

If you can produce higher quality media you'll be able to rise above the rest. There's a lot more high quality content being produced but so what? It still has to compete against more of all types of media, including more high quality content.

Some are focusing on producing "compelling" content, I see a lot of PR "gurus" espousing the need for compelling content, compelling story telling. It's true, compelling content is a good thing to have and we are seeing a lot more compelling content being produced. But so what? It still has to compete with more of everything.

The value of all media content as a whole: news media, corporate media, compelling or mundane media, photos, videos, social media, will continue to fall in 2013 and well into the rest of this decade. 

What will this mean?

- We can expect higher marketing costs for companies.

- Traditional PR will have less impact.

- Advertising will become even less effective.  

- And governments will have trouble communicating with their people.

These are just some of the things ahead for us. A cacophony of voices becoming ever more shrill and difficult to hear, the good and the bad, filtered and unfiltered, a mass of content, a media tsunami on an unprecedented scale.

The epicenter is here...

Silicon Valley is at the epicenter of this tsunami, it became a Media Valley years ago. Our top companies and startups are essentially media companies -- technology-enabled media companies. 

Google, for example, publishes pages of content with advertising. Facebook, Twitter, and multitudes  of startups are media companies.

Silicon Valley is the source of technologies disrupting the media sector, and the source for tools and services that companies are using to transform themselves into media companies. It's an incredible place to be right now because it's becoming a massive Gutenberg machine that's about to start cranking out new types of media in formats as yet unimagined. It's by far the most interesting place in tech, imho.

---

Check back for more on this topic here at Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting from the intersection of technology and media since 2004. 

From SEOBook: "A case study in being PRE negatively seo'ed."

Enter www.buymycar.com, an idea I had wanted to do for some time, where people list a car and it gets sent to a network of dealers who bid on it from a secure area. A simple idea but FAR from simple to implement.

...

Satisfied I had ticked all the boxes from hours of Matt Cutts video's and Google guidelines documents, I went to work... I was enjoying building what I had hoped would be a useful site and kicked myself for not having done so sooner. I also thanked Google mentally for being smart enough now to reward better sites.

But after four months of work, testing, and signing up car dealers, and still before the full launch, the web site owner Robert Prime, checked to see what links there were to the site. To his horror he found 13,208 sites had used a link to his site using the anchor text "Buy My Car Scam."

...this was absolutely devastating to see.

A worried competitor had obviously decided I was a threat and to nip my site in the bud with Google and attack it before it had even fully started. The live launch date was scheduled for January 7th, 2013!

... I was faced with death by Google rankings ... before it had any rankings... my site being cited as a scam across the Internet before it launched!

Foremski's Take: Negative search engine optimization was rare until Google changed its algorithm over the past two years and started paying attention to the quality of the sites linking to any web site.

It has led to a huge erasure of hyperlinks as web sites try to clean up large networks of their back-links.

But it has also added masses of new hyperlinks designed to tarnish the online reputation of a competitor and to flag it within Google as a potential scam or spam site.

When competitors gain by using this tactic what is the response of an ethical business? Does it have to do the same because that's what the mechanics of Google's algorithm dictates?

How can businesses behave ethically if Google only responds to unethical behavior by others, such as labeling a competitor a scam?

The Google algorithm is more than a collection of numerical values -- it also has ethical and moral values built in that can't be easily seen. The rise in negative SEO shows how the design of the algorithm can encourage unethical business practices.

Can Google design an algorithm that rewards ethical businesses? Companies competing to be more ethical than each other would be a very good thing to see.

If Google can do one then it can do the other, imho.

The Googleplex - Google's HQ from above [$GOOG]. Credit: Tom Foremski

It's remarkable how few journalists understand Google's business and how what it does or doesn't do affects massive volumes of commerce around the globe.

If I were running the New York Times I would keep half-a-dozen journalists focused on Google 24/7 because it's that important.

Instead, we get very little real coverage of Google and what goes on beneath the hood, because the mainstream media doesn't know much about Google at all. It's easier to write about self-driving cars than to delve into the complexities of Google's business.

And Google loves to point people to its self-driving cars, because it's a red herring that has nothing to do with it's business except to keep the prying eyes of media distracted and focused away from its core activities.

Eric Schmidt, chairman and former CEO of Google, is a little like Google's self-driving car -- designed to take attention away from the rest of Google. We never hear anything insightful or revealing about Google from Mr Schmidt because he's not that plugged into the company, his job is to act as a lightning rod and keep others from digging into the business practices of the search giant.

You'll notice that Mr Schmidt's forthcoming book "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business" is co-authored with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, to provide some ideas about the future. Even then, I wonder if it will be worth buying when I read an excerpt such as this:

Soon everyone on Earth will be connected. With billions more people set to join the virtual world in the next few years, the boon in digital connectivity will bring to the physical world enormous gains in productivity, health, education, and quality of life.

By 2025, the majority of the world's population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to having almost unlimited access to all of the world's information through its largest ungoverned space -- the Internet.

As this space grows larger our understanding of nearly every aspect of life will change, from the minutia of our daily lives to more fundamental questions about identity, relationships and even our own security.

It reads like a high school essay cribbed from old copies of Wired magazine.

For a taste of the complexity of Google's world, and everyone that's trying to make money in that world, take a look at this infographic from SEOBook attempting to explain the many different strategies that Google uses when updating its search algorithm.

Google's goal is to confuse search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and to uncover aggressive SEO techniques through delaying, or obfuscating results from SEO changes being made.

By making it harder to link a change in a web site, with the resulting change in search rank, Google believes it can fight SEO and clean up its search rankings.

Unfortunately, it also means that a lot of legitimate online businesses can lose rank overnight and lose revenues for no fault of theirs but due to clumsy algorithm changes that favor big brands and big business.

The past couple of years of algorithm changes have been very hard on small online businesses, and forums are full of heart breaking stories of decimated revenues and job cuts.

This comes at a time when Washington D.C. is looking to Silicon Valley and "innovation" as helping jumpstart a deeply troubled economy and create millions of new jobs. That's not going to happen and Google is a good example of why that won't happen -- if you understand its business -- which few journalists do.

This infographic is not easy to follow unless you are in the business of search engine marketing. However, it does give outsiders a view of the territory that nearly every online business has to deal with on a constant basis -- trying to keep up with algorithm changes that can sink or swim your business, without warning, and often like an act of god, without rhyme or reason.

(Here's a much larger version.)

Analytics company Mixpanel and its investor Andreessen Horowitz are trying to persuade the tech world to be more honest with itself by reporting numbers that are far more informative: Engagement and retention.

... Marc Andreessen and Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi have decided they want to raise the shame level by calling them "bullshit metrics."

Foremski's Take: Everyone that uses any kind of metric knows they aren't perfect and that they are often easily manipulated. That was the case back in the day of print, too. Reader numbers were often inflated, and all sorts of tricks were used to help sell newspapers and magazines to advertisers.

Metrics, in one form or another, are one of the chief currencies of the digital economy. That's how publishers get paid, and that's how startups can raise money by showing their popularity.

Publishers and startups know that the metrics they report aren't a reliable way to gauge success but that's what advertisers and investors want to see, so that's what they see.

Mr Andreessen wants metrics that measure engagement and retention. But that's just another thing to be gamed and it's very easy to game things in the digital world. It's still true today, as it was back in the day, that no one knows you're a dog.

The truth about online metrics of any kind is that whatever the metric - its value will degrade over time.

Advertisers want people to engage with their ads so they design them to be engaging such as clicking on what type of ad you want played on Hulu, thus driving engagement metrics for not much benefit to the viewers. How many people want to engage with advertising? None. It doesn't matter because thats what pays the ad agency bills that quarter.

You have to apply your own analysis of the metrics being offered and that's what investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, and advertisers need to do, and that's what the best ones do.

It's only "bullshit metrics" if you don't know how to interpret them according to your needs and goals.

The important thing is not to stop using metrics of one kind or any kind, it's important to be measuring something, even if it needs to be changed going forward.

And it's important to remember that some types of metrics will change over time because they reflect trends and fashions among online users. For example, how people "engage" is constantly changing and shifting, from blog posts, to comments, to photos, to images, to retweets, to ...

Anecdotally, I see people sharing less, I see people sharing things privately, I see an iceberg forming under the public view of our online lives, representing an ever larger mass of our social activities.

