Public Purpose Media

Connecting the Divide Between Broadcast & Digital in Public Media

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:49:00 +0000

This quote from Politico today struck me as being very analogous to digital media strategy and investment in public media:

Obama 2012 is building a volunteer network with the audacious goal of contacting every single person who voted for him in 2008, as part of a reinvented voter outreach that will be as focused on smart phones in 2012 as it was on text messages last time. Strategists plan to customize videos and other messages for the iPhones and other mobile devices of targeted voters. They also envision "virtual networks" among supporters' friends and families, so that millions of people will feel a personal connection to the campaign..."It's additive, not a replacement," one top adviser said. "A huge chunk of voters still listen to the local evening news."

This type of thinking mirrors the best sense of digital strategy in public media today. While there are some voices that are calling for their own tea party moment (think 1773, not 2011) with digital, the better approach is a how the various platforms work together to increase "positive consumer behavior", such as loyalty, tune-in, membership and recency.

The challenge is getting a more sophisticated strategy & implementation than just having multiple platforms running at the same time, but rather having a 'theory of conversion' (if I do this, this will happen, do that, and that will happen) that improve the user experience, increase the value of the public media content versus the rest of the market and help guide people towards mutually desirable outcomes, such as membership.

And that takes a couple skills that do not seem to be currently at the forefront of our work:

A Culture of Goals - we need to increase our industry's use of key performance indicators (KPIs) to clarify and focus our mission and business goals. And then these KPIs need to be connected to their digital space to clearly point to how digital platforms enhance the fundamental business. (I will readily admit that I do not have a perfect view into this issue, but over two years I have been asking about the use of data I have rarely come across a very aggressive use of mission/business goals in public media.)

A Culture of Conversion - if you do not have a 'theory of change', of how a person moves from being a viewer, on whatever platform, to a sustaining member, you might as well just rely on "hoping for the best!" It is essential that we map out the myriad of ways in which we encourage people to become more involved in public media to then even, potentially, becoming supporters. At the NY Times they wanted to move people from "being readers to users and from users to contributors." It is essential that we think about how we convert people online from casual to regular users of our content, and then onto supporters.

A Culture of Analytics - there is a vast quantity of data that comes from our digital presence that can be freely accessed through Google Analytics. However, it is all worthless if you don't then that data into measurable results that match against the station's mission and business goals (KPIs). I am not sure why anybody should care how many 'reTweets' a station gets, but they would care about how far the station's message (not just impressions) is being carried out into the community.

A Culture of Experimentation - finally, if one does not succeed, try, try again. Especially the digital world our users are a river of data flowing through our platforms. If we have goals, a sense of conversion and a good strong use of analytics, you can begin to see how you improve results by changing a few things. "How about we add a picture to this page?", "What if we changed the page layout a bit?", "Hmmm...how about a bit of a more prominent link over here?" I know that this takes resources, but if we tie those outcomes to fundamental goals that drive value in our work, the attainment of our mission and the increase of our supporters, they are well-worth a modest effort.

Where to start? I think that one of the best framers is Avinash Kaushik, who has written a set of great books, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, and Web Analytics 2.0, as well as the great blog Occam's Razor. His blog and the An Hour a Day are great starting points.

At the moment, the digital media play in public media is just like that 'senior official's' goal in the quote above, that our online and mobile platforms are fantastic ways to be additive to the broadcast experience. But we need to go beyond that though. The opportunity is to use digital media to enhance the consumer experience, especially in direct relationship to the broadcast. This includes hard-core outreach via digital platforms for programming, using online and social to connect people to the content and promote engagement and then preserving the content for the future.

Our future is bright and the more we can pair our broadcast strategy with our digital platforms the easier it will be for us to navigate that future. Onward!

Digital Journalism Through Storytelling: Media Future Now Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:05:00 +0000

On March 22nd, Cory Haik, Deputy Editor of the Universal News Desk of the Washington Post and I were invited to speak about the new forms of journalism that are enabled by digital tools such as mapping, crowd-sourcing and data visualization. The talk was a part of a regular series of conversations managed by Media Future Now, a small independent group of digital doers and thinkers in Washington DC, led ably by Andrew Mirsky

My presentation was more of an overview of new forms and formats of digital storytelling that I have been proud to witness in public media, including Andy Carvin's amazing work with the current Mideast "people revolutions" in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and beyond. My underlying points were thus:

Cheap, powerful software + cheap, powerful networked sensors (e.g. smartphones) + constant (largely non-journalism) innovation = constant changes in forms & formats, especially if journalists keep up
As warned by Robert Benincasa, the data journalist for NPR, we must beware of "fetishize visualization over content," meaning that editorial decisions must guide visualization and that there are different interests and constraints of the artist (creative) versus the journalist.
In the seemingly coming era of paywalls (or the final, sad collapse of mainstream journalism), it is not just brand that carries the day, but quality, unique, relevant content that has editorial narrative...and this might be supplied, in part, by new forms of digital journalism.

Next up with Cory Haik, who talked through the daily tradeoffs and balances of her job in managing the firehose of Washington Post content. It was a bravo performance of how to drive real innovation inside of real journalism. With me sitting in the audience I took furious notes. It is well worth-watching. (See below)

My presentation:

An embed of the presentation, thanks the New America Foundation, where the event was held.

Video streaming by Ustream

You Get What You (Don't) Pay For

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:15:00 +0000

My Seminal Internet Moments: The Early Years

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:30:00 +0000

I was recently having lunch with friends and we started to recall some of the seminal personal moments for us that revealed the power of the Internet and WWW. I thought I would put up this post as a starting point to record some of memories, old and more recent, that still make me go "Wow!"

Perhaps you would like to post your own too...

Connections: From Dental Floss to Whales (circa 1990-ish)

One of my favorite early television programs was James Burke's Connections. In the program he would start out with a proposition of how a simple tool or idea led to many other tools and ideas that would demonstrate surprising connections in human and environmental history. In a classic episode he showed how plastic was related to early Dutch cargo ships. (I remember that one!) The show was smart, interesting and really underscored how all ideas and objects are built upon the accretion of human knowledge, insight and innovation.

When I first understood what a URL was - meaning when I first experienced linking I immediately thought that promise of James Burke's Connections was finally at my fingertips. Through the magic of linking I could wander off through the vast store of human knowledge; sometimes following determined paths, but others through luck or fancy that would lead to new insights and appreciation for our world.

Amazing! The World Wide Web was going to be my encyclopedia, teacher and exploration portal all in one. While I did not appreciate or understand it then this was the potential to index the knowledge of the world through a commonly-understood metadata; the accretion of thousands of individual decisions about context that would help build a vast human store of experience.

