Image by Spencer Tunik

People like making and maintaining human connections; they are what make us who we are. The people we form these connections with become acquaintances and friends; you can have a shared experience with these people that make a valuable addition to your life. If you form a connection like this you mutually advocate each other, this is a positive, active, human connection.

These human connections mean a lot more than the passive brand connections many people have with media products, and which some brands are actively looking to increase without thinking about what value, if any, these passive followings really have.

We don’t just need more people following us, we need more acquaintances and friends, we therefore need to make our brands more human and personable so people form relationships in which they feel they can advocate what we do.

The image above isn’t included for titillation or shock value. Specer Tunik once said of his art that the subjects are pivotal to the work. His work is credible because those involved completely buy into the idea, they advocate it, they are not just a following but working in collaboration with him to produce something startling, special and completely unique. Art.

It never ceases to amaze me when ordinary people get into the spirit of what I’m doing. It’s pivotal to my art.”

Spencer Tunik

People are pivotal to media products. Our products are our art.

Publishing brands are losing their credibility and relevance because audience expectations around forming connections with them have changed. This is due to the proliferation of interpersonal methods of digital communication like email, forums, Facebook and Twitter. The ability to share information with other people in real-time is easier than it ever has been and we maintain regular communications with more people than we ever have done, so why should we listen to what a brand has to say with the same level of interest as a human connection? We shouldn’t and we don’t.

There is still massive value in the media brand as a platform to enable professional content creation but more than ever before it is the personality and human behind the brand operating on the platform in which our audience are interested in and want to form a meaningful connection with. If the opportunity to do that is absent for the audience they don’t buy into it.

To facilitate the audience advocating our brands we must humanise them to the greatest degree possible, the audience should feel they can connect with the people behind the brand and form a connection with us on a human level.

I was sent this article

The point I have a problem with is below.

The end of frequency
Say goodbye to the idea of monthly magazines, or weeklies, or dailies. Print publications, already under siege by the Internet and 24-hour news cycle, will have to learn to adapt to a world of instantaneous updates. This is most obvious for news and business publications, but it’s just as true for fashion, entertainment and specialized titles.”

Luke Hayman, 2010

I disagree with Luke, I would have written something like this.

The rebirth of frequency
Say hello to the idea of monthly, weekly or daily digital magazines. Print publications, which have seen their audience decimated by the unbundling of content on websites can take control of their content once again. News publications by their nature require instantaneous updates the feature led niche subject matter found in magazines doesn’t. The iPad may provide a consumer platform for a digital equivalent to a monthly, weekly or daily magazine.”

Me, 2010

Putting news, business, fashion, entertainment and specialized titles in the same bracket confuses the issue. Newspapers and magazines are fundamentally different platforms, which are consumed in a very different way by their respective readers and in turn deserve different digital platforms.

Luke comments himself that “Print publications [are] already under siege by the Internet and [a] 24-hour news cycle” the modern news cycle isn’t part of the way modern magazines need to operate. While touching on topical issues magazines are predominantly feature led and nowhere near as time or location sensitive as a newspaper.

I also have a problem with Luke referring to the Internet like it is a medium (“under siege by the Internet”). It isn’t, the Internet is a place, print publications are under siege by websites.

Websites by their nature make bundling content rather difficult. The iPad as a medium may be able to deliver bundles more effectively in a fundamentally different way to websites. As Jony Ive comments in the iPad launch video though “In many ways this defines our vision, our sense of what’s next”. It isn’t the final solution, but it is a start.

When Bonnier published their Mag+ research at the end of last year they commented that audiences like “an editorial package” and “an infinite, endlessly expanding RSS feed” makes it difficult for an audience to really engage and relate to a content provider. Audience like a package they can “read through and finish”. I agree.

Audiences like a bundle of content, it’s not a bad thing for them to want and it’s not a bad thing for us to want to provide. The birth of the iPad does in no way whatsoever signal the imminent death of monthly, weekly or daily magazines, it signals their renaissance.

Disqus is an interesting system because it also removes the barriers put up by different websites and allows commenting on a central hub. It provides users with a very flexible platform on which they can follow multiple threads of discussion in the same place without having multiple sign ins on different sites.