Metrics are just metrics - bullshit is how they are sold. And people love being sold to.

The widespread belief is that the media has "reach." Trust me, they don't. Not anymore. It's become almost pathetic.

It hit me the other day when I snagged a profile for a client on a well-known website...

Dear God, I realized, my client has more readers than they do. The website needed us to attract an audience for them. They wanted the subject of the piece to send his readers over to them rather than the other way around.

It seems a bit strange that people in New York, the media capital of the world, have only just discovered "Pageview Journalism."

Popularity has been driving online journalism for sometime, I started writing about it more than 2 1/2 years ago in May 2010, noting that reporters are increasingly rewarded based on the traffic they bring, either through direct cash compensation, or by a boost up the editorial ladder, which is essentially the same thing.

Things were similar in the days of paper: writing scoops, provocative subjects, popular columns, etc. But reporters could get away with also writing stories about less well known subjects, ones that might not gain much attention, but the stories were important in highlighting emerging trends and personalities, because it was the overall number of readers that was counted.

In the move from paper to electron, the number of readers of a single article can be counted, and is counted. This means journalists are encouraged to focus on articles with subjects that will bring larger numbers of readers.

Why should a journalist focus on a small company, or unknown individual when the likely small size of the audience will bring the wrong type of attention from their boss?

The focus on Pageview Journalism is a product of the hard economic realities of the media industry. But its rise represents a capitulation of editorial direction and voice to the fickle whims of pop culture.

The result is what we have today: a bland me-too media landscape which publishes huge numbers of the same stories.

But this is not just about journalists feeling the pressure of popularity. What about PR companies? Why should I take a briefing from your client if I can't get the traffic?

Can PR companies drive traffic to a story that I write?

If they can they are golden. Reporters will take their calls over any others.

- - -

Please see:

MediaWatch: Journalists Won't Report News Unless It Can Drive Page Views - SVW

The Future Of Tech Journalism In A Post-Technology World - SVW

PRWeb distributed the press release and said it slipped through its internal tests for "integrity."

Danny Sullivan explains how PRWeb has become a popular distribution network for a lot of content, some of it shady, and how it ends up on well respected newspaper sites.

How PRWeb Helps Distribute Crap Into Google & News Sites

In the past, you'd get a press release out and hope newspapers might pick up the story, often using the release as a basis for writing their own stories -- ones that might be fact-checked, or sourced with others, or get turned into something other than a promotional item.

Instead, with PRWeb and other services, you can get whatever you want published and distributed verbatim into a wide range of news sources.

Foremski's Take:

Many newspapers have sections where they republish press releases, hoping to make a little money on the pageviews that this might draw. They don't check the facts in the release because they never have, even when writing news stories based on that information.

Newsrooms everywhere assume that the facts within a news release are trustworthy because the company issuing the release has passed it through many internal checks by its communications and legal teams.

Journalists also assume that the distribution service, PRWeb, Businesswire, etc, has verified the source of the press release, though not the facts in the release.

The "scoop" culture in rewriting press releases

This system works nearly 100% of the time. However, once a fake release has made it into this trusted network it can then gain wide distribution very quickly on highly ranked news sites, primarily because of a key vulnerability in many of today's newsrooms.

Lots of online news sites, such as TheNextWeb, Techcrunch, etc, demand as many as 6 news stories per day from each staff writer. They are under intense pressure to publish news stories within minutes of an announcement, which means they are rewriting press releases with no time to make calls.

Gone are the days of newspaper deadlines, when reporters had several hours to work on a news story before each edition hit the streets.

In this new newsroom culture, the first site to publish the rewrite of the press release is considered having a "scoop" even though the lead might be measured in seconds

[A scoop used to mean being the exclusive source of an important news story. It represented a lot of hard work by reporters cultivating networks of important contacts. Rewriting press releases all day long does little to help young news writers become effective reporters, who are skilled in interviewing senior executives, in nurturing contacts, and skilled in the many ways of uncovering great stories and real scoops.]

The perils of broad distribution...

This incident highlights another valuable aspect of issuing a press release: it can help to maintain a high Google rank by increasing the number of links back to a company.

As Danny Sullivan explains:

Buying a press release through PRWeb is an easy and legit way to effectively buy links, a way that Google doesn't penalize you for.

That won't stay true for long if PRWeb continues to distribute fake releases, or spammy, low quality content. And if that content is republished by large numbers of what Google considers to be low ranked sites, that will be a very large problem too.

There are a lot of web sites republishing press releases because the content is free and easy to find.

There's a very clear danger here: Google's algorithm updates are increasingly focused on rooting out sites trying to scam Google into awarding a higher rank. Lots of links can harm websites because it is a red flag for Google. It could decide to penalize a site for trying to SEO it's way into a higher rank by buying lots of links on lots of low quality websites.

Take a look at: The Fast Unravelling Web: Here's Why Google Is Killing The Hyperlink - SVW

This is why many companies are trying to get web sites to delete links back to them because they are concerned that it is hurting their Google rank.

This "negative SEO" trend, where fewer links from top sites are better than lots of links from many sites, is resulting in a mass erasure of hyperlinks and threatens to unravel much of the commercial Internet. I

PRWeb is popular because it can offer wide distribution for its clients' content which can lead to lots of backlinks from many sites. But if Google decides it doesn't trust those sites, or the distribution platform, it could boomerang onto PRWeb customers with a wallop, because of all the backlinks from low-ranked sites. 

And if Google decides that some content is low quality, then every website republishing that content, is risking its visibility within its search rank.

PRWeb is just an example of the challenges faced by all other press release and content distribution services. 

So what's the best way for companies to distribute their press releases? It has to be through trusted distribution networks that keep low-quality, spammy content out. Because Google will judge your business and your content on the company it keeps.

He spoke at a Wired "Culturazzi" event, at the Marriott Union Square and to sign copies of his latest book: "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution."

And that's what 3D printers represent, nothing less than the consolidation of the massed factories of the industrial revolution, into a singe icon on your computer's screen: "Make."

This is the promise of 3D printers, they are "replicators" they enable us to photocopy reality: "Rip. Mod. Make."

They represent the next industrial revolution and it's because of this that Mr Anderson left his job. "It will be bigger than the Web," he predicted.

At the book signing, I asked Mr Anderson how he was going to profit from 3D printers, will he make them? No, no, he has his drone company, which he says is the same thing, and it's all explained in the book. Making robotic flying gizmos. I don't quite understand how it is the same thing but for the purposes of the evening's theme, it is the same thing.

I must admit I don't understand how printing plastic things at home disrupts anything beyond my local "99 cent" store that has lots of plastic things that now I might choose to print at home, and it would probably cost me more than 99 cents - given the history of ink prices for my home printer.

Our industrial age has created a massive number of advanced materials that are essential to producing our products - 3D printers can only handle soft, easily melted materials. A home 3D printer that can create a product with multiple materials, such as ceramics and metals, hasn't been invented and won't be for many years.

How disruptive can a 3D printer making plastic things be? Mr Anderson's book was printed at a large print shop - my home printer, despite many years of progress, still can't replicate a book - in all its qualities of heft and form.

If 3D printers could handle melted cheese, sugar, or chocolate, I could see a future for them in the home. But I wouldn't leave my day job.

More photos:

Above, on right, and below: Katie Boysen, Communications Director at Nasty Gal.

More photos here.

I've been warning people: "Special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want you to read, but you won't pay for the media you need to read."

Software engineers have a saying: GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.

If you start with garbage data you will get a garbage result. That's the future we are heading towards, a future where our media is corrupted with information that serves the goals of special interest groups.

Take a look at Australia where multi-billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart has been trying to acquire Fairfax Media, publisher of top newspapers, in a bid to counter anti-mining forces. We'll see more of that as newspapers and other traditional media continue to weaken.

Without our gatekeepers, able to spot corporate spin and BS, how will we make the right decisions about things such as the economy, environment, education, energy, ecology, elder healthcare...

And that's just the issues that begin with the letter 'e.'

Could corporate media be the answer to the funding problem for serious journalism?

My fellow panelists at the recent Holmes Report Global PR Summit were John Earnhardt, head of corporate communications at Cisco (Cisco is my original inspiration for 'every company is a media company'), Jesse Noyes from Eloqua, and Simon Sproule, head of global marketing at Nissan Motor Co., with Morgan McLintic from Lewis PR as the moderator.