However, the web has never really lived up to this promise. The simple fact is that we are too interested in creating our own content to really think about the middle bits that link it all together. In large measure we have ceded these connections to the indexing of spider-bots and search algorithms, which I think make the world a little flatter, a little more banal than it really is or could be. However, projects like Wikipedia and Mahalo, among others keep the promise alive.

Tom Clancy & I Are Best Friends (circa 1992-ish)

My now wife, Mary and I had just moved into our first apartment together,

a very sweet loft overlooking the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. We signed up for AOL together and distinctly remember how cool it was to hear that "You've Got Mail" sound. (That was some pure marketing genius...perhaps it was just a functional prompt to check out your email account, but it was pretty cool to know that someone else, somewhere actually contacted you over the Internet...it was validating and special. This was relatively early commercial email era, so it was exciting to hear that Hayes modem crank up, get connected and know that you were CONNECTED.)

I distinctly remember going onto AOL's Writer's Workshop discussion board (or something like that) and seeing a bunch of people online asking and answering questions. They were not very "writer-ly" questions or answers, mainly about how now to get screwed by publishers, who actually would take new authors, etc. However, there was this name there - Tom Clancy - who was very much participating in the conversation. I checked out his profile, and it was THEY (or at the time THEY, versus today "they") Tom Clancy. Wow, me and Tom Clancy connected across the miles of wire together. We were best friends for that 5 minutes.

This was a seminal moment because there I was, sitting in my loft in the middle of Philadelphia listening in to real writers talking about their everyday lives, and there in the middle of it was a really famous, successful writer...sitting around the virtual fire, chewing the fat just like everybody else. The moment taught me about the power of connection and the possibility of civic conversation. And the power that the Internet can bring all of the knowledge and relationships on the network into your own little home.

You Call That a Knife? (circa 1996-ish)

At this point I was working for The Enterprise Foundation in providing technical assistance, funding and training for community development folks around the state of Oregon. My work took me all over that beautiful state, including the then up-and-coming town of Bend (which is now, what I hear, down-and-out for the moment). At the time, travelling outside of the city limits was like stepping back 50-60 years in Oregon's rural past. This is where the real community development work was occurring. (My definition of a rural Oregon town: it had to have a Napa Auto Parts store, an "antique" shop and a chiropractor...it was a pattern that held up.)

Just north of Bend is the small town of Redmond, Oregon. And in Redmond they had an antiques shop, of course. I was working on a Main Street program that was helping infuse money, training and technical assistance to help revitalize Main Streets, as well as build more mixed use, mixed income housing. There I heard my first story of e-commerce.

In the middle of this dusty old town the antiques dealer had acquired three WWII-era, I believe German, knives. The antique dealer sold one to someone in the town for $20. Then, in an improbable leap of faith, put the other two up for sale on the still very young eBay. After a week the dealer had sold and shipped both of the two remaining knives for something like $400 each.

Bam! Here I was trying desperately trying to help Main Street businesses to improve their operations and customer presentations to attract new customers from Bend and those going down Route 97 on their way to Bend. But in the midst of this dusty town this small antiques dealer, with a simple modem, could reach out and find the customer to maximize the value to themselves and their customers. That moment taught me that the Internet was going to be a powerful force for economic development. (And as a final note, I, frankly, have not seen a very enlightened state, city or economic district policy that goes beyond just simply providing for more robust access...our economic policies need to stretch beyond this basic tier of service.)

The Internet Ham (circa 1997-ish)

The final piece is something as simple as fulfilling my craving for Virginia Ham. (The saltier the better...yummm.) The direct experience from the "Redmond Knife" led me to think about reversing the flow and allowing me to buy what I want to buy when I want it. It was nearing Christmas and I really wanted to relive my Pennsylvania ham glory days, so I jumped on the web and found Edward's Virginia Ham. It was my first online purchase - the Internet Ham.

This seminal moment was really about how the Internet could bring the world to you home. I could reach across the country into a small town outside of Smithfield, VA and bring me home some ham. Amazon, eBay and all of the other Internet retailers should be thanking the ham for my patronage. (And as you can see from the picture, when I moved here from Portland, one of my first trips was the pilgrimage to the birthplace of my yearly Internet ham.

Urgency & Verve: Powering Public Media's Digital Presence

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 03:14:00 +0000

I was recently reading an interview with Michael Edson, the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution and came upon this fantastic line:

I think the issue of "how we grab them" (the audience) is both practical and a philosophical. I am content, as a U.S. taxpayer and global citizen, with a spectrum of approaches as long as organizations pursue their missions with urgency and verve. I am not content when our public institutions posture about their own importance but neglect to use the tools, logic, and culture of digital technology when those tools could be profoundly helpful. No director should allow this: no board of directors should tolerate it.

This is a perfect challenge to public purpose and noncommercial media and the way that we utilize our digital tools to advance our own missions of public service. We need to renew our sense of how to use the full spectrum of digital tools to breath new life into the way we interact with our audiences and produce value for our country.

My ongoing definition for public purpose media is "Using media to solve problems worth solving."

Fundamentally this means for public service media has the purpose of improving the lives of individual citizens, improving our community institutions and the civic infrastructure of America. The public purpose media sector does this by producing high-quality journalism, educational and arts & cultural content. For Public Media this has earned public media's high levels of trust, appreciation and loyalty.

We now have greater opportunities to extend this focus on quality, engagement and value into the digital space. However, borrowing again from Michael Edson of a rhetorical method there are some old constructs to overcome:

Old Construct

The web is another broadcast channel that reaches a broad-based audience.

Current Thinking

The web is a space where people of similar interest and aims connect to work together and create value for themselves and similar communities. The web is much a process of information creation as it is a distribution method.

Old Construct

The web is accessed by the computer on my desk.

Current Thinking

The web is accessed by an array of devices situated all over my home, my work and myself.

Old Construct

As a professional, I create high-quality content. My audience is there to consume it.

Current Thinking

As a professional, I have the judgement and skills to often seed the raw feedstock that can be enhanced, extended and applied to create value for individuals and communities.

Old Construct

My (public media station) schedule page is my most valuable online asset.

Current Thinking

That's because you have not yet offered anything more interesting to 99% of your audience!

If we are to fulfill our DIGITAL public service mission we need to first step back and ask ourselves what do we want to accomplish? What is the specific value we are producing and for what audience? What is the improvement we are bringing to the world that has not been seen before?

