Off Course-On Target

Mishmash of Mashups

In the past two years or so, one of my most popular topics and the one that I've been asked to spend most of my time on is mashups. Notably, this topic seems to be popular across a widely diverse range of my audiences and across many countries and cultures.   

My recent audiences have spanned four continents, and included such diverse group as IT professionals and CIO’s; commercial sales executives; military organizations; technology-enabled learning and e-Learning professionals; and higher education professors, deans and ministers. Given all the interest, I thought a short summary of the topic, along with some recent examples, was due. Hence... today’s post. 

If mashups (or my views about them) are relatively new to you, you can find more details by searching for “mashup” on the Off Course – On Target site. Some of my previous postings on mashups include: 

• The future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup! 
• Mashed Up Snowflakes?

The main point I try to make (and why it seems so relevant to so many) is that mashups should be thought of as a conceptual model rather than a technology. While the term "mashup" is somewhat new, the concept is neither new nor complex. In simple terms:

A mashup is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole. 

Even more simply (and a surprisingly robust metaphor for it) is that mashups are like Lego blocks; you have a lot of small components which can form almost infinite numbers of assemblies to create just about anything you can imagine.   

With mashups, the ‘bits and pieces’ or individual Lego blocks are pre-existing things that can come from any source and often from multiple sources. Furthermore, these “bits and pieces” can truly be just about anything and everything, from content to code to hardware to events to teams.

Two things that are accelerating the rise of mashups are what I call MC² (with apologies to Einstein and others):

MC² = Mass Contribution multiplied by Mass Customization

Mass contribution and mass customization are part of the deeply pervasive metapattern of mass personalization, which Erik Duval and I refer to as "The Snowflake Effect." All of us are becoming increasingly enabled by mashup technology and the plentiful availability of mashable objects.

We are becoming mashup creators ourselves. Fewer programming skills are required, and many essentially require none, so we can focus on finding and assembling the specific components we want to put together into a unique assembly. You can get a sense of the depth and diversity of mashups by spending a few minutes looking at some of the examples listed by the likes of WebMashup.com.

Perhaps because my audiences who work in information technology (IT), as well those who are CIO’s, have shown such an interest in mashups, I took note of today’s posting (July 23^rd, 2007) "A bumper crop of new mashup platforms" by Dion Hinchliffe and his previous posting from May, Mashups: The next major new software development model?. Dion’s blog, Enterprise 2.0, focuses on “leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web”. He too makes note of this shift in focus from the current practice of creating  “raw components” to creating assemblies instead.  In the larger context, I’ve noted that this is also bringing with it a rethinking about the scope of design and how we are all becoming “designers”.  As we create these assemblies of solutions to match our  unique requirements, context, and situations. we are becoming more involved in design and design related tasks.   

Dion provided this diagram which I thought was a good summary of the situation:

   

He also provided a reference to a recent McKinsey "Web 2.0 in business" survey which noted that 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups. He went on to note that: 

“...there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space.”  

In other recent news, I saw a good example of the Snowflake Effect and mashups on TV, or perhaps better put, in video content. This example is called Chime.tv and you will find a good summary and even better video coverage on David’s posting "Chime.TV’s subject-based channels cut across Internet video sources with one UI".

Even more apropos to today’s topic of mashups, Chime.TV is but one of the many examples coming out of the recently completed Mashup Camp run by David Berlind and others from Ziff Davis. David posted some of his observations on mashup trends yesterday in his posting Mashup culture shatters crusty, stodgy old approach to business app dev.   

Returning now to this idea about mashups as a conceptual model, I want to recommend that you look at these examples and consider how mashups fit into your world and work. Consider that mashups also apply to people!  Think for example about putting together a great project team. Ideally you want to be able to find just the right collection and combination of individuals who possess just the right set of skills, knowledge, experience, and attitudes (the Lego blocks) to form a new “assembly” that best matches the needs of the project and the context of the specific situation. Or consider how valuable it will be to be able to find just the right individual(s) to meet and talk with at a conference, in an online chat, or on IM. 