Morgan had chosen the panelists well because Cisco and Nissan provided two contrasting models of corporate media producing great journalism.

Cisco has a large team of journalists producing articles about the tech industry for its online magazine "the network." John Earnhardt said that the reporters have just two rules to follow: "Don't write about competitors, and don't write anything that could harm Cisco."

At Nissan Motors, the company has built a full scale TV studio and produces a news program with veteran journalists from the BBC and elsewhere.

It produces news stories that sometimes feature its competitors, and it doesn't shy away from controversial subjects such as Chinese protestors smashing up Nissan cars and other Japanese cars, in response to the dispute over the nationality of remote islands in the South China Sea.

It's an extremely bold move for corporate media to engage in highly charged, highly controversial subjects. And because of that, Nissan represents the leading edge in the rise of corporate media.

Its news programs are designed to be indistinguishable in content and quality from that of traditional news organizations.

Mr Sproule admits it is hard work," We are building the plane as we are flying it."

I asked Mr Sproule, why does Nissan want to get into the business of serious news journalism? Why not sponsor an existing news show?

His answer was surprising. "I don't have the confidence that traditional news organizations will be able to survive the transition to the new business models. Why should I invest large amounts of money over the next few years in a failing enterprise?"

Taking Nissan marketing money away from traditional media will surely hasten that decline but I can understand his position.

Despite the steep learning curve, Nissan is pleased with the audience it is attracting and it plans to expand into sports coverage next year.

Ultimately, both Nissan and Cisco will be judged on how many cars or network equipment they sell. And here, there is a very important distinction to be made compared with traditional media.

Earlier this year when I asked John Earnhardt how's the traffic to Cisco's "the network" online magazine? He said it was good, but that he would be happy if it made a difference to just one person.

I was incredulous, one person? Yes, he said, if that person controls a $100 million budget and chooses Cisco then that will more than pay for the costs of its corporate media venture.

(Nissan says it measures its news program success in audiences of millions but it acknowledges it ultimately is judged by how many cars it sells.)

This made me realize that the business model for corporate media has a massive advantage over traditional media where success has to be measured in an audience reach of tens of millions.

Media is a loss leader, you need something else to sell. If all you have is media to sell, then you will have losses.

That's why traditional media has large losses, it has nothing else to sell.

We are moving into a world where corporate media is on the rise because of the decline in traditional media businesses.

Corporate media is dabbling in the production of serious journalism with an important advantage: it just needs to reach enough people that will buy its products, and that will more than cover its operating costs.

- How can traditional media businesses compete? How will they finance their operations from digital business models that require massive audiences to be viable?

- Can corporate media can generate serious journalism? Yes, we've seen it can. Corporations have valuable brands to protect, they will be highly motivated to produce high quality media.

- Could corporate media win a Pulitzer prize? Why not? I can easily imagine a world where corporations compete with each other to produce great investigative journalism.

Clearly, it would be preferable if we our serious journalism originated from an independent third party but that's not looking like an option. Traditional media organizations continue to struggle to transition to the digital economy.

Cisco, Nissan, and a few others, like Intel, could very well be the early prototypes for the future of high quality journalism, and provide an extremely valuable service to society.

I really enjoyed being at Outside Lands but there was a ton of music that I didn't get to see, so this project also gave me an opportunity to see those other acts.

I found a lot of great footage uploaded by fans and I curated it into a collection that continues to grow as people upload more clips.

Yes, many are shaky, some of the videos are shot extremely well but the sound isn't very good but the content often makes up for the shortcomings because of the enthusiasm of the crowd, the vantage point, the singing of the fans...

For example: Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up."

Take a look at my highlights Pearltree here.

And here is the whole Pearltree:

Outside Lands 2011 - Found Fan Video Documentary in Outside Lands 2011
Let me know if you'd like to team up and work with me on this project.

Burning Man is very much a San Francisco/Silicon Valley festival. It's a type of Dionysian harvest festival where people bring together tremendous creativity and industry and where there's no commercial payoff at all. There's no commerce and there's no advertising and no sponsorships.

Out of a dusty ancient lake bed where nothing can grow, a city of 50,000 people rises, with buildings and structures several stories tall.

A week later it all goes away, back to the bitter alkali dust that is everyone's souvenir of Burning Man because you keep finding it in every nook and cranny.

Burning Man always seems so unique and so fragile, it always seems that it might fall apart, but it hasn't yet.

A core culture...

Burning Man has been around long enough, since 1986, that it is now core to the experience of the culture of the Bay Area. That's why you should plan to go one day.

But a trip to Burning Man is not about throwing a weekend bag into the back of the car. You have to pack everything in and out. There is only ice and coffee that you can buy in the centre camp. You have to bring everything and take everything back out with you.

Also, the environment is hostile. This is where they should test the mars rover because the extremes of temperature, rain, sand storms, freezing wind -- are harsh. This is not a pleasant experience and it's not for the weekend spa goer. Which is why Burning Man attracts a particular type of person.

Playa art...

The best part of Burning Man is the art in the playa -- a truly vast canvas where people create incredible art. Some of it is giant sculptures such as the one above, "Bliss" a 40 foot tall sculpture of a dancing woman built by artist Marco Cochrane, you can see it on Treasure Island.

It's a good example of the huge ambitions of the artists that come together at Burning Man.

It teaches...

The event is important because it teaches a lot of things: town planning, survival in extreme environments, cooperation with others, how to work in teams, how to be productive, and how to be generous. There is no commerce of any type at Burning Man, the art and other projects rarely have any names attached to them.

The entire experience is unmediated, there is no expectation of any kind, it's a meritocracy of in it's truest sense -- there is no history. Each year Burning Man is reborn again, from the same dust but into a totally new world.

Commerce free... mind free

The commerce-free experience is great because it frees up a lot of your mind that you didn't realize was affected. For example, there are dozens of radio stations, several daily newspapers but there's no advertising. Even brand names on the sides of rental vans are blacked out. There is nothing that is "sponsored by Intel" or any visible brands at all. As far as you can see.

It was painful leaving Black Rock City and moving beyond the range of the Burning Man radio stations and having to switch to commercial radio, even PBS. It was so hard having to listen to all those commercials.

Even reading a magazine with adverts was difficult for many days. I realized how much I'm flooded with commercial messages, repeatedly, constantly. It felt very good to be away from all that commerce chatter because it freed up some of my internal dialogue.

That's a great benefit of Burning Man: living for a week in a place where there is no commerce at all. A commerce-free experience -- where else can you get that? Nowhere. Everywhere you go in the world, even remote territories, someone is trying to sell you something -- but not at Burning Man. That's a priceless experience.

All the work that people do to build Black Rock City is donated, there is no commercial intent. To see an entire city functioning, productive, and so innovative -- without any commercial payoff or intent is truly extraordinary. What type of blueprint could it provide for our cities today? [IBM with its Smart Cities program should study Black Rock City.]

Plus, Burning Man can be a great place for networking. Eric Schmidt got his job at Google because he hung out with Larry and Sergey there one year.

Discovering new music all in one place is a great way to spend three days and there was lots of music that was new to me.

Unmediated experiences...

It was also good to be in a large mass of people, tens of thousands, and I realized how rare it is to see so many people at the same time. It felt like I was checking in with my larger community, the one I only see through other channels, mostly media channels of one kind or another. Yet here was a totally unmediated experience.

I started thinking about the word and taking it apart: "un-media-ted" and how wonderfully descriptive it is, especially in the context of our media soaked experience of the world.

How much of the world do we get to experience that is un-media-ted -- that is not consumed through one kind of media or another? There's not much, at least not much that's meaningful.

I realized that meaningful unmediated experiences of the world are rare and that's why it felt extra good to have this experience at Outside Lands.

In that spirit, I'm putting together a collection of videos I found on Youtube and elsewhere, that capture some of the spirit and fun of Outside Lands.

It's all found footage from fans, most of it is shaky, some of it is extremely well shot, but all of it comes from people that are really into the music, you hear the crowd sing, the camera waves with the hands in the air... there's some great scenes.

Say it ain't so...

Up top is an example of Foster the People performing a cover of Weezer's "Say It Ain't So." You are right in center front, in the middle of the crowd, singing along. It's the closest we can get to an unmediated experience of being at Outside Lands.