It is that last question that starts to address the challenge that Michael Edson laid before us. He challenged public institutions to bring public solutions that have URGENCY and VERVE. Where should we establish our public service media online boldness? What are the great challenges we could be addressing in the lives of our users that have show us so much trust, loyalty and enthusiasm? Are we going to be incrementalists?

How can we capture the art and vision that we put into our documentaries and journalism and turn that to the digital spaces that our country is rapidly inhabiting?

The digital tools of today are so plentiful, so affordable and so powerful that we cannot help ourselves to reach out and turn them from a commercial purpose to something more noble; with a deeper purpose that speaks the the needs and wants of our country.

Perhaps it was best said by Theodore Roosevelt:

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Quick Fire Presentation at FedScoop 2010: Public Media in the Digital Age

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:19:00 +0000

I was very pleased to make a ten minute "quick fire" presentation to 500 federal CIOs, CTOs and contractors about public media in the digital age. There were a few technical problems - a zone of clicker working issue - but altogether it was very enjoyable. Check it out below.

The Future of Digital Public Media

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:13:00 +0000

I just ran across the video for a presentation that I, Marita Rivera (WGBH), Sue Schardt (Association of Independents in Radio) and Kinsey Wilson (NPR) participated in March. It was ably moderated by Jake Shapiro of Public Radio Exchange. The presentation was the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

I think that the discussion still holds today and is fascinating. (And very strange to see yourself on video...do I really sound like that?)

Risk & The Relentless Pursuit of the New

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:33:00 +0000

There is a lot of talk about innovation in public service media these days. It is hard to even have a conversation about the use of technology or digital media without tying it back to the development or adoption of a new innovative technology or practice.

Before I go on further I should make sure that I am defining my terms. When I reference 'innovation' there is a whole continuum of what could be construed innovative or more properly put, perceived as innovative. (What is innovative to one person is old hat to...yeah, you know.) The innovation stretches from adoption of new practices to new insights within established systems to the adoption of new technologies.

Today, it seems that most of the time we use "innovation" as a blunt instrument within public purpose media. I think we generally define innovation with the following formula:

Leading Edge Technology + Repurposed Information = Innovation

I feel we have put a premium on the use of technology applications that re-serve information - data points, content, transactions...in new and newer ways. (Is this innovation? Yes, through a particular lens.) In fact, I think we are in the "pile-on" phase of this type of innovation, where we are getting 64 flavors of community tweets, events, opinions, news mash-ups, etc.

And this premium of this particular type of innovation is often times amply rewarded.

For example, just the other day the James L. and John S. Knight Foundation just recently announced over $2.7 million in grants to the Knight News Challenge winners in 2010. This is the [Correction: fourth] year of the funding that will eventually invest $25 million over five years into innovative journalism tools, platforms and technologies. While Knight is the core funder of journalism-technology innovation, they are joined by the Ford Foundation, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, the William Penn Foundation, the McCormick Foundation, among others.

Now this starting to sound that I am cynical to innovation. That I am complaining about Innovation for Innovation's Sake. I am not!

I saw the evolution of technology and digital media tools in my own work. I remember early on quite diligently researching and manually entering the addresses, hours of operation and description of resources in The Beehive. Then we built an API and a robust database service called the Resource Locator. And now Mark Murphy and the Technology Team the team at One Economy recently launched the Resource Locator as a virtual reality service on Layer. This is good stuff and I really applaud how they have taken the basic foundations we laid and made it into something experimental, interesting and unique.

And when I look at the Knight NewsChallenge winners I am excited to see what they are going to roll-out in the next several months. It is a very, very exciting time to be a part of digital media and in particular public service media.

The Challenge of Risk

However, I am also a bit concerned about the LACK of conversation about risk, and in particular the management and sustainability of continuing this relentless innovative focus.

While innovation has clearly created mission value, there is also a question of how it will create lasting (asset or income) value. There is little discussion or analysis paid to the life cycle of the technology innovation, the maintenance/operating costs of the programs or the total cost of ownership.

This is not an argument against taking innovation or slowing it down, but an argument that inherent in the act of innovation is the need for intentional risk assessment and management. I have increasingly been seeing stories about the "future skills of journalists" such as this story here and this one here. And while I think these articles make great points (love that MediaShift), I worry that I am not reading more about urging the adoption of the "business skills" within journalism or digital media.

I am not suggesting every digital media practitioner learn "managerial accounting" and "financial analysis." But we sometimes seem to treat digital media as either a playground - an earnest and serious one - or as a something that has to be done because everyone else is or that it is expected of us. (Sigh...there is always an implied sigh at the end when someone expresses this thought.)

This is a disservice to what is an essential element of digital media, which is that it is a business.

A nonprofit is still a business, and frankly one that requires staff to be more entrepreneurial than most companies. I should know since I have been working at nonprofits for the past - oh God, don't say it - 14 years.

Public service media does not have an innovation problem...or at least one anymore. What we have is a risk management problem. As a group, an industry, a system...we are not properly arming ourselves with the necessary enterprise skills, tools and perspective to make our efforts sustainable.

One of the fundamental facts of working in public service media is that the mission attracts,

drives and sustains you. Another fundamental fact is that if you don't manage your cash flow, watch your balance sheet, look for operational efficiencies and diversify your revenue you are going to fail.

When we fund or lead innovation we are often looking at the wrong thing. Or perhaps more aptly put, we are not looking at the full picture. Innovation is a shiny object. What we should be paying attention to is a portfolio of assets, liabilities and the transactions that connect the two.

While overly simplistic, below are some broad

areas that hold the keys to proper analysis of return on innovation. Within these areas we should be building both metrics and analysis that tie traditional business financials with the increasingly sophisticated digital media analytics. We need an Innovators Dashboard that enables both funders and managers to understand the risk and rewards of building and implementing innovative digital media practices.

This type of rigorous analysis is just emerging and there has not been to date a concerted effort at building the type of best practices needed. When I speak to senior managers at public purpose media companies I often ask the question "what metrics do you look at on a regular basis?" The unfortunate answer is that they hardly look at any metrics; more often than not they are guiding themselves and their small companies forward by feel, grit and determination. It is a worrying trend that I, as both a funder and digital media person, should start to address. My hope is that there others out there who want to help out.

The starting point is well away from the funder's decision-making process. It needs to start at the most basic level, and that is the innovator him/herself. We can and should continue to innovate, but every innovator should also take the time to learn the skills they need to make that innovation sustainable. Any entrepreneur has multiple personalities: artist, hustler, visionary, salesperson... Now is the time to add one more: business person.

Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (May 2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:10:00 +0000

This is a great post that public purpose media start-ups should read, absorb and love. This is a slap in the face to those preaching innovation without regard to sustainability.

Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (May 2010)

View more presentations from Dave McClure.

The Sublime Freedom of Failure

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:20:00 +0000

In a strange rush of the the last twenty-four hours I have heard about or read about three sublime, elegant, beautiful failures. The honest admission of coming-up-short. And the great thing is that people are owning it and determined that you or anybody else doesn't repeat the same mistake(s).

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral. - Rosalind Russell

In my industry, as well as in this town (Washington DC) failure is not a virtue. This is the reason why I was pleasantly surprised to find a serious conversation taking place about the role of failure. We know that our fear of failing, or perhaps more accurately, letting others know that we have failed, comes from a very personal, emotional place. In failure we are stripped to our elementary school selves where disappointment, rejection and alienation had equal rule with excitement, wonder and joy. Failure is elemental to our emotional state, but can be pretty darn problematic for our professional lives as well. Just ask Elliot Schrage...

However, the three examples that I will cite below potentially signal a new opportunity to embrace the wretched, wrong-headed and sometimes just plain delusional. We should embrace it and celebrate it because at the center of failure is hope and an intention to act. Gandhi said that "man will not be judged by his acts, but his intentions" and that is exactly the reason we should reward those that Act. They are braver than the rest of us.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self. - William James

I think that this is especially true of large, disaggregated industries or systems. There is a political norm that in these loose group of actors success is the coin of the realm. Actually quite literally as people fight for scarce resources. You succeed (or at least get others to perceive you succeed) you get the money to go on perceiving to succeed. If you are a (repeated) failure your are supposed to be weeded out by the evolutionary process. Done. A reject. A mistake.

However, things are a bit more complicated in these big systems. There is also a counter-trend that is just as logical: herd mentality means that while there may be leaders the rest of us just tend to cluster around mediocrity. One way to describe it is that we are all minor successes, or more cynically all minor failures. The only way to truly fail is fail big. And the rest of the system just gets enough to survive another day.

How are we going to break out of a system of minor successes/failures? Or more importantly how are we going to stop failing redundantly? (If we are going to fail, let's at least be a bit of creative!) In these big systems redundant failing; hitting the same potholes is what wastes resources and promotes uneven successes. We always blame a lack of communication of successes, but I am beginning to believe it might be a lack of communication about failures that is the true culprit.

I think that technologists have something to offer on this subject. Failure is an expected in the life to a programmer. And in fact it is their way of life. Whole systems of work flow are dedicated to the exposure of failure repeatedly in order to identify, isolate and fix. (And if they are really good they document it.) Then they do the failure detection process again, and again, and again. Everything from agile development to quality assurance processes are focused on expecting, managing and even glorifying in human failure.

The failure that I first wrote about above is really programmatic failure, meaning failing of implementation of human processes, rather than technical ones. I think the trick is how public purpose media starts to construct "iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional entities." In other words how do we borrow from the technologists the systems to detect and document the programmatic failures?

We don't celebrate failure and we should. Here are three who do and suggest a way forward:

The Painful Acknowledgment of Coming Up Short (Organizational Failure)

Leaving KETC: It Was Just One of Those Things (Personal Failure) - I also have to give huge props to John Profitt to write this blog post. He is amazing...someone hire him now.

FailFaire.org (Organizing Beneficial Responses to Failure)

Let us resolve to illuminate - respectfully, truthfully, candidly - our failures and celebrate those that have the courage to go for it. Anybody want to organize a fail faire for public media? Call me and let's see if we can go big; failure, success or something in between.

My Metaphysical Crisis of Foo

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 04 May 2010 01:26:00 +0000

I just had the pleasure of attending Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp East (twitter: #fooeast) over the weekend at Microsoft’s New England Research & Development (NERD) campus. The event-meeting-happening-whatever was a really fascinating mixing chamber of people who are doer-thinkers. The venue and the atmosphere promoted a beneficial suspension-of-belief that one could associate revolutionary cancer management with open source software with real-world social conditioning. It is a gathering that buoys the notion of the connected, socially-aware uber-technologist in ascendancy.

My sense is that at the core of every Foo Camp participant is a strong belief that innovative management of systems can generate beneficial human solutions. Social behavior becomes a function of system inputs. More feedback, more information, better design = better social behavior. The goal of many at Foo Camp is constructing better analytical frameworks to drive social solutions. As a former (future?) community development person I must admit that I naturally suspect this line of thinking. However, as a proto-technologist I understand its power to build new options for policymakers and community developers.

I don’t say this with any trace of disparaging the concept; technologist doer-thinkers have much to offer to help solve the problems that have bedeviled policy-makers and social scientists alike. However, in many ways I was surprised – again, not pleasantly or negatively – that there was not as much focus on what the consumer needs or wants. I probably would guess that derives from the deep tech nature of many of the participants. There were people who design consumer-side solutions, but even then they were ‘immigrants’ from the tech side.

For me personally, this was refreshing, as well as challenging. Rather than re-imagining the 2.0 of government, education or health care, I thought about solutions to community-identified systems failure. Rather than large-scale, I went small-scale, iterative, accretion of solution as change. This presented a new set of problems for me.

It has led to a bit of a post-Foo metaphysical crisis…Am I doing what really matters? Is my work amounting to managing somebody else's process, or fulfilling my own passionate mission? Or, flippantly, am I a cog in a beneficial machine or just a cog?

Before I get to that, here is a quick two-hour postmortem list of the ‘surface value’ of attending Foo:

Ideas & being connected to ideas…the general fuzzy warmth that you get in your second week of graduate school, but this experience is with people who actually act;
Having your eyes opened…to what you don’t know, what you should know and the desire to know more.
The allure of new relationships…perhaps the most obvious, but also the most beneficial/nefarious at the same time. Beneficial, because I know more smart people who can get me out of intellectual jams, but nefarious because you could easily see yourself slipping into the comfort of a closed loop chumminess of interesting ideas.

There is one other surface value and I would characterize as the triviality of the ‘side project.’ (I suspect that this is probably more about me than about Foo Camp.) I walked away from the experience filled with a range of little projects that would be interesting to me, maybe beneficial (or maybe not, hence the nature of vanity), but generally would be done to please myself. They amount to hobby, but here are the ones that I would want to do:

Based on a session led by Tom Coates re-read William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and update his observations by attaching cheap sensors to everything movable and trying to infer a social graph from use patterns.
After a talk with Matthew Bernius graph changes to the editorial policies at specific news outlets against the introduction of new technologies.
Also from my talk with Matthew, but also influenced by the thoughts of Patrick Meier, use Clay Shirkey’s “algorithmic authority” (which I will have to actually read…), create an interactive tool to help journalists (and users) visualize objectivity.
Put on a one-day discussion on the proper use of data visualization as central driver and construct, rather than an ancillary product, in both journalism and creative narrative.
Construct a project to test the applicability of user interface and website accessibility design to reforming urban environments.