Rather than leaving this to serendipity (even as powerful as I believe that to be), imagine a future where you and we collectively can start to increase the probability of finding “just the right” people to create the mashup of individuals you need. To some extent, this is already happening at some “unconference” events and more broadly with the newest “dating technology” whereby changing the context from romantic to professional or other purposes, the exact same technology can be extremely effective at helping you to find the right people to talk with, work with, and meet with. 

I’ll continue to keep an eye on mashups and talk more about some specific applications and diversity in future postings. In the meantime, send me some of the ways you are going to mashup your world. This may sound “off course” but it sure is “on target” to improving our overall learning and performance, don’t you think?

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P-Learning: Fill up your tank...and your head?

I’m finally off the road long enough to get out on my Harley to enjoy both the great weather that we’ve been having lately in sunny California and some of the great winding back roads you can see in this picture. However, even at almost 50 miles to the gallon (or about 5 liters per 100k as I would have said when I lived in Europe), enjoying all those lovely miles means that I have to stop to fill up the gas tank once in a while.

So there I was, calmly filling up the Harley with a whole 4 gallons of gas when a voice from above started to talk to me. No, no, not THAT kind of voice!  I looked up to find a large LCD screen installed on the top of the gas pump. As I sat there filling up my tank, the monitor tried to fill up my head with information someone felt I just had to have.

That’s right folks. Just when you thought there might be some escape, along comes  “Gas Station TV”, offered in this case by the company of the same name. Programming on the pump starts when you put in your credit card and it repeats until you finish your fill up. My other vehicle is a pickup truck with a MUCH larger tank than my Harley, so I expect to hear several loops when I’m filling it up!

Of course, I needed to find out more and sure enough, I found an article on Gearlog called “Watch Pump Top TV at Your Local Gas Station”.

My first experience produced mixed reactions:

• The advertisements (was there any doubt?) were annoyingly frequent and the ratio of ads-to-content was way too high. If they want to be effective and not drive us all away, then they will need to come up with much better marketing models.  Perhaps they could follow the success online by placing the ads off to one side or the bottom and let the content come through the majority of the screen space?

• The sound was too loud!  When the station is busy and every pump is playing a different part of the same loop (the “show” starts when the pump starts), it gets VERY annoying very quickly. 
• It will take a while to settle on what type of content is best for this venue. For example one segment gave the local weather forecast and an updated traffic report. Smart and helpful, so I appreciated that. I could see them adding driving tips, how to get better mileage and an option asking me if I need directions to my next destination.

While I understand that we are a “captive audience” in these situations, smart installations could give us more control, resulting in greater effectiveness. For example, they could provide a volume or mute button to let me control the sound, and they could follow the Web example (most of the time) by not having any sound from advertisements unless I choose to let it play.

However, their biggest opportunity for success would be to let the Snowflake Effect hit these installations. The content would be customized and personalized just for me. For example, since I have to stick my credit card into the machine, it could determine who I am and it could:

• Use some of my chosen preferences to give me more relevant information. 
• Know which vehicle I’m driving (ask me on the touch screen if I have more than one), and provide me with information specific to that vehicle.
• Know the kind of content I’m most interested in during these situations—maybe I’m more interested in the weather than sports scores, or I might want different information depending on the time of day. 
• Offer a large series of content so that I could choose those segments that are relevant for me. Then they could keep showing me new content for as long as I’m there, rather than just repeating the same loop ad nauseam.

Still, like it or not, I imagine that this trend will continue to show up at more stations. If used well, this could be an example of modular learning that is good for both the consumer and the producers.

So, next time you are at the gas station, don’t be frightened by the voice from above (well, maybe be very frightened?). Just look up and see this latest example of the digital surroundings we are living in. Gas Station TV is more evidence of the trend line I’ve covered previously here at Off Course – On Target—the  increasing presence of "digital screens" where literally any surface can become an interactive display. Read more about it in my postings "The Old Medium has become the New Content" (Part 1) and (Part 2).