And I've collected lots more of these found fan videos into a curation of Outside Lands 2011 -- it's essentially a crowd generated documentary pieced together from hundreds of video camera phones.

I've organized the project in Pearltrees because it has a great media viewer and I can easily share the entire collection. Plus, I can recruit a team of people working with me to curate the collection, by searching for new uploads, checking the quality of the videos, and throwing out the worst ones.

If you were at Outside Lands, or you are a fan of some of the bands that were there, please team up with me on this Pearltrees project -- you can become part of the first Pearltrees documentary!

If you missed Outside Lands 2011 please browse my Pearltree, you can choose by artist name and jump straight to their performance.

I'm still curating the collection but the first five artist videos have been sorted according to the best videos, the weakest are left in a "rest of videos" pearltree. But the work is not done so if you'd like to team up with me and find and add new videos, please send me a request. It's really easy to use Pearltrees in a collaborative project.

The Decemberists...

Here's the Outside Lands collection I curated for The Decemberists. Check out the incredible "Down By The Water." Another great found video. There's lots more.

Arcade Fire...

Here's the Arcade Fire collection. Check out the first video (below), you are right in the middle of the crowd happy and excited to be there, waiting for the band to come on. Then as the band starts "Wake Up" a crowd favorite, everyone is singing and waving, and you'll be too -- there's tremendous emotional power in these videos. It's good payback for the camera shake you have to endure at times with these videos. (I'd love to run them through iMovie's anti-shake correction, it wouldn't take long.)

Don't miss the second video too, the incredible performance by Mavis Staples and Win Butler in a cover of "The Weight."

Girl Talk...

The most memorable show was Girl Talk, which surprised me because listening to the music before the festival I was just mildly interested. But the show was so good.

It was just one man and his computer. He had the whole meadow full of happy and singing people -- the vibe was tremendous. Fans filled the stage, and you couldn't tell where the performer and audience started or ended -- the whole performance became one happy, pulsating crowd. And the music was a superb mix of musical icons, cultural passages that each evoked a mass of additional connections. A great live show.

Outside Lands 2011 watched from the crowd...

Here's the entire Outside Lands found footage Pearltree, you can browse it, you can add it to your collection, which means when I update it your copy gets updated too. Also, you can team up with me and help me curate the entire project.

I hope you enjoy this collection of found fan videos. And you can leave comments on the videos to thank the hundreds of fans that created this documentary of three days of great music at Outside Lands 2011.

Outside Lands 2011 (Found Fan Video Footage) in Outside Lands 2011

It's partly media's fascination with itself, that there is a lot of media this week about Marshall McLuhan: the philosopher prince of the media world. It's the 100 year anniversary of his birth, July 21.

Mr McLuhan came to fame in the 1960s thanks to the boom in television, which propelled his image and voice into many millions of homes, and also provided the source material for his insights into the nature of a nascent, but increasingly powerful media technology.

"The medium is the message" is his most famous quote and it used to perplex me; I could find no one that could adequately explain it. It was fun to say but its meaning seemed trite while alluding to a greater truth. It was fascinating.

It wasn't until the fragmentation of digital media over the past 20 or so years, that for me at least, that quote made a lot more sense.

The mass age of media...

Even the misspelling of the famous phrase made sense. "The Medium is the Massage" became the title for an innovative book produced by Mr McLuhan and collaborators in graphics design. The title was a typo from the publisher on an early draft but Mr McLuhan decided to keep it because it had accidentally produced an insight into media and the "mass age" the mass media age of our times. It helped establish the term "mass media" as an important concept.

I've put together some mostly short clips from YouTube that should serve as a decent introduction to Mr McLuhan's ideas (please see end).

The media mess age...

Today, we might judge some of Mr McLuhan's ideas as obvious, but that's because we are products of the mass media age; we are "media natives" in a way that few could have been in his time.

Our children are digital media natives and they will have their own Marshall McLuhans to help them understand their world.

What would Mr McLuhan think about the media world of today? Has much changed?

It's certainly looks to be a very messy, very fragmented media world with many more types of distribution channels. But it's ultimately a manageable mess because it's digital. Computer technology can manage anything that's digital no matter how messy -- and that includes the challenge of publishing media through a mess of social networks and online sites.

A fragmented media world doesn't mean that the old order has also fragmented. The increasing complexity in acquiring huge volumes of traffic is becoming a matter of scale and money. This favors large media organizations because they have scale and money. And so do the big product brands who are becoming media companies themselves, the best known example is Red Bull's impressive magazine publishing venture.

Large brands such as Philip Morris used to have their own TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s, so today's world would be a very recognizable world if Mr McLuhan were to visit (he died in 1980). He'd also see that the media still uses mass media distribution channels: the Internet, the most "mass" of all channels. And the production of media is still dominated by big media companies.

Social media hopes...

What would Mr McLuhan say about "social media?" Is it a distinct media or just one aspect of "media" as a whole?

Social media certainly seemed different when it began to emerge a decade ago as blogging. There was a great enthusiasm and optimism about this potent, emerging challenge to the media autocracy.

The early excitement about the blogosphere was driven by an expectation that it would sweep away the institutions of mass media and its legions of gate keepers. But the armies of citizen journalists that were expected to democratize the media industry never appeared, or at least not in sufficient numbers to make much of a difference.

And social media failed to become the superior alternative to mass media.

It's a shame but there it is, mass media is still very "mass" and alternative viewpoints and ideas continue to struggle to reach audiences. Much like in Mr McLuhan's times.

But there are many new developments. Maybe these will show a key change with Mr McLuhan's times?

The reason the media autocracy is seriously challenged is not because of blogging but because their online business models don't work. Google, and other low cost media companies, have driven down the value of Internet traffic. It requires massive volumes of traffic to produce profits from content. Which is why it helps if you can scrape your content for free, because you will need lots of it to make money.

A flip to the old order...

Here's an example of the newest type of new media company: Flipboard. Interestingly, it celebrates its one year anniversary on Mr McLuhan's birthday.

It employs about 32 people and publishes an iPad magazine that displays media content shared by your social networks. It freely collects content from many media sites and formats it in a very stylish design. It produced no revenues and no original content.

Here's a traditional media company: The McClatchy group publishes 30 daily newspapers and 43 non-dailies, it employs more than 7500 people and generates $1.3 billion in annual revenues.

Its stock market valuation is $210 million. Which is about the same as Flipboard's valuation back in spring when it raised funds -- its valuation is far higher today.

The emergence of SoDOMM...

Not only has social media failed to challenge mass media it is helping to amplify its reach. Several studies have shown that the vast majority of media shared through social networks is links to big media, sources such as New York Times, CNN, etc.

A large part of social media has become a sort of newspaper delivery service, and a willing promoter of TV programs and movies.

It's an effect I've dubbed SoDOMM - Social Distribution Of Mass Media.

Another change that I'm sure that Mr McLuhan would be fascinated to see is that we have so much more media, in more formats, at more times of the day and minute, than at anytime in our history. What will that do to us? It certainly will do something, and something very big.

I have a media hammer and so does he. I bet that Mr McLuhan would immediately recognize that the Internet is a media technology.

The invention of the web browser allowed any media content to be published to any computer screen no matter the platform and location. Now, any computer screen can publish back -- we now have a two way media platform that is going to have an enormous effect on every aspect of our lives.

New struggles for hegemony...

There are new battlegrounds of ideas and influence emerging, which are made more complex because of the mess of media out there. How does government and commerce deliver "mass" ideas through this fragmented mess? It's challenging because each media changes the message.

But it's precisely this fragmentation of media that also makes it easier to target messages of influence at specific groups, because a fragmented media will collect very specific types of audiences -- a marketer's dream.

The rise of Tribal Man...

I'm sure that Mr McCluhan would see recognize a trend he called "the rise of tribal man" and the decline of the individual.

And that's certainly true, we see modern day tribes of many sorts, most of us are members of many. And that was also the case fifty years ago when people belonged to an economic class, a job type, a neighborhood, a charity club, an alma mater, etc. Media companies tried to targeted every single tribe through specialist media but it wasn't easy.

In today's digital world it's far easier to reach these groups. The very things that modern tribes use to define themselves -- clothes, music, looks, speech, the places where they gather -- are easily visible online. And what's visible is trackable and targetable.

