Highly aware of the fact that I’ve used two cliches in one headline, I’ll beging by looking at what appears to be Deloitte saying in its 2009 predictions that as a result of the rising cost of hosting their services more social media publishers will move to new business models, like charging users to upload or share. Will it work in a web culture that worships at the altar of freeware? I doubt it.  If Facebook started charging tomorrow to upload content, Ning would be laughing.

Another interesting finding in this report points to how increasing attention is being drawn to the mobile Internet platform as one of the only potential ‘content growth’ areas. I’d agree with this. Informa have already pointed towards this, and the growth in geo-targetting services and other killer apps that allow people to shape their media consumption around their lives, on the go is undoubtedly the way forward in my opinion.

I was recently also asked by Campbell X if the social media credit crunch would have an impact on R&D:  after a lot of thought I’d say yes in the shorter term, VC funding has shot down, but in the longer term it may spawn more ‘built to flip’ networks with subscription-based business models, that are either easy or tailored for use on mobiles.

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I don’t have much time to blog this morning, but I want to draw your attention to two posts that have helped me develop my thoughts on what corporate consciousness. While I personally believe it is about something much more fundamental than a CSR programme one of the links I have here is from an interesting CSR blog:

What Obama’s Inauguration means for CSR

The new accountability in governance

That’s all for now!

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Have you ever been to a Tweetup? I went to Lewis Webb’s,  the wittily named Shoreditch Twit (the next of these is on the 26th January) ; where I met journos, tech lovers and a few fellow comms people. Twestival aims to collate people’s Tweetups for a common propose. In this case it’s a very worthy cause.

Here’s enough information from their site, to tell you why you should get involved. Thanks to Jaz Cummins for the link.

On 12 February 2009 100+ cities around the world will be hosting Twestivals which bring together Twitter communities for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

Join us by hosting a Twestival in your city, attending an event, or participating online.

The Twestival is organized 100% by volunteers in cities around the world and 100% of the money raised from these events will go directly to support charity: water projects.

In September 2008, a group of Twitterers based in London UK decided to organise an event where the local Twitter community could socialize offline; meet the faces behind the avatars, enjoy some entertainment, have a few drinks and tie this in with a food drive and fundraising effort for a local homeless charity.

The bulk of the event was organized in under two weeks, via Twitter and utilized the talents and financial support of the local Twittersphere to make this happen.

Around the world similar stories started appearing of local Twitter communities coming together and taking action for a great cause. Twestival was born out of the idea that if cities were able to collaborate on an international scale, but working from a local level, it could have a spectacular impact.

By rallying together globally, under short timescales, for a single aim on the same day, the Twestival hopes to bring awareness to this global crisis.

charity: water is a non profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations by funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need.

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Recently I’ve been meditaiong in the mornings, but today was different. I jumped straight onto Techmeme to see what the tech industry was saying about the change in administration. O’Reilly’s blog was the first to catch my eye;  drawing the link between the importance Obama’s team appears to have placed on ‘bottom up’ social organisation and its similarity to the mechanics of social technologies.  The Whitehouse.gov blog also rams home a commitment to transparency communication and participation – which makes me think that it is the very first administration to really become the first large mainstream ‘conscious organisation’; by that I mean one that looks inside itself and conducts an audit of its activities with the consideration of the welfare of its ecosystem of stakeholders and communities in mind. I’m at the beginning of developing this idea; but I believe that this will create a tipping point in which we’ll see the same consciousness applied to the corporate sphere.

It’s early days, but Obama has already hinted in his speech that huge reforms are afoot; ones that will force organisations to change the way they treat the plant, workers, foregin intersts and more. The web is red hot with articles on Obama’s leadership style and how people can take insipration for his use of web 2.0 to bring about fundamental changes in human behaviour. I am convinced that as a result, corporate consciousness – caused by a shift from linear to systems thinking – will eclipse CSR and or at least change what CSR does in future. This will all therefore impact hugely on what PR professionals do.

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I’ll confess it now. I’m a comms professional that hasn’t joined Digg yet. I’ve realised the error of my ways; and I don’t mean that in terms of using the service to try and hawk as many stories as possible, or to try and game the system and climb into bed with the likes of user/submitter, who practices Digg-manipulation techniques.  I’m thinking about the tool as a way of helping people understand stories with more depth to understand the nuances of what the people really want to hear; to be part of a community where you won’t get away with just broadcasting constantly; where you genuinely have to be a ’social’ participant to benefit from it, in the trust sense.

I intend to put this right very shortly. I’ll Tweet you with my new user profile when it’s up!

Also Slideshare’s got some great news; it’s now allowing you to intergrate Youtube clips. I always wondered why they hadn’t done this earlier. Am I the only person who read cryptic looking bullet points in presentations and wondered what the ‘flesh’ looked like on that proverbial skeleton? Surely I can’t be. Anyway, now can make more fun, visual presentations (which will be great for product demos and experiential web 2.0 creds, even resumes) and let your voice do the work. Ace.

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As you might have guessed, this image is not of Obama

Here are my top five Obama-related social web/app links:

1) Umair Haque’s scintillating piece on next-generation leadership

2) There’s a shedload of video streaming services looking to capitalise on the inauguration. Take your pick!