The upside of living in a market-based economy is that we are the market. Ultimately, we ARE in control, because we can vote with our feet and our wallets. My suggestion? If this trend of almost all surfaces becoming digital interactive displays is inevitable, as I believe it is, then let’s start coming up with ways to use it to our advantage. Let's make them  into another opportunity for learning moments.

In the near future, “Fill ‘er up” may apply not only to your gas tank, but  to your head as well. Just remember… your actual mileage may vary. <g>

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Get out your Snow Shoes—Severe Snowstorms Hitting TV

In the context of television, I remember when the word “snow” meant that you had very poor reception. Under those conditions, the image on the screen looked like a snowstorm. Now, however, there is a whole new type of “snowstorm” hitting TV and this one is causing a MUCH more profound effect. In the past few weeks, I have seen a veritable storm of news showing how the “Snowflake Effect” (mass personalization) is deeply affecting TV.

Today I’m pointing out some examples to help bring the underlying pattern of the Snowflake Effect into focus, and so we can all understand and benefit from this in our current work and planning. In my role as the so-called “Strategic Futurist”, I strive to look much further into the future than is typical. Taking the long view helps all of us make smarter decisions NOW! This approach is more than just fanciful gazing into the future, and it is not purely strategic. Rather it is a very pragmatic and smart approach for providing good “decision support” for our everyday actions, choices, and guidance. By seizing the underlying principles and patterns, we can make significant advances toward mass personalization and a world optimized for each of us as unique individuals experiencing a stream of unique moments and opportunities.

So with this purpose in mind, here are some new directions in TV content—some concrete evidence of extremely telling and important trends that will affect our overall collections of content and our abilities to get content “just right” for each of us as “snowflakes” and for each “snowflake” moment.

Content Convergence

My first example illustrates the convergence of TV and video from multiple content sources. In this case, the combination of services and technology enables the mass personalization of TV viewing with personal or digital video recorders (PVR or DVR) along with the videos available from online outlets such as Amazon.

Last month Amazon and TiVo rolled out their new integrated offering called “Unbox”, which lets you combine the TV content you receive via your cable or satellite sources with access to buy or rent downloadable TV shows and movies available from Amazon. You can get more details from some recent reviews such as:

• “Amazon’s Unbox Marriage to TiVo”  by David Berlin on ZDNet

• “A Hands-On Look at Amazon Unbox on TiVo” by Matthew Moskovciak on Crave.

As these reviewers note, this first offering exhibits many of the shortcomings that most innovations suffer from, such as some awkward interface problems and difficulties displaying wide-screen HD content, but they will surely be addressed as they mature. The Unbox also provides a significant advantage over say, the recent Apple TV or the use of Microsoft Media Centers, because you don’t need a PC running in the background to make this all work. So this solution is a significant step towards making mass personalization of TV content much simpler and more likely to be adopted by the masses. It’s a great example of TV’s transition from a medium to content, something I discussed previously here at Off Course – On Target with “The Old Medium has become the New Content” Part 1 and Part 2 .

TiVo Home Movie Sharing

TiVo also recently rolled out another and perhaps even more significant capability called “TiVo Home Movie Sharing”. By providing you with a “private channel, this service lets you quickly and easily share your own video content (home movies) with other TiVo users. To provide this new service, TiVo joined forces with One True Media, an online service that helps people create video montages or home movies and provides a fast way of uploading your own content. Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection has a more detailed review entitled  “TiVo Home Movie Sharing”.

Obviously this model is limited to those who are TiVo users, but look beyond this and imagine what will happen as this capability becomes more ubiquitous and universally available!  And of course, there would be no need to restrict this to “home movies” since it would work equally as well to share video content of any kind and would have value for businesses, education, and most organizations.

This example may help you understand some of my previous comments about the exponential explosion of “channels” for content (such as music and video). From the hundreds of channels currently available via cable and satellite to literally billions of personal channels, there would be at least as many, if not multiple, channels as people since each individual would want to have many different channels to match many different moods, situations and circumstances—watching alone versus with your family, daytime versus nighttime, news and documentaries versus entertainment, etc.