Also very visible: the mini dust storm of media we produce every day, just through clicking on like buttons, surfing sites and sharing stuff. It all ends up being faithfully reported in our news streams; every person is like a media company -- both publish original content (and neither makes money from it ;).

Each person's news stream is a mini magazine, and in today's world that's a huge source of free media content, that can be aggregated and sold to advertisers by the new generation of media companies.

Why?

While Mr McLuhan had a tremendous innate understanding of the early days of mass media and its likely effects on society, there was little discussion of "why?"

Mr McLuhan offered a clear cultural analysis and insight about the nascent modern media world-- a difficult feat for a complex subject -- but there is also a need for a materialist analysis for a more complete understanding.

Follow the money is what I was taught as a journalist because that's where you'll find a far more interesting story, and one that's more accurate, too.

For some of the missing materialism, it's worth turning to another pioneer thinker, the Italian journalist Antonio Gramsci. His work in the 1920s and 1930s was on the subject of "cultural hegemony" -- the struggle for the control of prime ideas by governments, elite groups, and commercial interests -- through the agencies of the media.

Hacking the brain stem...

On this anniversary of Mr McLuhan's birth I'm re-reading the prophetic "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. In this extraordinary 1992 novel, the future is a world where battles for cultural hegemony are fought with media technologies that try to hack straight into our brain stems -- bypassing our natural defenses of logic and reason -- and influencing us directly within the core of our sentient being, in our lizard brain.

It's a scary future and one that's not far off. You can see aspects of it in many places.

Garbage in...

I see the many changes happening in media as the most fascinating and important subject around. Because media is how society "thinks" and decides how to move forward on important issues.

Software engineers have a saying: garbage in, garbage out. If you start with garbage data you will get a garbage result no matter how good your code.

As media companies struggle in their transition to a new business model the quality of our media degrades. That means the quality of our decision making degrades too.

We have so many important decisions to make: about the economy, the environment, energy, education, ecology, elder healthcare ... and these are just the subjects that begin with the letter "e" -- there's plenty of others. Yet our abilities to make the best decisions is hampered by the poor economic health of our media companies.

And that's why this is a hugely important topic, imho.

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Please see:

Goodbye social media... welcome back mass-media | ZDNet

Some more thoughts on SoDOMM - the Social Distribution of Mass Media... | ZDNet

The Two-Way Internet... - SVW

Here are some Marshall McLuhan video clips and other content in a Pearltree format for quick browsing. Add the Pearltree to your free account or team up and help build it with additional content.

Marshall McLuhan and CBC Life and Times in Journalism/Marketing/PR / Tom Foremski (foremski)

[Oriella Survey: Most Journalists Shun Social Media And Blogs - SVW]

No one is asking journalists to throw away the tried and true ways of researching and verifying stories but to add new skills that will improve their reporting. Those new skills include curation and the use of media technologies to tell stories in ways that haven't been told.

How to source a video

A great example of how journalists can verify social media sources and put together different types of content comes from journalist Mark Little, one of the founders of Storyful, a site that offers curation tools and a publishing platform.

Mr Little has written an excellent post that draws on his 20 years experience as a reporter and he explains how he approaches the tricky issue of verification.

Without a doubt, verification is the greatest challenge. It's also the greatest opportunity for 'social journalists' willing to leave the confines of traditional news organisations and perhaps even create their own.

He describes what he calls a "light-bulb moment" that occurred when he was working on a story about Egyptian protestors engaged in a pitched battle on a bridge across the Nile.

Our curators discovered the video on Facebook and quickly contacted Mohamed to confirm he was the original creator of this remarkable footage.

The team used Google earth to check the location of the bridge and Mohamed's vantage point. Using social media channels Flickr and Panaramio, Storyful compared Mohamed's video with other user generated content shot on ground level.

Finally, the curator asked Mohamed for his permission to upload the video to YouTube and pass it on news organisations. Mohamed sought only a credit in exchange for the free use of his video.

Over several months, Mr Little managed to distill a procedure of how to verify video content from citizen reporters, into an easy to follow list:

- Review of the uploader's history and location to see whether he/she has shared useful and credible content in the past, or if he/she is a "scraper," passing other people's content off a their own (location is a big clue: don't trust uploaders in Japan to post video from Syria).

- Use of Google street view/maps/satellite imagery to help verify the locations in a video.

- Consultation of other news sources or validated user content to confirm events in a video happened as they were described.

- Examination of key features in a video such as weather and background landscape to see if they match known facts on the ground.

- Translation of every word that comes with a video for additional context.

- Monitoring social media traffic to see who is sharing the content and what questions are being asked about it.

- Develop and maintain relationships with people within the community around the story.

This is a common sense approach to verifying content from sources that you don't know. Yes, it does take some extra work but that's what journalists are paid to do. Journalists should not be shunning social media.

LinkedIn for scoops

Some training is available. For example, Krista Canfield at LinkedIn helps train journalists how to use LinkedIn as a reporting tool. She says she has trained journalists from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Here is one of her tips for journalists researching stories on LinkedIn:

As a journalist, you may not want people to know that you're following a company. If you want to follow companies in stealth mode, here's what you do:

1. Hover over your name in the top right hand corner of LinkedIn

2. Click "Settings" when it appears in the drop down menu.

3. On the next page, under, "Privacy Controls," you should see a link that says, "Turn on/off your activity broadcasts." Click that link.

4. Uncheck the box next to, "Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies."

You can find out more here: LinkedIn for Journalists

A reporter is a curator...

A reporter can be seen as a curator of the information contained in a news story. The reporter decides what content, from which sources, and in what order, should be included in the news; the story then creates the context for the news.

In pre-Internet times reporters published a story and they couldn't easily see how it was consumed and discussed. In the online world we are spoilt with many ways to measure readers, and see the effect of a story in different communities in near real time.

For example, I nearly always Tweet my headlines to my readers. Sometimes readers will retweet with a different headline, sometimes it's a much better headline. There have been times that I've gone back and rewritten a story and changed the headline because my readers had picked out a better lead.

That's just one small benefit to paying attention to social media and trusting your sources. Mr Little says it well:

The only way a curator can ultimately sort news from noise is to join the social media conversation which emerges from news events. Not just listen, but engage directly, openly and honestly with the most authentic voices.

Every news event in the age of social media creates more than a conversation, it creates a community. When news breaks, a self-selecting network gathers to talk about the story. Some are witnesses - the creators of original content - others are amplifiers - passing that content on to a wider audience. And in every group are the filters, the people who everyone else looks to for judgement.

The reporter has to see themselves as part of this extended network of people -- they all play a vital role in news gathering and publishing. They make the product better.

The team beyond the newsroom...

Journalists are used to working as part of a team--they are a cog in the production process, which includes editors, news editors, sub-editors, producers, photographers, layout designers, etc. No one works alone in the news business.

Journalists just need to get comfortable extending that team beyond the newsroom.

But that takes time, it takes time to "curate" your sources, because you have to establish levels of trust and connection. Trust takes time.

That's why the sooner journalists start embracing social media and blogs, and learning some of the new toolsets, the better. The better for all of us too since we will get better and truer reporting, and higher quality content.

Quality content will stand out like a towering emerald skyscraper, high above the black waters of the unrelenting tsunami of mediocre content.

Here's a reminder of what great reporting looks like: Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone Politics

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

We need more journalists like Matt Taibbi, who are able to tackle big, and hugely important issues.

If journalists can extend their editorial team beyond the newsroom, and include the citizen journalists, and the "amplifiers," etc, they will become far more effective, and we might get a new generation of highly skilled journalists, a new generation of Matt Taibbis...

---

Storyful. » The Human Algorithm

Oriella Survey: Most Journalists Shun Social Media And Blogs - SVW

Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

Cooking food made a big impact because eating raw food is hard work. If you look at other primates they spend much of their life eating.

In 2008 scientists in the UK tried an experiment with humans, putting them in a zoo and feeding them as much raw food as they wanted: berries, fruits, vegetables, etc. To fulfill their daily energy requirements required eating more than 10 pounds of raw fruits and vegetables -- it was taking them most of their day to get through chewing this much food and most were unable to finish their daily ration.

By the end of the two week experiment it was clear that raw foods alone cannot fuel a modern human. All the test subjects lost lots of weight and they couldn't finish all of their food even though they would eat well into the night... some would have likely died if they had stayed on this diet.