While these projects would be fun and potentially interesting they really don’t drive a central purpose to one’s life, the mission that one is on to improve the world. Attending Foo did something to surface a very old question I referred to above; namely am I making a difference or just solving problems?

There is great allure in the solving of problems. They are immediate, they are definable and you generally can get a sense if you can shout out victory or groan in defeat. However, without some motivating narrative that aims those solutions to the heart of a bigger mission, they often become an end to themselves. This is all a bit banal, but the solution of problems may pay your mortgage, but at some point you figure they don’t matter very much without a meaning or north star.

Many logical and rational things tie you to a career of just solving the immediate. While we can insert the words family, age, society, culture; they all boil down to how willing you are to accept risk. And this is perhaps one of the more insidious things about Foo; in that space and time risk simply does not exist. The imagined future is possible and in many ways seems totally probable.

The personal challenge for me is how to sustain the values that brought me to this point in my career. The fundamental goal that drives me is utilizing media and technology to solve human-scale problems. Without speaking about public broadcasting or specific organizations, Foo has continued to demonstrate that real change is really happening. How can I be a part of it? How can I incorporate that change in the work that I do? Do I have anything to offer that work?

There is a saying that has been haunting me lately: “happiness is only achieved when your ability is only limited by the extent of your knowledge.” Foo Camp expanded and extended my knowledge.

Now what?

Vocalo Social Media Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:20:00 +0000

This is from Devon Smith, a former summer associate at CPB. I really like her approach and and how she presented her conclusions about Vocalo's social media strategy. I want to be clear that I am not endorsing her conclusions or prescriptions, rather I think this is a nice piece of work that is freely available on the web for others to follow as an approach/format for their own internal analysis. Good job Devon and Meredith.

Vocalo Social Media Presentation v2

View more presentations from Devon Smith.

Evolutionary Public Media

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:25:00 +0000

I was recently asked, either by MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media or the folks at FCC’s National Broadband Task Force to sit on a panel – titled: The Future of Civic Engagement in a Broadband-Enabled World. Joining me on the panel were Jake Shapiro of PRX moderating, Marita Rivero of WGBH, Kinsey Wilson of NPR and Sue Schardt, The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR).

While it was flattering to be asked to proffer my thoughts about the “Future of Digital Public Media” I was the one that accrued the most benefit. In preparing for the panel I put together three pages of notes (three pages!) on how I thought we can preserve the best of public broadcasting within the inside-out transformation towards ubiquitous digital media. While the thoughts in this blog post are my own and not CPB’s, it is my work at CPB that has helped me nuance my thoughts on the subject.

My framework for governing the public broadcasting transformation is grounded in the belief that changes should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

There are many who would disagree with me – vehemently – and believe that we need to blow everything up and start again. They point to the loss of audience (check); the lack of diversity (check); the loss of fundamental business model (check); the erosion of local content creation (check); the gradual decline of public media’s standing in policy environments (check); the graying of the workforce (check); etc. And they are not necessarily wrong; these are more than just challenges, but real barriers to change.

They are rightfully frustrated that fundamental/significant change seemingly never happens, or if it is evolutionary it is at a glacial pace. Well, even climate change can come to public media.

“I canna’ change the laws of physics! I've got to have thirty minutes." - Scotty

While we need to make smart, forward-looking investments into areas of public media APIs, metadata standards, alternative production models, collaborate code bases and all the rest of it, we – the digital media types – should also look towards the assets we have right in front of our faces, namely the broadcast spectrum.

I sometimes have to remind myself that I moved from pure digital public purpose media to the world of public broadcasting because of that wonderful opportunity of helping public service media to access the “big megaphone” of spectrum broadcast. My fundamental goal in coming to public media was not to destroy the old, but rather hack it for the purpose of serving the American public in new ways. Basically, I want my dad to come out to the garage and see his beloved old Buick turned into the Rally Fighter; same general parts doing the same general thing, but Oh So Different.

There are two basic arguments in the Evolution, Not Revolution canon.

1. Broadcast is Good Real Estate
2. Business Models Are More Complicated Than You Think

Broadcast is Good Real Estate

Public media holds as a central mission the provision of Free, Universal Service to anyone regardless of their ability to pay. While digital is essential, we also need to recognize that digital is not free to the end user and is not available to everyone. Broadcast, on the other hand, has the ability to reach the nooks and crannies even after we are all saved by the National Broadband Plan.

Broadcast also has the current lead, by a fair margin, in economies to scale. While there are very valid arguments that the many-to-many interactive nature of transmedia makes the one-to-many model the poorer, we should recognize that each technology has its direct analogue in the other. Broadcast isn’t interactive, but the cost between delivering (one-way) content to one person versus a million is close to zero. (OK, this is way more nuanced when we start accounting for depreciation, interconnection, operational costs, but in general this relationship – for the near term – holds up.)

Lastly, broadcast is still the dominant access point. While this is steadily changing with more and more people watching video, consuming news and using audio streams through data ports we have to understand that broadcast is still a very well understood, near idiot-proof technology. With the exception of that whole programmable VCR era, 99.9% of folks have a pretty good understanding of TV purchase, hook-up and operations. Not so much on the online or mobile side just yet.

The direct argument against this is that the world is changing. Quickly. And that the Internet is thy name. I agree with this view. I have a whole other blog post in my mind about the Internet-deniers in public broadcasting (they say “it’s not impactful, look at the Nielson numbers”, which roughly translates to “It’s just a flesh wound!”) I have seen and heard these folks up close up and they are a bit scary.

However, I have also met the broadcast-deniers too. That television is dead (they don’t usually pick on radio) and broadcasters are a bunch Lawrence Welk-lovers. These folks are equally wrong, but I will allow that they throw better parties.

Business Models Are More Complicated Than You Think

The revolutionary would say “off with their heads” to the broadcasters, but most of them have not run a media business with the mission requirements of public media. The Rube Goldberg machine of public broadcasting is a strange creature and while it looks painful, for what we have asked of it, it has largely worked. Changing it too rapidly is a bad idea. Leaving it alone is even worse.