Google Ads TV (pun intended)

Google has also announced several new initiatives that provide further proof of this trend towards mass personalization of TV and video content. For example, in a continuation of their basic ad-based business model, Google recently entered the television advertising business by striking a deal with the large U.S. satellite TV operator EchoStar. Reuters covered the story in the PC Magazine article “Google Ads Move Onto Direct TV”. I am NOT pointing this out because of the advertising or business model issues, but because this is all being driven by the desire to get more direct connections with viewers and to provide the critical feedback loop component of the Snowflake Effect.

As the PC Magazine article notes, “Viewer feedback is the Holy Grail”. Granted, this is also being driven of course by advertising revenue and the pursuit of personalization of advertising, which can certainly have its dark side. However there is also the significant upside of developing these capabilities for improved “targeting” of information and there is no need for this to be restricted to advertising content or purposes. When it works to our own advantage and benefit, well “targeted” information is simply another example of getting it “just right” as in just the right information to just the right person(s) at just the right time, etc. And as noted in my previous post “JOOST = Juiced TV”, such targeted advertising has the ability to dramatically reduce the volume of advertising we experience by as much as 90%!

Google Engineering the Snowflake Effect

Donna Bogatin on ZDNet recently posted an even more direct example of the Snowflake Effect in her article “Google Television engineering targets mass TV personalization”. She does a nice job of summarizing some of the many benefits of “mass personalization” and notes how...

“The characteristics of mass media contrast sharply with the World Wide Web. Mass media channels typically provide limited content to many people; the Web provides vast amounts of information, most of interest to few. Mass media channels typically beget passive, largely anonymous consumption, while the Web provides many interactive opportunities like chatting, emailing and trading.”

Google’s stated goal is “to combine the best of both worlds: integrating the relaxing and effortless experience of mass media content with the interactive and personalized potential of the Web, providing mass personalization.”

Apple Aiming for TV Breakthrough

Not to be outdone by others and adding even more proof of how large and powerful the Snowflake Effect is, Apple has also made some significant announcements recently (see "Apple Aiming for TV Breakthrough"). Most relevant is their launch of Apple TV, a combination of a hardware device and some services that enable content, especially TV and video content, to be streamed from your PC or Mac to your television screen. More details are available on Wikipedia and in the CNN review “Apple TV best for ITunes addicts”

Of course, this is not a new capability, since many other manufacturers and service providers have been offering this for several years. But Apple hopes to be able to do for TV and video content what it did for music and audio content with the iPod. In fact, Apple TV requires the use of iTunes (running on a PC or Mac) to control the access to video and TV content. Personally I think this is also one of the more vexing limitations of the Apple model including the fact that a computer running iTunes is also required to make the system work. I was also surprised to find that there is currently no way to buy iTunes Store content directly from the Apple TV. You have to go to your PC or Mac to do this. This is why the Amazon/TiVo Unbox example is a potentially better model. But it would be folly to dismiss the “Apple factor” with the “emotional design”, mass appeal, and marketing that Apple is SO good at delivering.

Get out your Snow Shoes! (hey, I’m Canadian what did you expect?)

Some see all this recent activity around television as the “liberation of the living room”, which I agree is happening. However, I think this is missing the much larger trends—the transition of TV from an old medium to the new content, and the progression of mass personalization or the Snowflake Effect.

Consider for example that we are also seeing a serious surge in the migration of video content to many other devices and locations—on digital display screens on cell phones, PDA’s, and inside planes, trains and automobiles. The MUCH larger trend we need to notice is the ability to have any content, anywhere, anytime. And while “any” is the focus, our locus needs to be on how to well we can take on this transformation from “any” to “every” and down to just “one” (the right person/place/time/context etc.)

Now THAT is a snowstorm I want to be a part of!  I’m looking forward to hearing about other examples from you, as well as your observations and reflections after you’ve experienced some of these yourself. Put on your snowshoes and let’s start walking this talk.

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The Search for Better Finding!