Cooking food enables us to extract far more nutrition, and in a shorter period of time, than eating raw food. Cooking became an external stomach. And other techniques of food preparation gave similar results. For example, fermented foods make use of microorganisms to process and pre-digest foods for us, e.g. cheese, yogurt, wine, beer, kimchi, etc.

The discovery of cooking led to large changes in our physiology. Our stomachs shrank, our faces changed as our teeth became smaller, and the shape of our face became "modern" as our jaw muscles grew weaker and smaller.

Less time eating meant more time for other things: to develop social and other skills. We had more time to develop agriculture and create civilization.

Now we are developing another external organ: the brain. Our computers, in their many forms, connected by wires and wirelessly, are very much like an external brain. For example, I used to remember lots of phone numbers but now I don't -- I rely on my smartphone for that. I rely on my computers to keep track of many other things too.

And when I get really old, and start having serious lapses in memory, I will use Google image search to remind me of who I am talking with. And there will be many other brain aids available.

How will this external brain change us? How will it change our evolution? What will we look like in the future?

Our brains will likely shrink. They have been shrinking since the discovery of agriculture -- and that makes sense: we don't need the complex skills of hunter/gatherers in tracking animals, or recognizing plants and fruits; or navigating hostile conditions.

Similarly, the brain will shed those things it no longer needs to keep, like our bodies shed most of our hair, whittleing away at our little toes and fingers; the appendix...

As our gadgets become smarter we will become dumber but together we become greater.

And while we can't combine our real brains we can combine our external brains. That's already happening in the wave of the many collaborative applications and this is just the start of something much larger. What will that be like? What form will our future take? That's the ride we are on.

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Please see:

Did Cooking Make Us Human? | Watch Free Documentary Online

Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now | Video on TED.com

50 Posts About Cyborgs

By Patrice Lamothe



Everyone realizes that the web is entering a new phase in its development.

One indication of this transition is the proliferation of attempts to explain the changes that are occurring. Functional explanations emphasize the real time web, collaborative systems and location-based services. Technical explanations argue that the interconnectivity of data is the most significant current development. They consider the web's new frontiers to be closely related to the semantic web or the "web of things".

Although these explanations are both pertinent and intriguing, none of them offers an analytical matrix for assessing the developments that are now underway. Some ideas are too specific.

The "real time web," for example, is one of the clearest and most influential trends right now. But once this observation has been made, it provides no insights into the usefulness and impact of the "real time web," or, more importantly, how it fits into the web's overall development.

In contrast, other explanations are far too broad to serve any useful purpose.

The "Web 2.0″ concept, despite its limitations, demonstrates the relationship among innovations as varied as Wikipedia, You-Tube and blogs. Web 2.0 serves to summarize a stage in the web's development.

The expression "Web Squared," sometimes used for the next phase, incorporates a heterogeneous grouping of functionalities and uses. It does not facilitate an understanding of the nature of the changes that are occurring, and thus does not allow us to infer their actual impact.

How can the web's development be understood?

The web represents a compendium of technical resources, functionalities and usage practices, and it cannot be reduced to just one of these dimensions. The success of technical innovations hinges on the ecosystem of existing products.

The development of products is tied to changes in usage patterns. Usage patterns in turn only develop based on technologies and products.

The development of the web thus does not arise from technologies, products or usage patterns alone. Each of these dimensions is inextricably intertwined with the other two, and innovations affecting one can have a decisive effect on the others.

The web's development no longer depends on the isolated efforts of an individual, company or organization. Even the largest industrial groups, as well as still larger government entities, have only a marginal influence when the issue is coordinating the multitude of people and things that constitute the web.

If the development of the web cannot be directly attributed to technologies, products or usage patterns, and if it cannot be reduced to the efforts of a small, identifiable group, how can we hope to understand where it is going?

More precisely, how can we establish a simple model that will serve some practical purpose?

In fact, it is the decentralized nature of the web and the infinite diversity of the projects developing on it that allow us to answer this question. The web has no central management or external regulations, and it lacks internal rules - or, more precisely, it operates under numerous rules, none of which is uniformly applied. The only ideas that are truly capable of coordinating the activities of the web are its own founding principles.

The founding principles

These principles are simply the initial objectives that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau stated for their project. Eliminating technical jargon, these objectives can be broken down into three general, universally applicable propositions:



1- Allow anyone to access any type of document.

3- Allow everyone to organize the entire collection of documents.

These concepts guided the development of the technologies, functionalities and uses at the origin of the web, which was initially made available to CERN scientists and subsequently to related research communities.

Due to the limited number of initial users, and the very specialized population to which they belonged, the original web had a property that has never recurred since: every user at that time had sufficient technological competence to access and create documents, and, using HTML programming, could participate in the organization of the entire collection of documents.

Every user was a reader, creator and organizer, in accordance with the three founding principles.

The web, initially a micro-democracy where everyone had access to all aspects of the medium, charted the course for its own development and established its long-term direction. Its objective as a project was clearly defined: to allow all users to become complete media, i.e., able to read, create and organize the collection of documents they desired.

The objective was both grandiose and straightforward.

Grandiose because the goal was the complete democratization of the medium's activities. Straightforward because the utopia offered to all was actually already a reality for a small group of pioneers. The founding principles were thus the basis for the web's system of regulation and development.

The web became a universal open source project without an acknowledged leader, comparable to what was to become Wikipedia, although on a different scale. Its founding principles facilitated the integration of innovations into the ecosystem. They naturally fostered innovations that corresponded to those principles, while automatically restricting others, thus providing sustained direction for the development of the entire project.

The two initial phases of growth

Let us now consider the twenty years that have elapsed since the web of those pioneer days; we will see that these founding principles not only assured the cohesiveness of the entire project, but also structured its phases of development.

1st frontier...

- The principle of "allowing anyone to access any document" established the web's first frontier and gave direction to its initial stage of development. For the most part, this phase ran from 1994-95 until 2003-2004. It corresponded to the massive development of a pyramidal web, with a small number of players creating, organizing and disseminating content, which was consumed by the majority.

Portals and search engines were the key products at this stage; HTML and PHP were the main technologies; accessing information was the primary use. It is worth noting that this model still applies to most current web activity, and it continues to grow at the same pace as the internet.

Second frontier...

- The second phase of web expansion began in 2000-2002, driven by projects such as Blogger, MySpace and, later, Wikipedia. Soon identified as a major turning point, Web 2.0 simply represents the popularization of the second founding principle: "allowing everyone to disseminate their own documents."

Technologies such as AJAX and RSS will make creation and distribution functionalities, which were formerly reserved only for developers, available to a very broad audience. A vast array of programs allows everyone to post all kinds of content on line.

The early web's success and the strength of the entire project are finally allowing related uses to expand on a massive scale. Blogs, social networks, and wikis are becoming icons of the democratization of speech and open debate.

Today, it is estimated that the participative web community is accessed by 200 million to 300 million people daily. In its turn, the web's second founding principle has also extended beyond the small circle of original pioneers to transform the usage patterns of a broad audience.

Technologies, products and functionality modes are now well established so that web participation will gradually become available to everyone. Its continuing development does not require any further radical innovation and will continue naturally over coming years.

The third frontier...

As briefly summarized above, the first two phases make it very clear where the web's next frontier lies. Although an abundance of innovations and new applications are extending already established product types, one of the web project's three components, "allowing everyone to organize the collection of documents," is still far from reaching a broad audience.

Has it not been observed that the HTML language, the essential link in the web's technological fabric, the technical vehicle for the third principle, is both the most significant contributor to the availability of the web and the one that is least changed from its original technical form?

That the creation of hyperlinks, which interconnect the web's actual structure and site architecture and act as the departure point for search engines, remains complex, very remote from day-to-day activities, and ill-adapted to the multitude of uses that could develop from it?

Now that the web allows everyone to read and disseminate everything, it should also allow everyone to do what its first users were always able to do, the feature that lies at the heart of its radical originality: organize/curate everything.

The web's ecosystem should progressively build technologies, invent products, and develop methods of usage that will allow everyone to manipulate content created by others, gather material, edit it, prioritize it and give it meaning.

The web should allow everyone to become a complete medium.

Are we talking about a wish? A bet? A hypothetical future? It is really much more.

If the practical directions for the future of a system as complex as the web are to be mapped out, they would have to be organized around the only coordinating points possible among players who are too diverse and numerous to coordinate the situation themselves.