The revolutionaries want public media to decouple from broadcasting, so let’s try out that idea: What do we do with all of those (depreciated) assets? We can give up the spectrum; sell it back to the FCC for an endowment…OK, if I am in a big city I might be able to pay for 30-60% of my re-tooled operations. (Making up that %, so some discussion about that would be good.) But I still have this big-ass transmitter tower and this now worthless broadcasting tech (master control, transponders, etc.) on my books. I have a physical plant with a studio or two, along with all of the equipment that I probably won’t need to shoot broadcast programming.

On the debit side I have just lost my CPB Community Service Grant (CSG), because I gave up my spectrum and am now not a public broadcasting organization. I also just alienated my usual donor base, and while I can recruit new types of supporters, that will take time and their loyalty will be fickle.

I have also lost a lot of the brand-building programming for my community because I don’t have the revenue to pay for the programming (nor the streaming rights). I guess I could always point people to the Frontline or History Detective websites, but then my lack of paying dues to PBS has undermined the financial support for those shows….oops.

When the big comet came crashing down on Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs we evolved with new complex mammals. It took another 65 million years to evolve the Internet.

However, not changing is not an option.

It has been publically reported and widely discussed that there is currently a process going on within CPB and the public media system to review the Community Service Grant (CSG) formula. It is a wholly complicated discussion, discussed by leaders who are sober and committed to the idea that things cannot stay the same; the pace of change must increase. It is not my place to comment on those discussions, but I can tell you that once you start pulling at one string you start unraveling a lot more. And in many ways you will have limited ability to control what happens next if you move too fast or too aggressively.

What Happens Next

One of the most important and interesting questions facing public media today is - who gets to control the evolution of the industry? In the past public media enjoyed being a backwater, out of the main flow of media. . Now, there is a big glaring spotlight focused on public media and thy name is the FCC.

Outside of the confines of public media a horde of barbarians have been amassing in ones and twos. (C’mon they even look like barbarians; David Cohn from Spot.us, it’s time to get a haircut!) I was a part of that horde through my work at One Economy. And it is nice to report that a few of those barbarians slipped through side gates and are sitting inside stations (APM, WNYC, WBUR, KQED, OPB, KETC, KCET, WNET, WNIN) and even have managed to start going concerns, such as PRX. However, is it enough?

As the crowd got bigger and bigger it started getting a bit rambunctious, as barbarians will do. And occasionally the horde gets riled up by public broadcasting rivals, who egg on the Picts and Visgoths through policy papers and grants. But the horde – no matter how large – was largely disorganized, as barbarians are. That changed one day when Julius Genachowski strolled up to the barbarians and said “Hey! Let’s make some policy!”

At first there was a collective “Wah?” to the suit-wearing, slick-back haired, cocktail party mannered folks from the FCC. However, as the barbarians realized they could turn in their ax for a predator drone that has readily given way to a collective full-throated ARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!! The barbarians are in the gate and they are making policy.

This is a huge challenge and opportunity for those who care about evolutionary change. We know that the legislative process will dull the sharp axes and swords of the horde, but we should also recognize that the gates are open and they are not being shut. What public media does in the next six to twelve months is essential.

I hate making an all-or-nothing statement, but if we don’t start significantly, meaningfully, and visibly opening up the system to change I feel we may have failed to manage a string of future events that unravel the whole thing. The essential question for public media today is: Do we assimilate the barbarians? Or do they plunder the whole place? There is too much at stake – jobs, trust, brand, legacy – to not manage this evolution.

Public Media's Innovation Agenda: A View from CES - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:39:00 +0000

In my previous post, Public Media's Innovation Agenda Part 1, I gave a quick overview of the trends that I saw at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. In Part 2 I am focused on taking those trends and suggesting some strategic moves for public media. Overall, my position is that the far-flung future is just that, "far-flung", and our goal should be preparing our industry for the next round of innovation/technology that returns both consumer and business value.

CES 2010 pointed us to the emerging media ecosystem. How should public media respond?

Public media has a long and proud history of being innovative in the terrestrial broadcast sphere with innovations like close captioning, and multicasting. This trend of TV innovation has happily not abated with PBS recently earning a Technical Emmy for their work on Mobile DTV workflow. [NOTE: I received an email from John Luff, Vice Chairman of Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards that I got the characterization of the Emmy to PBS wrong. Let me correct the record! PBS won the Emmy for "the important and ground breaking work done on distribution of the multicast and unicast pre-compressed and formatted ATSC streams used by early adopting stations to get on the air." Thank you John for the correction!] I applaud PBS, in particular John McCoskey and Jim Kutzner for keeping us at the forefront of the television spectrum world. However, if we look at innovation in the interactive world we have a different story.

Public media has not invested in innovation to the degree it should be, especially considering the rapid evolution of the consumer media ecosystem. In a previous blog post, The Mogul’s Dilemma, I noted that “public media is better placed as an innovative adopter that takes the best of media advances and applies it to the public service media mission.”

“Public media has not done enough to partner with media innovators. We don’t structure our technology or content plays to be compatible with consumer media manufacturers and providers. Nor do we spend enough time to find common cause with content and interactive companies that are defining the next generation of consumer experiences.”

I still stand by that statement, but would amend it with the following observations: Public media needs an innovation agenda. It needs to be clear, rational and focused on providing short- and medium-term value to the system and the consumer. The good news is that this is not hard. The bad news is that we have to change our ways, especially how we collaborate to get it done.

A Public Media Innovation Agenda

Building value through public service IPTV – while the consuming public (and the press) is getting their heads turned by 3D TV there is a quiet revolution of moving interactivity to the television. On the CES show floor either through direct TV Internet integration or through set-top boxes (check out Boxee’s new form factor) the cutting edge is still weather, sports scores, checking your EBay bid and seeing Facebook photos……………………………………….*snore.* Just as PBS Kids and PBS Kids GO are kicking tail in providing innovation of content and interactivity, we could start enhancing the value and utility of television programming by developing widgets, especially with set-top box manufacturers like Boxee. We should be integrating our public service media mission of informing, educating, inspiring and helping the public to take action. Just imagine an IPTV widget in partnership with Wikipedia or One Economy floating alongside NOVA, Frontline or the News Hour that socializes content, and provides “take action” resources?

Preparing content and technology for the converged mobile/television ecosystem – we produce television, we produce radio, we produce online, but we are producing all three separately. While the world is fragmented along proprietary lines it is no excuse for us not to jump into the marketplace. Let’s build our own partnerships to bring multi-platform content fitted for TV, online and mobile consumption. Heck, let’s make it easy and team up with Blip.TV and Boxee and just run a trial on some of our streams. This could be a low-bar move to get our producers aware and creating content that will fit over multiple platforms.