As I often say to my audiences, “There is a big difference between searching and finding.” It’s along the same lines as the difference between shopping and buying, or fishing and catching. I’m not suggesting that one is “better” than the other, just that they are VERY different and often confused with each other.  Apply this distinction to the Web, and I suspect that if we were to evaluate our current practices and time use, we’d see that we spend a LOT of time searching and not very much time finding. 

My focus (some might say, "myopia") on metadata is because I believe it is one of the keystone elements that can make for better finding of “the right stuff” (people, places, content, services, locations, events, etc.) more possible. However, other critical elements are the interface and human interaction layers and models for finding.

Today we are almost completely dependent on or limited to the use of both textual models and variations on lists or search results to find what we want. While this is helpful in many situations and is not something I expect will disappear, I am anxious to see additional ways for finding the right stuff (which is not always what we think we want). One way to achieve this goal would be through the use of visual methods and multidimensional techniques.

Don’t you find that often the most valuable things are those you discover serendipitously? Or how about those situations where you say, “Of course!” but they were not what you had directly been looking for?  Current keyword searching is not unlike trying to find a word in a dictionary that you can’t spell in the first place. It’s extremely limited, because you have to know which term to use in a search, there are no semantic “smarts” to the searching, and of course, it is all purely text based.

So I’m always looking for and experimenting with alternative or additional ways to do more finding. The good news is that these alternative means seem to be growing, yet they typically don’t get too much attention and awareness of them seems very low. I suspect this is because we are creatures of habit. We are too busy doing things the “old way”, so it is difficult to be aware of better alternatives and to go through the challenge of changing (even though these “old ways” are relatively new habits that we’ve only been doing for a few years at most!). It’s that old “UNLearning” issue, yet again!

This conundrum seems a bit like the situation, “I could really use some time management training, but I just don’t have the time.” If you suspect that you are spending a lot more time searching than you are finding, consider how much time you will save by acquiring some new finding skills and tools. With this in mind, you may want to check out some of the following ideas. This list of ideas is not meant to be comprehensive; rather, it will serve to show you the range of alternative methods, interfaces, and tools that are available. Hopefully it will also help you find other alternatives.

Rafe Needleman has a very useful Web site that will help to keep you apprised of the growing field of “webware” or Web-based solutions and technology. I highly recommend that you check out his site regularly and even consider subscribing to it. Recently, Rafe had a post called “Five Weird Ways to Search” that covers a good range of options. I’ve used most of these options, including Grokker and Kartoo, for several years now. I don’t think any of them are “it” or “the next big thing”. However, they are great explorations, and each has something to offer.

Based solely on my experiences, the two from this article that I recommend you try are Quintura and Grokker. I’ve used Quintura less, but it is a good example of tag clouds*, something that I find very useful and believe you will see much more of in the near future.

Since our human behaviors are usually the biggest barriers to change, I would STRONGLY encourage you to try these out for at least a few weeks. Do some experiential learning (which seems all too rare these days) of your own. I think you’ll find, at the very least, that it will give you some good glimpses into the future of finding and help to change some of your thinking and approaches to it.  Try out a few of these and send me details of your experiences and of any other find/search tools that you discover so we can all benefit.

*You can see a limited version of tag clouds, the collection of different-sized words in the upper left column of Off Course – On Target.

And now for something completely different!

While you are feeling experimental, try out some of these slightly “farther out” examples of finding the “right stuff”:

Rafe Needleman’s post Art meets News on Universe shows you examples (such as Universe and the Digg Swarm) of the use of visualization in searching and finding. This technique adds a social dimension to visualization by providing a viewpoint on content from a collection of others. Look past the specific content used in the example (which is silly indeed) and instead see the experience of the interface when video and floating visual choices are used. Then be sure to check out Time Trumpet.

And, in my continuing quest to wean us from a text only existence, try out the recent introduction of Nostalgia for photos. It is a wonderful desktop application for Yahoo’s Flickr. And if you like what you see with these, be sure to check out some of the other cools apps from Thirteen23.

Don’t be overwhelmed by all these new choices. Just give them a quick look and try out two or three to satisfy your curiosity in the search for better finding!