Disqus makes it easier for people to comment and track their contributions on a single profile which they can display as a comment blog. After all, there is no difference between a great comment and a great published article.”

disqus.com

A shared space like this is great because it makes the process of engagement easier and facilitates debate though commenting, which adds value to the content being debated and to the comments themselves.

For larger brands who want debate to happen on their “digital property” thus generating registrations to their system from which they can collect data a system like this could be seen as disruptive, however if Disqus allows communication to happen more productively across different sites and are able to facilitate the sharing of user data then then content providers may find this sort of solution very attractive.

Below I have tried to represent this idea through the example of UK national newspaper websites. The Collective Community which is joined by a system like Disqus can push and pull users between different debates and points of view allowing users to move between different debates easily and interact with them using the same identity. The Separate Communities on the right are more isolated and contained. They don’t allow a freedom of expression amongst them without using different identities.

Traditional content publishers (which newspapers are) may find this a difficult concept to buy into initially. The system is not exclusive, so users could be actively recruited by another content provider, who might be a direct competitor. Users might then choose to spend more time with that other content provider if their experience of the content and debate are better than that which they had before.

Content providers such as newspapers and magazines have very competitive rivalries for sales in hard-copy that now spills over into the digital world in a battle for users, this influences the relationship these brands have with their readers. Whether or not a system like this would be used by a competitor should be put to one side and the user should always be considered first.

Content providers own the content being presented, when it then takes a life on of it’s own through the comments made on it that is not their property, it belongs collectively to those who have continued the conversation.

Content creators don’t own the conversation, users do.

Having a collective community which is able to move betwen different newspaper websites means those websites can concentrate on what they are traditionally good at. Not managing a community but producing interesting, exciting content that users will love.

With Janis Krums having tweeted the first picture of the Hudson crash using his iPhone yesterday the opportunity that citizen journalism offers publishers is clear for everybody to see!

This is surely going to be one of the landmark tweets. It was sent from on board the first rescue ferry to come to the aid of the plane that crashed in The Hudson yesterday.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on a post by Lewis Gray entitled “10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech”

I would add that in terms of delivering news in real-time that citizen journalism and a croudsoursed delivery mechanism will me more closely integrated with main stream news sources. Services like NowPublic.com will really come to the forefront and start making more of an impact.”

Me on 10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech By Louis Gray

I think this event demonstrates with dramatic effect how powerful citizen journalism can be and how events like this will bring it more praise as an incredibly important part of the modern news delivery mechanism.

Only two weeks into the year and a major news event with world wide interest has been captured first by a citizen journalist, there will be a lot more to come from citizen journalism in ’09!

Janis Krums was on MSNBC while still on the ferry and is set to appear on breakfast shows in the US today to hopefully spread the word about how he took his photo and how other people can get involved with the network in the same way he did.

I wait with iPhone in hand eagerly anticipating the opportunity to deliver news to the masses.

Links:
- Janis Krums Twitter page
- The Tweet he sent from the ferry
- The Twitpic entry of the plane in The Hudson

Depending on the subject matter being discussed you might want to include maps, videos, Wikipedia entries, mp3 files or images; in order to put your thoughts and ideas in context, add value to them and make sure your users truly understand what you are talking about.

This contextual content would traditionally be linked to via hyperlinks that would take you away from what you are already halfway through reading, thus disrupting the flow through the article and making the process of reading a bit awkward. Apture does away with this problem, enabling the publisher to retain users and improve the user experience.

I used a system a while ago called snapshots, it automatically inserted links displaying a preview of the site you were about to click through to. Although it was a novelty to start with it was fairly pointless and didn’t often give users anything they really needed. What did work were the links that automatically popped up content from a Wikipedia entry you were linking to. Apture improves upon and refines that side of the system, and makes it really slick.

Apture is a tool that allows publishers to weave in contextual reference material so users have easy access to information that can enrich their experience of the article being read.

This system allows you to be a lot more flexible in the way you publish and really adds value to your content without overwhelming users when they first come to view your page or sending them off to a completely different website to find something out thus loosing the thread of what you are talking about.

I love the opportunity this system offers both users and publishers to engage with content in a very tactile and user-friendly way that helps aid the reading and publishing process by utilizing external resources with the aim of enriching the impact and value that the content carries.

It’s an evolved contextual hypertext tool that reinvents the rules of web publishing and is really easy to implement and use. It’s what hypertext must always have wanted to be. Brilliant!

