Lord Puttnam talked about the transition from controlled media to media that can be directly delivered directly to consumers and how many opportunities this is opening up for producers. The now low cost of production, the new distribution methods and the flexible consumption patterns arising from personalised media. New business models and new audiences of interest. Feeling that scale isnt an advantage in the media at this time and that smaller producers have a real chance now to build. Need to develop new content that exploits what the emerging media can do. Education is the key to competitiveness…this can be the key to innovation and new talent and it is vital to promote education in order to unlock the upcoming opportunities.

Just got back from a break and been catching up. This post caught my eye from Kevin Anderson. Its a rather humorous take on how comfortable the mainstream media actually are with blogging. The main thrust of the arguement from the BBC representative seems to be “who checks the bloggers?”; are blogs trustworthy? Well its interesting that a news organisation (that often commits errors, don’t they all?) can ask that, as it shows that they are running scared and dismissive about ordinary people actually stepping into their territory.

This is interesting. This is a typical middleclass liberal elite reaction to democratisation. Since the dawn of modern pop culture this elite has consistently claimed to support “ordinary people’s culture” while at the same time insisting on the retention of outlets such as radios 3 and 4 and sneering at anyone who reads the Daily Mail and The Sun. People do have the choice to read other newspapers but still they choose to buy the tabloids in their millions, not the qualities, and despite this being real democracy in action it’s not good enough for the elite, they have to attack ordinary poeple who buy these papers so why should their attitudes to social media be any different?
It is interesting that they choose now to attack outlets and channels that allow people to tell their story in their way and insist that their definition of “checking” should be applied to this world too. In other words they want to control it.

These new forms are great precisely because they dont have that old fashioned system of checks put on them. It will be interesting in the coming years to see how this begins to work when smart meta data filters emerge and the whole process of editorial approval breaks down even further.

This post isnt about the BBC by the way its about attitudes in the media in general - feel free to argue with me here or at the festival…

Who could have ever predicted the size and power of the blogging phenomenon? This started life as a few geeks publishing their diaries on the web on a day-to-day basis. Who on earth would want to read that? But people did read that – we are interested in other people’s opinions and personal experiences. Now, Technorati tells us that there are 27 million blogs, with another 75,000 created every day. The trend originated in the US, but has become truly global phenomena in a relatively short amount of time. There were more apparently more blogs in Japanese than in English last month.

Blogging originated as solitary people sitting at their computers writing personal journals. Solitary Bloggers have no power. Then along came RSS, or really simple syndication, which allowed people to easily link to content across the web. Suddenly anyone, regardless of technical skill, could publish a blog and link to other people’s blogs. When the phenomenal numbers of Bloggers across the world start to connect to each other, they start to have real influence. With this much potential for influence, it comes as no surprise that this force can be profitably harnessed by commerce. Trawling and analysing the vast amount of information across these millions of blogs could offer a way of predicting market forces and public opinion. Dr Brian Whitman, based at MIT, has created Echo Nest, a piece of software that scans blogs to find out what people are saying about particular songs. This information allows him to predict market success of the songs, allowing him to successfully forecast which song will hit the top of the charts and when. He claims that his forecasts have proved accurate week after week.

The power of the blogosphere continues to explode. Even Murdoch recently hinted that his media properties should start working with Bloggers, finding ways of linking them into his media empire. It’s a model already piloted by the online version of French newspapers Le Monde and Libération.

RSS offers a model where the user picks up content when they want it. Instead of buying and selling through big sites such as Amazon or ebay we are being offered the chance to buy and sell through blogs and RSS aggregators (iNods and Edgeio). These aggregators push traffic towards individuals’ blogs, making it possible for blog owners to make money or at very least raise their market profile. The first people to understand and exploit these new trends have the opportunity to become global brands.

RSS also offers (fortunately or unfortunately depending on which side of the fence you sit) a way of reaching customers without going through the spam filters that block so much email content.

Mark Rogers is the co-founder (along with RSS pioneer Ian Davis) of online monitoring and response specialist Market Sentinel. Apart from monitoring blogs and message boards Market Sentinel sets out to provide reputation measurement and benchmarking. It has also pioneered attempts to provide feeds free of spamblogs.

Mark (in the Emerging Trends Panel 10.45am Friday 26 May) will explore how consumer generated content and social media (blogs, Podcasts, youtube) are helping individuals do things that were formerly the preserve of the big media corporations publish text, sound and video and reach a global audience. This has implications not just for media owners, but also for brand owners, marketers and even governments.