Investing in education gaming (but not what you think) – I split educational gaming into three separate layers divided by effort and price: Big-Time, those are the huge production games that cost more than movies to produce and distribute (think Halo, or Dragons Age); Environmental, these are relatively straight-line interactivity games, such as World Without Oil (ITVS), or the stuff on PBS Kids or the forthcoming work being done with the STEM collaborative; finally, Small & Disposable, these the quick flash games, the iPhone apps and all of the games equivalent to a disposable Swifter Duster-Upper.

Many people advocate going big in public media. While not on par with Electronic Arts, CPB has been investing in American History & Civics for quite some time with no appreciable output. (To be fair, I had access to a prototype of Mission: America and my seven-year old son played it and really liked it.) I think that the cost and lack of seriousness on the part of public media to build a game publishing enterprise suggests that we are not prepared to go this route.

Our friends at PBS and ITVS have shown how the middle tier of gaming can be done well. (More PBS than ITVS, but ITVS has a solid plan of action and a track record.) At the same time this capacity is not wide-spread; stations are still getting their sea legs and the cost basis for the development/production is the far over the average for the marketplace. While mass production of these games for public media seems unlikely, working with key players to build a production model seems like an appropriate level of investment for an innovation agenda, but this is really a ‘couple of times a year’ type of production schedule.

It is in the lowest tier of games where public media has realized a return on investment. These small games can be agile, fast and ubiquitous. Development of these games has a low barrier, there is a talented workforce and market pressures keep the costs of production low. PBS has shown us the way on how to address these problems. An innovation agenda should be investing in ubiquity of capacity at multiple stations, building the right connections to developers with national producers. We should do this wherever the capacity to produce low-cost educational games as a part of content production can find purchase. (Not EVERYBODY has to be developing games for goodness sakes.)

Creating interactive content for multiple platforms – again, this is staring us in the face so blatantly that we don’t really see it. There is one dominant mobile app platform at the moment, iTunes, but Google’s Android platform is quickly catching up, and everybody is launching an app store. Even our friends at Intel launching an app store for netbooks (brilliant idea, and as I found out recently that my old friend Molly Olson was the lead, go Molly!) Public media has some killer apps out on the iPhone: I love the Public Media Tuner, OPB music and NPR app, my kids love Curious George and my wife on her Android phone follows the NPR app every day. However, development is uneven across the system, and largely confined to radio producers/stations. This is an opportunity to really push the app world with high quality content, innovative interactivity and value to the public. It is another opportunity for low costs and high returns, so let’s really start our engines and make app development an essential part of television production, news distribution and music programming.

Increased accessibility to back catalogs of quality content – I love the American Archive project and this is exactly the platform for us to innovate. While there are big digital rights hurdles that need to be addressed we have to understand that the consumer media world, while awash in content, it is mainly complete crap. Distributors and manufacturers alike are incredibly hungry for good content that does not only drive virility (American Idol), but also drives long-term viewing. They are in competition with the traditional broadcast outlets and – I really sincerely believe this – this could include utilizing public media’s content to round-out a full offering. (Our updating of subject and presentation will only help fuel their interest.) Our content, especially our back catalog, is our key to unlocking a lot of doors, something our friends at Sesame Workshop and Florentine Films know only too well. They are making the moves to get out in front of the market.

Funding & Driving Innovation

Paraphrasing the uber-conference speaker Clay Shirkey “the Internet is the biggest collection of people concerned with words and culture ever assembled in the history of mankind”. However, the funding we dedicate to these channels overall is inadequate, especially in keeping pace with how this audience wants to consume our media.

At the moment CPB has identified funding for research and development purposes out of our digital appropriations. Through the newly created Diversity & Innovation department at CPB we add another million or so dedicated to innovation and my own department, Digital Media Strategies is trying to refocus our digital ‘content & services’ dollars towards future infrastructure roughly to the tune of six to seven million depending on how you count the money. Our friends at PBS and NPR, as well as stations, probably add another ten to fifteen million (this could be low) to work that develops innovation and infrastructure. If you add in production work at PBS for example, as well as the STEM and AHCI projects, you probably add another $15 million or so a year. In total that is approximately $24 million a year to building digital infrastructure and $15 million in the production of new forms of content. Mixed in to all of that is some true innovation development and adoption.

Out of a roughly $2.5 billion dollar system we are spending about 2% on innovation of any kind. And out of that I would guess that we are probably spending roughly 0.25% on true innovation, mostly in Digital TV, Mobile Digital TV and HD Radio.

Now before I have the engineers out for my head, let me be clear: continuing innovation in legacy broadcast is NOT A BAD THING. Under the goal of universal service we have to continue to reach our, albeit dwindling, terrestrial audience. Propelling this innovation forward is the fact that spectrum is still the lingua franca of our nation’s telecommunications policy construct…for the moment. Our decision makers know spectrum inside and out and the endless complexities of power maximization, broadcast compression and the vagaries of “high V versus low V” broadcast can fill the best of cocktail hours. (OK, I know I sound a bit snotty…)

Restructuring Public Media’s Innovation Approach

The times, they are calling for a different approach. As a system we need to demonstrate some collaborative leadership that reallocates our attention and resources to the emerging consumer media ecosystem. Here is my debatable formula for a Public Media Innovation Agenda:

Reallocate resources to a yearly $10 million dollar public media innovation development fund. This fund would be constructed from multiple players, including CPB, PBS, NPR, as well as the potential for investment by stations and philanthropies. The goal would be joint investment and development of innovative projects across public media. It would be run as a true investment fund, and not a grant pool, meaning that we should get a refugee VC who would construct and manage the internal public media innovation fund just like an external venture or angel fund. (Note that this idea is informed by Ken Ikeda and BAVC’s “Public Pool” concept.)

Build an open innovation agenda that incentivizes industry & the public. Innovation within public media will only work if we do it in partnership with manufacturers, content distributors and the community of technologists. We need to incentivize their participation, which can be done if we a) allow public media to become an R&D playground for partners, b) put some co-investment money on the table (see above), c) protect their rights and licenses, but at the same time extract value for the public, and d) leverage, wherever possible, the broad innovator community outside of corporate interests to help suggest solutions, develop prototypes that we take into production, and contribute code.

Create a Public Media Research & Development Council. There are great innovators and technologists in the system, but they are not collaborating. Attending a recent PBS Hack Day there was a lot of code innovation flying around, as well as leveraging software from the private sector, but what was missing was anybody outside of PBS. Ditto over at NPR. And so on, and so on. Public media is too small to have such fiefdoms amongst the ubiquitous 1s and 0s of interactive media. We need to bring people together to develop the open innovation agenda, manage relationships with the same company (e.g. Intel is getting peeved that so many disparate parts of public media are approach them en masse) and coordinate actions.