They must be based on the only elements that are universally shared: the project's founding principles.

To state that the next step in the web's development is the democratization of the capacity to organize/curate is simply to state that this is only one of the web's three initial DNA strands that has not achieved the level of development achieved by the other two. Thus we can correctly speak of the project's next frontier.

Toward a complete web

If this is the case, now that the successive developments of the first and second principles are assured, could we not speculate that innovative techniques, products and uses will now converge in the direction of this new frontier we are anticipating? This development is actually occurring before our eyes: the web's third phase is already underway.

Conditions, needs, and capabilities have aligned so that the web's third principle is now reaching out beyond the small, original group of professionals and pioneers.

Among users, social networks are now making instantaneous exchange of content possible. Almost 20% of tweets sent contain URLs. Facebook puts sharing links at the top of its hierarchy of functions.

For many web enthusiasts, reading content provided by a community is replacing information from automated aggregators.

On the technological front, collaborative systems and the "real time web" allow everyone to coordinate their views with various communities, organizing data as it is received. The trend toward opening up data and semantic technologies is broadening both the web's basic organizational structure and the means of accessing it.

Rich interfaces offer ways to radically simplify editing and organizational activities so that every user can manipulate complex data in a way that is intuitive, entertaining and natural.

In the area of products and functionalities, web giants, as well as the most advanced startups, are gradually pointing toward a user-curated web. [Some of Google's innovations add curation features, such as Wave, SideWiki; plus the opening of its search engine to explicit opinions and grading from its users.]

Furthermore, the organization/curation of the web by its users will soon call into question the hierarchical, automatic model for search engines.

- Wikia was the first significant attempt to develop a search engine using a collaborative algorithm.

- Pearltrees, which is specifically described as a network of interests, allows its community members to organize/curate, connect and easily locate all the content of interest to them.

- Foursquare, in contrast to earlier localization systems, applies not to people but to things: on this network, players acting together can organize all the places they regularly visit.

The technologies, products and uses originated in the first and second phases will not disappear. On the contrary, the next phase will combine the three principles that are the basis of the web's history and originality: each user will be a spectator [consumer], a creator and a curator.

The Web will thus become for everyone what it once was for only a happy few: a medium that is complete, democratic and democratized.

Yet the concept of cloud computing isn't well recognized even among some of our foremost technology leaders.

Take for example, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas. They recently co-published a long article The Digital Disruption, in Foreign Affairs magazine, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.

They also spoke at the organization's CEO Speaker series. Here is part of a report by Anne Nelson writing for PBS Mediashift:

"I'm extraordinarily excited about the scale of the mobile revolution," Schmidt said. "... There are four to five billion mobile phones of one kind or another and we are approaching a billion smart phones."

Schmidt added that the effect of Moore's Law will be to transform smart phones into the world's dominant communications platform in the near future.

The implications of the mobile revolution, he said, "are just beginning to be understood. But remember that these devices are more powerful than supercomputers were a few years ago, and we are putting them in the hands of people who've never had anything like it before."

In the article and the talk, Mr Schmidt focuses on the power of the smart phone, and that it has the capabilities of a supercomputer from a few years ago. That might be true of some smart phones, but not of the "four to five billion mobile phones of one kind or another" that are out there.

It's extraordinary that Mr Schmidt and Mr Cohen made no mention of cloud computing. Because with cloud computing, those four to five billion mobile phones can have the power of a supercomputer from today -- not from several years ago.

I recently spoke with Ram Menon, Executive VP of Worldwide Marketing at Tibco Software. He travels a lot in India, and other developing economies such as Brazil.

"It's incredible how many people can now afford a simple cell phone. And it's incredible what you can do with simple text messaging. Farmers can get real-time pricing information on their crops, and much more. There's even a whole grass roots industry around powering cell phones, such as ways to convert a bicycle into a cell phone charging station. In remote places where there is no electric power, people can still use their mobile phones."

With a simple text message system you can bring the power of a supercomputer to the cheapest and simplest mobile phones via cloud computing. For many important applications there is no need to place supercomputing power in the device itself.

Simple cell phones can act as smart phones today, thanks to the cloud. That's an amazing technological advance.

It's strange that Messers Schmidt and Cohen have failed to notice this technology, and what it can do -- especially since they work at Google, which operates the largest cloud computing platform.

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There are more posts like this in my book: In My Humble Opinion

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Please see the following Saturday Posts:

The Beatnik To Blogger Connection...

The West Coast Corridor: 1400 Miles Of Innovation - Disruptive Creation On The Fault Line

IMHO: We Are Becoming Nomadig...

The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches...

It's easy to forget that we are still in the very early stages of the Internet -- a basket of technologies that continues to evolve and affect nearly every aspect of our business and personal lives.

The first phase of the Internet emerged into the commercial space only in the mid-1990s, from military applications at first and then university research uses.

In this first phase of the commercial Internet, the development of web browsers meant that we could now publish a page of content: text, photos, video, to any computer screen regardless of the platform. It didn't matter what the operating system was, or the type of computer: mainframe, minicomputer or pocket computer -- as long as it can run a web browser we can publish a web page to it from anywhere.

That was a significant achievement because you used to have to be on the same network, for example AOL, or CompuServe to be able to publish the same content to other users. There was no cross-platform communications, even email was difficult. I remember it took years for gateways to be developed that could send email between CompuServe and MCI Mail - two popular email networks.

It took government funding and support for industry standard protocols to be able to achieve what we call the Internet. And once the rivalries between the competing self-contained networks could be bypassed, the Internet took off like a rocket.

The Internet's potential effect on business was extraordinary. In the mid to late 1990s, stock market investors built a massive "dotcom" bubble. A company only had to announce that they would launch a web site to have a massive spike in its market value.

Those days seem ridiculous in hindsight but only because we did not yet have the means to truly transform business operations, at least not yet. But the investors were correct in their prediction that there was a truly disruptive force at work and that those companies that were forging ahead would have significant advantages.

In those heady, early days, large corporations were faced with threats that the "dotcom" companies would "eat their lunch." Many companies panicked and launched expensive Internet operations without thinking things through; many companies were frozen in indecision and did nothing.

The dotcom dotbomb soon arrived and established businesses breathed a collective sigh of relief: their lunch was intact and most dotcoms disappeared overnight. A recession gripped the entire tech sector for several years as the excesses of those early years played themselves out.

Recessions, however, are excellent nurseries, it's where innovation emerges. And the early 2000s is where blogging started to emerge, and thats when the first social networks such as Friendster and MySpace appeared. And it is where the roots of what we now call social media emerged.

There is much written about, and spoken about, and tweeted about social media, social networks, social CRM ... "social" with everything. But the "social" part is a red herring because what emerged in the early 2000s was the second phase of the Internet.

The first phase allowed us to publish content to any computer screen. The second phase of the Internet is where any computer screen can publish back.

We now have a two-way Internet.

If you thought Internet 1.0 was impressive then look out because now we have a two-way Internet, and this time, the new "dotcoms" will be far more challenging to established businesses, they will eat lunch, breakfast, and anything else of value. It is an Internet on steroids.

For example, we now have a printing press in our pockets that can potentially reach tens of millions and soon billions of people. It's no wonder that Rupert Murdoch is pissed. You used to have to be a media mogul, buying ink by the barrel to have the potential reach an audience that anyone with a smart phone, or desktop computer can now reach.

The Internet is a powerful media technology, it's a publishing technology. And it has become very easy to use thanks to sophisticated development tools and services that anyone can use.

- You used to have to be a computer expert to set up and publish a web site, now anyone can do it in less than ten minutes.

- You used to have to build a large audience in order for your content to be seen now you can post something to Facebook or Twitter and your network of friends or contacts will republish it and potentially reach huge audiences.

The Internet has become a two-way medium.

What does this mean?

It means that "social" media is just one application of this next stage of the Internet. It means that every company, every person is potentially a media company and has to learn how to use this two-way Internet.

Every company, even if it makes diapers or ball bearings is also a media company because it publishes to its potential customers, employees, neighbors, etc. And it also has to learn how to listen and engage with those communities as they publish back.

Businesses that figure out how to use the two-way Internet will prosper and the ones that don't, won't.

New types of applications will emerge such as personalized advertising that is location based; and a whole host of other applications that have yet to be imagined.