This isn’t an advert for Apture. I just feel innovations that benefit both the publisher and user in such a dramatic and unexpected way should be noticed. It doesn’t seem that enough blogs are taking advantage of this sort of system, which is a missed opportunity.

By giving publishers the opportunity to engage users in other content from around the web, perhaps even from competitors, improves the user experience and the value users get from the content.

The more value users get from a piece of content, the more likely they are to revisit that content-provider again. By creating the possiblity of weaving a dynamic multimedia hypertext Apture helps publishers add that value. It will be interesting to see the sort of sites that start to use this system over the coming year as its potential, particularly for blogging, is massive.

The actual piece of journalism itself is not by the citizen but an BBC journalist. The article as a result becomes a collaborative effort between the citizen and journalist.

This video has probably been uploaded using the BBC’s upload system which can be found here. It’s also the sort of video that might well have been sent via ShoZu which I looked at recently.

While the image quality of the recording in this video is a bit lacking it adds a real life element to the story which makes it more engaging and meaningful for the users viewing it. I have to say I am slightly disappointed that the person who submitted the video has not been asked to give his/her account of the scene when they arrived instead relying on others statements. The submitter also has not been given any credit, which they always should be, it’s a motivator for others to do the same.

The video really brings the story to life while not having the ability to show professional footage of the scene. It’s also fantastically cost effective. I am sure this story will be shown on TV using footage taken from a helicopter which will probably cost thousands to film. If you have somebody on the scene with a camera phone it’s free (or probably £50 if the owner of the footage asks).

People pull their phone out all the time now to take pictures and videos of things they see happening around them. Those videos are being used more and more on TV and the Internet. The first instance of mobile video and pictures being used heavily was the 07/07 terror attacks on the London underground lots of people who were on the tube being evacuated pulled out their phone and recorded their experience.

Over the coming years I am sure collaborative citizen journalism will play an increasingly important role in the delivery of web based news as people become more and more familiar with it’s use they will want to become actively involved in its production and delivery.

Links:
- No Casual Operation: Inside a Citizen Journalism Newsroom
- CBS launches citizen journalism upload site
- Value of citizen journalism
- Citizen-Journalism Site Relaunches With New Features – nowpublic.com
- Bleacher Report Takes Citizen Journalism to Fox Sports

You can see why their wins were richly deserved when you have a good look at their site. Everything is geared towards making the site as engaging and intuitive for the user as possible.

The sites driving purpose is to engage users in real issues.

The goal of the foundation is to foster the spread of great ideas. It aims to provide a platform for the world’s smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries and most-inspiring teachers, so that millions of people can gain a better understanding of the biggest issues faced by the world, and a desire to help create a better future. Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea.”

ted.com

And they have provided a platform on which the “spread of great ideas” can indeed happen.

They suggest in their “Our Mission (You can help)” section that you can post their videos in your own blog and start a debate around them. They are clearly looking for a very specific audience who are already engaged in the issues talked about on their website and want to then to go off and create their own debate.

I am particularly interested to look more at how setting debates in contextualized digital space, as TED do on their website makes the content presented to users more meaningful than if the content is set outside their own space and in a collective environment like YouTube

I am glad to see that TED also have a YouTube channel on which all of the videos found on their own website are uploaded.

Let’s take a quick look at one example of the same content being shown in 2 different settings. Brian Cox made a presentation recently about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and they have posted the video on TED and YouTube.

- TED version
Views: N/A
Comments: 73

- YouTube version
Views: 95,900
Comments: 304

YouTube has obviously given this video a much larger audience and reaction than it would have otherwise achieved set on TED alone. AET has increased as a result of the multiple placements. But depth and quality of the debate veers off on Youtube slightly less focused than that on TED.

You are only going to watch this video on YouTube if you are genuinely interested in the subject matter. And then you are only going to comment on it if you have an opinion on what has been discussed or want to react to another opinion that has been expressed and want to debate. So in this sence it is as valuable and engaging a place to present the video as on the TED website.

Setting the same content in sites with different audiences is a good thing because the content gains a larger audience to engage, which brings more value to the producers, sponsors and users of the content.

For a non-profit based organization like TED their is really no downside to presenting their content on YouTube. If commercial profit based websites are going to make the most of YouTube then you have to partner with them or make the content on YouTube viral and lead users back to your own property.

>>> Not finished