I see that the BBC’s rivals have criticised the BBC’s new strategy…here  Not suprising really as they now have 10 more years to get their strategy right before losing some or all of the license fee (which will happen next time). It si costing a fortune for companies to go properly digital into the new on-demand world. The BBC does have it easy in that respect but let’s not forget that their competitors have more reasons than fairness on their minds. The article quotes a director of News International as saying “Why should public money be used to create competition to a successful commercial venture such as MySpace?”… a bit cheeky maybe as news Int own MySpace.

The biggest issue for me is how much they plan to work with the independent sector. Why cant they divert most of the money towards commissioning  form small indies in order to promote competition and growth?

The last 100 years has seen an ever increasing acceleration in forms of media technology. Communication is now possible in a multiplicity of forms using multiple technologies and in an ever increasingly smart context. One of the most interesting things for me is to speculate on what the nature of 21st century media will be.

We have seen the emergence of omnipresent, smart media technology and it seems that one major concern is about how we interface with the content. In hard UI terms new interfaces are appearing that include shared use, spatial, temporal and conceptual, tags, tangible, physical and hybrid UIs as base design concepts. New UI metaphors for bridging the physical and virtual world are being developed that use spatial and temporal mappings between real and virtual world, dynamic sets of devices, shared devices, public displays and dynamic adaptation among several dimensions: devices, users, services, not to mention tracking and modelling social behaviour and protocols, all of which are giving us Ubiquitous Interfaces.

This begs the question what effects will these new forms of interface have on the content? For example, how do gameplay mechanisms which are being used across media in order to attract and keep consumer relationships active affect content on TV?

How will advertising change? The imminent death of the 30 second TV ad slot is the birth of a whole new landscape. New forms of branded content have emerged but yet more is needed to fully exploit the emergent media landscape. Intelligence, profiling, smartness and new forms of relationship with consumers are driving new forms of advertising and may see the death of the big ad agency.

Mobile technology has created a whole new dimension to media technology and content. Full TV to mobile services have launched and consumers seem to like them BUT the content is having to change in form and also in the way it is delivered leading to a world where the most extreme personalisation is just around the corner on a mass scale.

Artists and the emergence of AI – art that ‘thinks’. Even artists locked in their Arts Council funded faux-ivory towers are being affected. If smartness and intelligence underpin other media technologies then why should artists be any different? For some years artists at the cutting edge have been exploring the cutting edge of computation and aesthetics but it is clear that with the new explosion of smartness, intelligence computational power and media channels available that this is an area that is set to explode in vitality and finally mass acceptance to maybe become the dominant aesthetic of the 21st century.

The emergence of behaviour and intelligence as interface design paradigms suggests that smart, always-on, on-demand, contextualized content will have to be created to suit the different needs of the consumer and examines the new opportunities for storytellers.

P2P, podcasting and other user generated content and distribution networks, in combination with ratings and reputation engines, could open the gates to truly democratic content…what do the public actually want, do they want what is fed them by media organisations? If media becomes truly democratised then we will find out.

These are just a few of the things that give us so much to think about over the next few years.

There are usually too many questions to fit into sessions at events such as this so why not post your questions in advance? Just reply to this post and state who the question is for and we’ll make sure its asked. Click here to see the sepakers.

At b.tween, one of the most interesting sessions for me is happening on the Thursday. The session puts comissioners from the BBC and Channel 4 together on stage with the intention of (hopefully) demistifying the commissioning process a little. Over the years I have gone and pitched ideas at major broadcasters but have often come away feeling that actually what happened was that it was no more than an ideas gathering session for the broadcasters themselves… I know that this isnt the case (usually) but commissioning is such an opaque process that anything that opens it up to scrutiny should be welcomed…

However there is increasingly no need to go to commissioners. The inexorable rise of the broadband internet has begun to shift the sand. Why for instance should I make content and just hope that someone shows it for me? Why do I need to be commissioned at all?

New technologies have become so cheap that content can be made to a very high standard on home equipment, we all know that, but increasingly distribution itself is now opening up to content creators. Apple announced recently they will be allowing paid for podcasts to be put on iTunes…that will empower small producers to make and distribute to a worldwide audience at very low cost. Similarly sites such as MySpace are enabling the self distribution of audio and video and are combining this wil reputation engines to enable truly democratic navigational hierarchies to emerge where content people love automatically bubbles to the top of the pile.

What I want the commissioners to answer is how they are going to change now that TV audiences are falling and insular, are moving to other media and producers have cheap direct access to a worldwide audience?