- A two-way Internet means that anything and everything can become connected.

- A two-way Internet means that there is a huge amount of data to be mined that can provide businesses with incredible insights into their markets.

- A two-way Internet can provide businesses with real-time responses to changing market conditions.

- A two-way Internet will unleash a tremendous amount of innovation in the forms of applications, new media formats, and new societies/communities.

A two-way Internet will also transform the way we consume and interact with media. The media is dying but long live the media because we now have more forms of media, in more formats than at any time in our human history.

How will that affect us? Media is how society "thinks" it is how countries develop policies, it is how we figure out solutions to important problems such as the economy, the environment, education, elderly care, energy and those are just the problems that begin with "e."

What are the new cultures being formed? What will the cultural changes mean to business?

A business that doesn't understand its changing culture won't be in business for long.

It is these types of issues that SNCR was formed to research and to try and understand.

We have plenty of technology and technologies in our world but so what? It's how these technologies are used, how they are applied, how they affect and effect our society that SNCR seeks to understand and to share with others.

We now live in a two-way Internet and that's an immense field of study and it is one that will continually surprise us with its near infinite permutations.

For journalists, for professional communicators of all kinds, these are troubled times but also extremely exciting times. At no other time in our professional lives will we see such huge changes in our jobs, our lives, our communities.

We don't know the answers, we know some of them but there are so many more to discover.

We all can take part in figuring out what those answers are. Those answers might keep changing or they might become the new rules for the next phase of the Internet. We don't know yet, we don't even know all the questions but it's sure exciting finding out.

And that's why SNCR has managed to attract some of the best people working in this area, eager and curious about the future and what it might look like.

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If you liked "The Two-Way Internet" there are similar posts in my book: "In My Humble Opinion"

I just started reading Nick Bilton's book "I live in the future & here's how it works" and the first chapter is about his investigation of the porn industry to see if there are any lessons to be applied to the media industry.

Every time a new technology has been introduced, way back to the printing press, sexual content has helped drive that technology and develop thriving business models that others have been able to adopt and prosper with.

Throughout the history of new media, from vernacular speech to movable type, to photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to "900" phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to CD-ROMs and laser discs, pornography has shown technology the way. "Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography."⁽⁵⁾ The same is true of the more mundane arts we call media. Where there is the Gutenberg Bible, there is also Rabelais; where the U.S. mails, dirty postcards; where the three-volume hardback novel, paperback pulp fiction; where HBO, Midnight Blue; where CompuServe, the Plain Brown Wrapper library.⁽⁶⁾

Pornography,⁽⁷⁾ far from being an evil that the First Amendment must endure, is a positive good that encourages experimentation with new media. The First Amendment thus has not only intellectual, moral, political, and artistic value,⁽⁸⁾ but practical and economic value as well. It urges consenting adults, uninhibited by censorship, to look for novel ways to use the new media and novel ways to make money out of the new uses. Therefore, while it may be politically impossible and socially unwise to encourage computer pornography, legislators should at least leave it alone and let the medium follow where pornography leads.

I see this issue as one of the most important issues facing not just the Internet but society in general.

We still haven't solved the problem of how to finance quality media.

It's the Gordian knot of our times, whoever solves it will be rich, but whoever solves it solves it for all of us, because we can all take advantage of it.

We will soon live in a world of ubiquitous video cameras. You probably have one staring at you right now just inches away from your face -- the camera in your laptop or desktop.

There are video cameras on street corners, business premises, highways. The Brits have the most video cameras per head of population but other countries are catching up. The CCTV technology is cheap to install and operate.

Consumer video cameras are cheap and getting cheaper and better quality. A Flip HD camera from Cisco is under $200 and there are consumer HD video cameras for under $100. HD video is found in smart phones, such as the iPhone 4. Soon, every phone will have a high quality video camera, and not just phones.

The circuitry and the mechanism for a HD video camera is tiny. It can be fitted into ever smaller formats, such as pens: Brookstone sells a video spy pen for $99.95, and there are cheaper versions available elsewhere.

As computers become more ubiquitous so will video cameras. It won't be long before there are video cameras all around and in places where we aren't used to having them.

It won't be long before we have always-on video cameras operating in all our social spaces.

Imagine living in a world where nearly every conversation, every meeting, every step you take in the physical world is recorded and archived in the cloud.

If you knew that every conversation with your kids, with your parents, with your friends -- was possibly being recorded and stored -- would you think twice, maybe thrice about what you had to say?

The Facebook effect...

We have become used to the possibility that all our online conversations and interactions are recorded and stored somewhere. We are much more guarded about what we say or do online.

But we think of our offline conversations and interactions as mostly personal and private. We don't exhibit the same cautious behavior offline as we do online.

If I meet a friend walking down the street and stop to chat for a few minutes -- I'm pretty sure that that conversation and meeting isn't recorded.

That won't be true in the near future. And it won't be because of government "Big Brother" surveillance. It will be because of personal surveillance devices that people will carry out of choice for personal protection.

It will be as if there is always a "fly on the wall" watching and recording everything.

People will carry what I call a "personal fly" -- a personal security device containing a tiny video camera fitted into a pendant or broach, embedded in clothing, earrings, or in eye glasses.

If you are attacked it will have video and audio records of that event.

Why will people carry a personal fly? Because they can, and because the technology will be cheap enough and good enough to be used as a very effective personal security device.

A personal fly...

A personal fly will be able to wirelessly record many hours of video and audio onto a flash memory chip; some "flies" will use the cell phone in your pocket to send continuous video and audio data to a cloud-based storage service.

If you were mugged, your personal fly would record the event and police could use its images and audio to track down the mugger.

- A criminal could try to destroy the flash card storing that video -- but since some personal fly devices send their data into the cloud, a criminal could never be sure that destroying the chip covered their tracks.

Thus, all people wearing a personal fly would be protected as if they were all storing their data off-corpus.

- A personal fly might even be equipped with a panic button alerting the police, and local public surveillance cameras to retain their video footage to track escaping assailants.

- Children will be a prime market. Parents will use these inexpensive personal security devices to protect their kids. It might even be considered neglectful if parents didn't protect their children with such devices.

- Adults will wear a personal fly throughout the day for protection. At the end of the day, or week, the video collected could be erased, or not, depending on what settings you keep

-Telcos will market them as part of the many wireless applications and services they provide.

- Manufacturers will produce different types of personal fly, in different disguises, and with an array of capabilities.

I have no doubt that these types of personal security devices will prevent many attacks and other types of criminal acts.

(BTW, I'm working with potential partners on manufacturing this concept -- let me know if you'd like to chat.)

The social fly...

What interests me is how such personal security devices (PSDs) will affect our behavior in our social spaces. What will be the new manners?

- Will it be rude to wear a personal security device at a dinner party?

- WIll it be rude to ask someone to turn off their PSD?

- How can you know if someone's PSD is on or off? (You can't know for sure...)

- Will it be rude to archive all your recordings?

- Will it be illegal to use a PSD in situations without informing all persons in the vicinity, similar to getting consent to record telephone conversations?

- Will we need new laws?

- Will people getting together, have to sync up their personal archive settings and come to some kind of agreement over recording their conversation -- before any conversation takes place?

- How will we behave in our social spaces knowing that everything we say is being recorded and possibly archived for many years?

- How will kids grow up with such personal surveillance systems? Parents will likely want to peek into how they do in the classroom, their conversations with friends, etc.

Stunted conversations...

The number of personal attacks is rare but people's fear of them is much larger, and that will drive the sales of these devices.

Surely, it will have a chilling effect on our society and our behavior...

The threat here is not from "Big Brother" but from each other; we will constantly be aware of a shadow haunting all our interactions, recording everything we see, hear and say. We will always be on guard, second guessing ourselves in all our social interactions

Surveillance by Big Brother is less scary than surveillance by each other, by people you know and know you.

- Say goodbye to casual drinking or anything at casual at parties.

- The opportunities for mischief by disgruntled friends and lovers are immense.

- The question of trust between friends and family members will be tested to the extreme.

- Living in an ambient surveillance world policed by the people around you is going to be challenging.

These things can't be good. But they will happen because they can.

Welcome to your future.

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[If you like this post you might like some of my other posts, collected in my new book - In My Humble Opinion: Notes from a Silicon Valley Watcher - available in paper or electron.]