3) A ‘Spreadshirt’ for society improvers and campaigners: Change.org

4) I’ll definitely be following these tweets

5) Get yourself an Obamicon!

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All this investigation of semantic web technologies has led me to think about what the media might look like in  the age of web 3.0.  Defined as ‘the third decade of the web’ by Nova Spivak, the web’s future could show a number of developments: from the evolution of the semantic web,  to effective ‘natural language’ search, data mining, machine learning,  and other intelligent web technologies.

So when we enter this new ‘phase’ which according to Spivak’s ideas will take place from 2010 to 2020, what might the media landscape look like?

I believe we’ll see the easier cross referencing between various news’ sources angles on one particular idea or story – I say this because of the semantic web’s capability of drawing ‘packaged, rich information’ from a number of sources, based on text entries online. It may place a pressure on news sources to differentiate themselves more clearly, so as not to get lost in a storm of information. I believe SEO will also as a result become more important for those newspapers too.

From a brand reputation perspective, I also believe that brands that have created positive dialogues will benefit hugely from the web’s increased ’strucutred-ness’ in terms of information. You’ll be able to  read about a brand and immediately access things that have been said about them – good and bad.

Beyond that, I have no further current observations. It would be great for those who know more about web 3.0 than I do to chip in with your thoughts…

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Courtesy of Nesta

As corporations and mainstream media outlets spend increasing amounts of time debating the impact of social technologies, as well as following that unfolding story, I have also found myself interested in what the future of the internet is. This led me to a conversation that has been happening since the web’s very beginnings but is only really beginning to gain traction now; namely semantic media.  Google has confirmed that semantic search is on the cards, suggesting that it will be the next big web2.0 conversation. Especially considering the fact that niche walled garden social networks are growing, threatening a possible ‘balkanisation’ of groups with specific interests away from each other into private internet world.

Voices on the blogosphere are already calling it ’smart media‘ – distinguishing it from social media by highlighting the following differences:

1. It’s an additional layer of information on top of your social tools, that provides structured precise information on objects on the web and in the real world, as well as explaining the relations between them
2. It provides a framework for the easy integration of data, based on no more than the text on your blog or social network.
3. It also allows you to connect information you have stored in disparate online networks, thereby creating better information sharing between networks you are part of.
4. In search it uses XML and RDF data from semantic networks to remove ambiguity from search queries

In short, it’s all about enhancing and structuring content.

Still confused? Here’s an example…

Rather than adding tags and links yourself, semantic blogging tools like Zemanta collate videos, photos and other links based on the words that appear in your posts. You don’t have to add links! I’m very impressed. The tool is compatible with Wordpress.com, so I’m going to trial it on here in two weeks’ time.

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Reading this morning’s FT update on Twitter, I was eventually led to an analytical article of the Chinese Internet censorship issue on the Huffington Post. The angles on this topic are typically a) technology led or b) focussing on the human rights factor, especially for local bloggers.  This article points out that censorship is actually hurting Google’s market share, by forcing it to offer an inferior information medium. It is explained thus:

You can see the damaging effects of censorship on competition in the Internet industry if you look at the dramatic shift in market leadership. In 2002, when the Internet market was in its infancy, Google had a 24% share of the Chinese search market as compared with then-upstart Baidu, which had a mere 3% share. By August 2008, Google, which has a dominant share of the U.S. market, had been reduced to just 19% of the Chinese search market while Baidu had 65%. This certainly wasn’t a result of Baidu delivering a superior product — rather, Chinese government censors forced Google to provide an inferior product with a much less robust search engine.

I believe there could be a potential backlash from the Chinese populace with time, if their exponentially growing Internet population becomes more savvy about what is happening to them.  However, it’s definitely not something we’ll be seeing in the near future if this report is anything to go by.

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That was a purposely controversial title. It’s almost a clichéd topic to be talking about within the media industries, but this report dug up by TechCrunch has estimated that around 88% of the publishing and advertising industry’s revenue growth over the next two years will come from the web. Here are the four sectors that are forecast to see the greatest growth:

1. Database & Information
2. B2B Online Media
3. Consumer Online Media
4. Interactive Marketing Services

Here’s a (reproduced) chart illustrating revenue sources, from the Jordan Edmiston Group:

Now I for one don’t believe that this will spell the end of newspapers. As John Battelle rightly pointed out with his article questioning the future of the New York Times, papers will just have to justify their existence more. It will be likely that any new entrants to the market will be online; it’s hard enough for people in many countries to justify the costs of print these days. Although his most recent article suggests that the UK could be one market in which the above trend takes place at a slower pace.

One question that I have is this: What will this trend (if it comes to pass and carries on in this vein) do to the way people publish the news to an increasingly interconnected, global community? We already have the Guardian ‘widening its global audience focus with its American version, and (the more distant example of) Al-Jazeera explicitly positioning itself as a news source with a less ‘Westernised bias’, I wonder whether it might prompt other papers to follow suit in a bid to diversify and appeal to new markets? I’ll be watching for the answer to this over the next few years…

PS – do take a look at John Battelle’s blog over the next few days as he’s doing a series of ‘think out loud’ pieces on the future of journalism. Very intriguing stuff, I’m sure…

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