August 2006 Archives

... Yes I have been in Sydney for five days, yes I'm home now. Get over it.

Thank you to my brother and Eloise for having me for a couple of nights at their place and putting up with me as an aggressive Marxist in their presence. Thank you also to Shannon for picking me up and making me human with Margaritas at my place. And finally, thank you to Mum for being wonderful from a distance, as usual.

I've been preaching that virtual communities and internet hype are driving consumer intention to purchase, and certainly intention is in evidence in research results. The difficult aspect of the equation is whether intention to purchase/consume goods converts to actual purchases. In the case of media consumption, the Serenity phenomenon demonstrated that online audiences can be driven to consume offline products. The film was made on the basis of the fact that the television series (called Firefly) was cancelled after only 15 episodes, and Joss Whedon fans banded together, distributing copies of the series via Bit Torrent, and campaigning to get the series back on air. The television networks were unmoved by the display of fan-based action, but Whedon himself decided to make the film as a means of satisfying the appetite of his loyal fan base. Even so, Serenity made just above average box office returns, and without the 'free' distribution of pirated copies of the series, it is doubtful that the film would have attracted such audiences (or indeed have been made at all).

Similarly the enormous internet hype surrounding the joke concept film, Snakes on a Plane, has shown slow returns at the box office, in spite of the widespread internet comic and viral marketing tactics deployed to promote the idea. The film still reached the number one slot in box office takings, but at US$15.3 million the returns are at least US$5 million less than New Line Cinema were expecting. And if reviews are anything to go by, a lot of the problem seems to be associated with good old quality. Snakes on a Plane is based on one fairly silly idea anyway and doesn't really have the thrill nor the jokes it needs to redeem itself. All the hype in the world won't overcome crappy content.

If the explosion of user-led content has taught us anything it is that in a diverse media environment, quality will always win. Internet marketing strategies will raise awareness and drive traffic for a short period of time, but frankly, if you haven't got quality products to back the hype, then much like those poor snakes on that dismal plane, your audience is going to die very quickly.

I appeared on this morning's ABC Radio National Media Report today, speaking on user-led production of content in light of the success of Al Gore's Current TV product online, YouTube and other media. The program is available for download here, or you can listen via streaming media. It's a half hour episode and I'm only on for the last five or six minutes, but I appreciate Gerald Tooth giving me the opportunity to participate in this episode on this very interesting topic.

As a result of recent terrorist plans to blow up nine passenger flights between Britain and the US, security advice has been upgraded across the board. Many flights from Heathrow have been cancelled, and getting in and out of the UK is extremely difficult at the moment.

News item here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200608/s1712219.htm
News item on arrest here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200608/s1712226.htm
DFAT advice here: http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/United_Kingdom
QANTAS passenger advice here: http://www.qantas.com.au/info/ukTravelAdvice?lk=prau

Today Ekka - the Royal Brisbane Exhibition - opens at the RNA Showgrounds and I have to say, I am sorely tempted to spend some of my weekend strolling through the mad mix of woodchoppers, farm animals, showbags and rides of the fairground. It is an absolutely sparkling morning here in Brisbane - bright and shiny and 20 degrees with vivid blue skies and trees bursting with early spring growth. I'm full of caffeine and sunshine today after chatting with an inspiring thinker about the future of collective cultures and political activism expressed through the medium of technologies, so I must admit I am in a good mood. (I dare anyone to challenge the beauty and medicinal glory of sunshine, warm coffee, fresh air and fabulous conversation.) But beyond my mood, it is also a great time of the year to enjoy all the public events on the calendar here at the moment. In addition to Ekka, there are free public lectures for Science Week coming up - both the BrisScience lecture on religion versus science on Monday, and a discussion of Australia's Nuclear Future this Friday at the Queensland Museum. Then there's the Brisbane International Film Festival still running, and there's a great exhibition on the 1960s and the 1980s at the Museum of Brisbane. And there are concerts, dancing and competitions all over the place - it's a great time of year to enjoy the sunshine, and participate. So I challenge all the locals to get out there and experience their city in what happens to be unusually settled and beautiful weather for this time of year, this weekend. Go to it and have fun!

EDIT: Yes, good point, Barry - the Straight Out Of Brisbane (SOOB) Festival is on too!

You know it was always going to happen.... Google and MySpace are shacking up together.

Hello 4am, my old friend.

I'm on the marketing trail for Uses of Blogs at the moment, and getting a few interviews on the value of social software and Web 2.0-style technologies in business futures. And it's been fun to articulate my own vision of user-led markets; the playful marketspace where ideas are spawned and then let out in to the wilds of distrubuted networks, to be virally reproduced, modified, expanded, focused, adapted, mashed and finally, made obsolete. But the questions are always the same: how will businesses make money from these technologies? How do you generate a revenue stream from conversations?

I always struggle with these questions, but not because I don't have any answers. Oh there are ways of making money. As a useful article in the Media section of The Australian noted yesterday, the percentage advertising spend being dedicated to online media channels is set to grow dramatically in the next 4 years. And micropayments as a business model for desired content does actually appear to be working for iTunes. But it's not the monetisation of these technologies that is significant for the future of business. It's what's happening to the marketspace itself that matters. Consumer expectations are changing, consumer practices are altering dramatically. Not only are audiences for business products and services becoming more fickle in their consumption habits, they are becoming more informed about their choices. It's not so much that Web 2.0 technologies are going to make organisations megabucks. It's that they are going to evolve, whether companies adopt these technologies or not. If companies don't appropriate and sensibly integrate these technologies then consumers will either develop their own space for discussing the company or the consumers will find a company that will provide them with the conversational marketspace they need.

The same goes for blogs. When I talk about blogs, people keep saying, "yes but most blogs I read are just utter garbage". Well yes, of course a lot of blogs are terrible. But as Technorati's slogan goes, "50 million blogs can't all be bad". And when it comes down to it, it's not that blogs are necessarily good, but the fact that they're there. Businesses need to consider blogs and Web 2.0 technologies not as a silver bullet to business problems of siloisation and a fragmented consumer base, but as a channel for understanding different aspects of human needs and desires.

This needs another blog entry which I will attempt this weekend, but for a long time I've been convinced that when it comes to business in the information age, we have a tendency to attempt to measure the wrong things. Web 2.0 technologies (and blogs as a subset of these) should not be measured by collective quality or activity, hits or visitors. They should be acknowledged as evidence of a paradigm shift in consumer behaviour and a revolution in content production when compared with the media landscape of even a decade ago. That's why they fascinate me :)

From today's IT Section of The Australian...

THE federal government may tap the vast pool of social resources behind blogs and websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia to boost its online information services.

The Department of Finance's lead information technology body, AGIMO, has begun experimenting with wikis and blogs with a view to expanding their use throughout commonwealth departments and agencies.

"The Australian Government Information Management Office is trialling wikis and blogs internally and is investigating the expansion of these services in the government sphere," a spokesman for Special Minister for State Gary Nairn said.

We're taking over the world, folks. Once governing departments start to adopt, it's all over. We're no longer the experimental elite.

It was another successful night for the BrisScience series last night, with John Quiggin considering how environmentalist policies can be realised in practice, from an economic perspective. It was a popular topic, with many present keen to engage with the debate over environmentalism versus economic policy. And it was followed by the usual drink and nibblies in the foyer, but this time it was based at City Hall in town - a very comfortable venue.

The next event in the series promises to be exceedingly popular - Margaret Wertheim, discussing the opposing forces of religion and politics. The event is being sponsored by the Australian Government as part of National Science Week, so come along and enjoy the show. Free entry, free drink, free nibblies, no membership required. You can't lose.