On The Turning Away

Power does not corrupt men. Fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

The inner procrastinator had been in charge too long. Until the conformist rationale pushed aside the contrarian instinct, we consciously put off reading Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario 2.0. In his apocalyptic Chaos Scenario published couple years ago, Garfield sounded the death knell of mass media as we know it. Now we’re “witnessing the middle of the end of old media”. In other words, the death spiral of the mass media/mass advertising symbiosis has accelerated.

Both print and broadcast are losing the audience to the infinitely fragmented digital media, which have near-zero distribution costs and are overwhelmingly free to the user. The conventional wisdom of following the money doesn’t cut ice anymore. In Chaos 2.0, you must follow the no-money.
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We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention this: the elusive new Ben & Jerry’s flavor, Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream, has arrived on the concret island. A cornucopia of sightings, including delis and bodegas, was reported.

Mind you, it’s not any decadent melting pot of vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and a caramel swirl. “It’s the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth.” And should you travel outside the city, there’s a google maps mashup where people have been contributing locations of Americone dream. If you wonder why “pickings for the New York area are pretty slim”, rumors have it the Colbert Report purchased most of them at Ben & Jerry’s Times Square Location (8th Ave. & 43rd).

Rumors have again surfaced this week that Time Warner may chop off its publishing arm since it lacks synergies with the company’s “other video centric businesses”. Industry observers concur that a sale of Time Inc. is “not out of the realm of possibility”, and a consortium of private equity firms could be the knight in shining armor.

Meawnwhile TW denied the rumors, amid reports this week that video “gets star billing” at Time Inc as it sees itself in an ideal position to compete directly with networks by creating compelling original stories that “arise from the voices of its strong publishing brands”.
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Before we all get giddy about the next generation of mobile media devices capable of seamlessly delivering full-motion video and a myriad of advanced interactive media content to the “third screen”, aka, the cell phone, a sober reality check.

A survey from Media-Screen Netpop/Pocket found that just about 5% of broadband subscribers are choosing to access the Internet through their cell phones or PDA’s, despite 62% of them own a Web-enabled mobile device. The top two barriers to using mobile devices for Internet access are data fees and small screens. For now online activity has yet to move beyond the traditional second screen, the personal computer.

Separately, another study from M:Metrics and Buongiorno, the multinational digital entertainment company, pointed to little difference in how mobie users in Europe and America consumer “genres of news and information consumption”. Mobile music is currently the largest sector of mobile entertainment worldwide, and 80% of mobile music revenue comes from ring tones.

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For those with elephant memory, we mentioned Photobucket, along with a bunch of so-called Web 2.0 sites, last October. Now Fortune has just discovered the photo-sharing gem and in characteristically hyperbolic fashion, gushed, “The biggest Web site you’ve never heard of.” And the drum roll from TechCrunch, where Michael Arrington never saw anything he doesn’t like.

Despite the hype, Photobucket’s popularity lies primarily in its MySpace fan base. Fair to say its success has less to do with Ajax, or cool stuff, and more with simplicity and giving users what they want. Whether it can live up to the self-proclaimed “fad-proof” mantra remains to be seen.

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(Courtesy of gapingvoid.com)

From JibJab with “news”: “What we call the News“. It’s spot-on.

The recent “Hillary 1984” video on YouTube highlights questions over the credibility of material posted on the Internet. Gone are the days when journalists act as a gate keeper for the public as power is shifting from professionals to the individual citizen to be responsible for their own news gathering and consumption.

It’s part of a broader picture of a consumer control era that has dawned upon us. When we can plump for downloading videos on demand, the once hallowed television with its fixed-time programs is slowly losing its grip on news and entertainment. “It’s a crossline between Internet and TV experience”.
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Hot on the heels of announcing plans for an online video platform with NBC Universal comes News Corp’s biggest push yet into providing MySpace’s millions of users with original video content - a deal with Michael Eisner’s pioneering “Prom Queen” Web series, produced by his digital studio Vuguru.com.

For Eisner, the most popular social networking site adds a powerful distribution partner to the list of YouTube and Veoh.com for his latest foray into digital entertainment. As online video becomes the sweet spot for advertisers, original and compelling content are seen as a key driver of audiences amid the intensifying fight for supremacy in the online distribution battle.

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