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JOOST = Juiced TV

It seems like there is no end to the examples of metaTrends coming at us every day, such as the Snowflake effect of mass personalization, and the convergence and conversion of yesterday’s mediums into today’s media and messages.

In the span of a relatively few years, we have seen the medium of television grow from the TWO channels that I recall as a child, to the 100+ that cable TV brought with it, and then to hundreds of channels that satellite TV now delivers. But as the saying goes “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” 

Today I want to talk about one that promises to be a precursor to the rapid evolution—some would say, “revolution”—of the medium formerly known as television or TV. With the upcoming launch of a new company called Joost (pronounced “juiced”), formerly known as the “Venice Project”, we are about to see a massive mashup of nearly infinite personal choices in TV-based content. I believe this will be yet another example of another theme I’ve talked about—exponential change—because we are about to experience the exponential growth of television content. (Now THERE is a frightening thought for some!)

Joost is being brought to you by the same duo who previously unleashed the explosion of file and music sharing by creating  Kazaa, and then went on to unleash the growth of online phone conversations by creating Skype. Now a bit smarter and armed with a whole lot more resources (eBay bought Skype for a paltry $2.6 billion) Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström appear ready to have the same effect on TV content with the upcoming release their latest brainchild.

If you look closely at some these Joost screenshots, you’ll notice that it provides various options—personalized “smart channels”, search capabilities to find just what you want, a buddy list, IM, recommendations, feedback loops to “Rate It”, chat, and “Share What I’m Watching.

Check out last month’s (Feb 2007) Wired magazine to get Spencer Reiss’ coverage in “Why Joost is Good for TV”. Reiss will give you better insight into the potential power of Joost and the future of video content. As Reiss puts it, their vision may be challenging but it is clear:

“The vision: universal TV, running on a hybrid P2P platform—millions of exquisitely networked PCs fortified with traditional video servers. Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone’s a winner!”

The “secret” to their past and (they hope) future success is to build systems based on distributed computing, known as Peer to Peer or P2P, where the users/customers become the network. These new forms of P2P actually work better as the demand goes up and more end user computers are added to this dynamic network. This is in stark contrast to the models that the likes of Google, YouTube and iTunes are using, where they have to store and stream the content, so demand typically slows down the overall system. Therefore, the major benefit of this new model that Joost is using is mass scalability. They’ll certainly need it if Joost takes off and billions of people start watching trillions of “channels” of on-demand “just right for you” TV content.

Joost is also another great example of the “mashup” or Lego-block-type approach I’ve long ranted and raved about. As Reiss got from his discussions with Janus and Friis, this is not so much a “skunk works” project as it is a mashup shop for “Lego-style architecture + open standards + existing public code”. Interestingly enough, Joost CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik doesn’t even like TV, but he has a big thing for Legos. So when he is in CTO mode, he calls it “a big exercise in systems integration” but when he tries to summarize, he simply says “We’re snapping together Legos.”

Currently, for each hour of broadcast TV programming, a viewer watches 12 to 20 minutes of advertising. Joost’s business model also depends primarily on advertising, but the distinct difference is that personalized TV enables highly targeted marketing and therefore MUCH less advertising…like, 90 percent less—as little as one minute per hour of viewing, if projections pan out. “The key in the past (to advertising) was volume and frequency,” says Clark. “Now it’s going to be quality.”

Joost has also made the conscious decision to NOT go after user-generated content. Given the current problems YouTube is having with the recent billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom, this decision is looking to be a very smart move—for now.

As per my previous posting on old media and new content, Joost is transforming the old medium of TV into the new content and is leveraging our current behaviors in terms of TV watching time. Reiss notes this in his Wired article:

“...it’s to migrate television’s mass audience to the Web. 'We want to be in the space where people are doing what they do now with TV, watching four to six hours a day,' says Henrik Werdelin, 30, another MTV defector who spearheads overall product development now at Joost.  He put it a bit more pointedly when he added, 'That’s a lot of YouTube clips.'"

Of course, there is no telling if Joost will itself turn out to be a winner. It may suffer the same fate as Napster, which was taken over by Kazaa. There is no end to formidable competitors and opponents in all of this, and it is just a question of who the big players will be and how soon it will happen. There is NO question in my mind that it WILL happen and will change and shape our behaviors just as the unleashing of other forms of content such as text, music and phone conversations has changed us.

If you’d like to learn more, you can keep up with Joost specifically via the Joost blog and even better, you can do some experiential learning by signing up to be a beta tester.

Even if you don’t see much value in having specific content on TV, don’t dismiss it outright. Instead, begin to imagine what you can do when you can have not just any content, but just the right content for YOU or for those you work with, your friends, or your family. As William Gibson so accurately put it “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”   Hope you will help to even out that distribution in the world.

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McLuhan meets Web 2.0?

In some of my recent postings (“The Old Medium has become the New Content” Part 1 and Part 2), I expressed my admiration and respect for the many prescient remarks that the late, great Marshall McLuhan made about the media, including “the medium is the message”. In keeping with this notion that “the old medium becomes the new content”, I thought many of you would enjoy a posting on YouTube which a good friend and colleage, Gerry Lang from Intrepid recently brought to my attention.  This led to some additional exploration and I turned up two others that seemed to have a story that I'd like to relate here.

First, Assistant Professor Michael Wesch at Kansas State University, USA has posted a video clip with the apt title of “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” (click on the image below to watch) Wesch not only provides a comprehensive explanation of the collection of recent Web-based technologies and the era of the Web popularly known as “Web 2.0”, he does this in less than 5 minutes!  In addition, he uses the medium itself to great advantage to make his points.

If you check out Wesch’s notes about this posting (click  “This …. (more)” to the right of the video), you can see that he matches his work to his message, because he says that this is his 2nd draft and requests that you send him suggestions for improvement.

In fact, his overall treatment of this piece provides a wonderful instance of  “leadership by example”. In addition to those things I’ve already noted, Wesch illustrates some of his points about Web 2.0 by matching the music (to my ears, at least) to the message. His chosen song, "There's Nothing Impossible" by Deus is available for download and distribution for free and as Wesch notes:

“Deus offers music under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license, yet one more example of the interlinking of people sharing and collaborating this video is attempting to illustrate."

This same license covers all the content you find here at Off Course-On Target. If you are interested in using Creative Commons license to distribute some of YOUR content so that everyone can readily use, reuse and repurpose it, check out the new v3.0 of Creative Commons license.

The second part is an example of user-generated content in the form of a follow-up response to Wesch’s clip by “Corey the Raven” that shos how such works can stimulate good responses from others. This is not only a good response but one that again uses the medium to provide part of the message.

And the third part is for those of you who are either new to Web 2.0 or find it all quite confusing.  It's a more "traditional" presentation style simple called “Web 2.0” created and posted on YouTube by Jeff Utecht from Singapore, China. Jeff offers a more factual overview of the history of Web 2.0 and does a good job of providing specific examples to illustrate the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0.

I enjoy these video formats and think they provide an excellent form of content and medium. They also underline the need to provide additional formats. For example, a text transcript of these videos or perhaps a set of “stills” (such as slides) would be extremely helpful so that you can discuss them later, pick out specific parts, and reference them. Wesch seems to agree and has added the transcript for “The Machine is Us/ing Us”.  Or if you prefer to try out your own version of using alternative mediums to get your message across, you can provide your comments via video and audio.

In my own attempt to “lead by example” and “walk the talk”, I provide a full text transcript with each of my audio podcasts here at Off Course-On Target. Of course, I probably need to provide an audio version of each text-based blog entry as well. I may be able to meet this requirement using some of the new automated text to speech converters. I’m working on that now.

In the interim, as we share and exchange our ideas, we can benefit from having multiple mediums and formats for the same messages in order to achieve maximum transfer and value. While not every message will require this, the availability of such formats as illustrations, video, audio, and text for the same message seems to provide a richer and more provocative experience. This, in turn, tends to stimulate responses in kind and goes a long way toward increasing the creation of new content and knowledge for and by us all.

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