Create a centralized Public Media Innovation Library. OK, this is an active project of mine, but is my down payment into the broader agenda. We need to create a community of practice at the staff level that will allow us to disseminate code innovation, development and implementation lessons and build day-to-day collaboration. This needs to be a staffed entity/repository to “evangelize” innovation across the system, and can be the working glue to make sure that there is bottom-up innovation, as well as top-down adoption.

Public media is smart and has the ability to lead. Public media has a strong valuation proposition for consumer media. Public media has brand out the wazoo. Public media has no money for innovation. What a great opportunity for strong leadership…onward!

Public Media's Innovation Agenda: A View from CES - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:33:00 +0000

How much content? A recent study, How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers estimated that in 2008 “Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. While measuring usage by hours of consumption is traditional, as a technologist, I am much more interested in data. And the HMI report accommodates; consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes…” (a zettabyte is a million million gigabytes.) The vast majority of that data occupied just two categories; television (accounted for by HD broadcast) and gaming. If the folks at CES have any say over it that number will continue to rise…and in 3D!!

Consumer Media Ecosystem Trends: A View from CES 2010

At CES they understood these numbers and are turning out products that they believe will increase the value of information. The majority of the show was dedicated to visual consumption of information, transcending all other usage. If audio was cited, it was largely to enhance visual viewing or gaming. Storytelling is the name of the game. In 2010 the manufacturers and content distributors are there to capture your eyeballs with compelling (perhaps flashy is a better word) content on their platforms they are happy to make that viewing consistent across television (broadband), mobile, eReaders and computers; whatever platform you desire. The big themes at CES that captured my attention include:

Form Factor Evolution – as information and content becomes ubiquitous manufacturers are trying to fit the device into our hands, pockets, and into every nook and cranny of our house. (Amongst the HD this and 3D that, I was most amazed by the super-thin LG TVs, about the thickness of a quarter.) This can be no better seen in the eBook Reader space as they multiply from Kindle-like to be larger, almost slate-like factors, to small and unobtrusive. This evolution, however, was seen across the floor to TVs, mobile phones, laptops and PCs.

Portability of Content Across Devices – for me this was the biggest story of CES, that content and manufacturers were teaming up like never before to build albeit proprietary platforms for portability of content. (Hah! Say that three times fast!) This can be seen with Motorola in their development of DVRs, smart phones, media players, etc. However, our friends at Microsoft have taken it up a notch…the best deployment that I have seen yet. Utilizing the Windows 7, Silverlight and other backend platforms they have built a seamless integration of TV, mobile and PC environments (or at least purported to be seamless…we will see.) If what they assert is real you can socially watch content via the Xbox, stop it, pick it back up on your Windows ME phone or Zune player and keep going right along and then over to your PC and back to your TV. It was very, very slick.

New Interactions with Content – Microsoft has teamed up with HP to provide the first roll-out of Graphic.ly, which was one of the coolest implementations of reading material I have seen yet. It may even make me read comic books. On big touch flat screen a comic book cover lays out in crisp definition. Flip of the finger opens up the comic book and allows for panel-by-panel reading, intelligent search (find every panel with Wolverine on it) and multi-part annotation by page, panel, character or book. Then amble over to the Dynamation booth and put on their ‘gaming glove’ and start flicking web pages or games…or better yet when Project Natal for Xbox launches forget the glove and get your whole body into the experience. Graphic layers over mobile cameras will be getting smarter at recognizing where you are and what you are looking at and geolocation, tagging and geo-file dropping is almost passé at CES.

Strategic Interactive Convergence – as mentioned above content producers and distributors are starting to team with manufacturers. While on one side that is resulting in some impressive utilization of processing power, bandwidth and content it is also locking consumers into proprietary and unique experiences. There is a definite lack of interest in building open standards in this space and on the floor there was marked demonstration of marked silos of content, through IPTV widgets, subscription services, and clear choices of hardware. Strangely enough, the only hope for breaking out of the silos was Microsoft’s ambitious cross-platform goals. Out of the frying pan and into the fire though on that score considering that Microsoft, though trying, is not what we would call an ‘open shop’.

It's a 2am Post about Baby Boomers, Leno & the Next MA Senator

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:14:00 +0000

Usually I go through multiple rounds of self-editing when I write and review a blog post. It is one of those nights...check that, mornings (2:35 am) and for some reason I cannot get to sleep. Strange.

However, for some reason I cannot get three seemingly disparate thoughts out of my head:

The late night wars between Leno vs. Conan;
The loss of Kennedy's seat to Scott Brown (R); and
PBS calling their new target demographic "Boomer+" (40-64).

Perhaps expressing the subliminal connection of the three things will allow me to release myself to the sweet embrace of sleep. OK, here it goes.

How Leno was ever the number one late night show when he hosted The Tonight Show is a mystery to me. His 'comedy styling' is dreadful, incipient, and just plain boring. I hated it, especially after watching the tail end of Carson's career who at least had style with a biting wit. As for Leno, his popularity could be explained by the fact that he consistently delivered up bland entertainment food that the self-satisfied lapped up with abandon because it make the 11:00 news seem like a distant memory. (Told you this was an unedited 2 am post.) And who was this audience? Baby-boomers.

We are not talking about the people who used to the be the folks who loved Cream, freedom of (their) expression and fighting "the man". Nor are we talking about the sensitive, low rent politically-engaged 30Somethings (circa 1987). Nor, God-bless them, the Boomers today who read the NYTimes and Economist for substance, but get their media gawking via The Daily Show.

No, we are talking the about people who we could say are either a) the folks that get up everyday and make this country work; our accountants, teachers, bus drivers, mid-level managers and stock brokers; or b) folks so overwhelmed and confused by demographic change, political turmoil and financial insecurity that they turn to the first source that either soothes their worries or validates them behind a screaming commentator or headline.

Or, in other words, the folks that voted for Scott Brown for Senator.

That's right, the Leno audience. (There, I can now blame Jay Leno for the lost of the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate -brilliant!...OK, OK is having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate might not be the BEST thing for our Democracy... a bit of morning logic starting to seep in....so let's just move on right now!)

The NBC boys got into trouble with their affiliates and who is the first person they are going to screw? Conan O'Brien, one of the triumvirate Generation X comedy leads, along with Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart. (Strangely enough, Jimmy Fallon is actually a Gen-Xer too, but with the haircut and the cute name ending with 'y' I have to throw him back to the 20-somethings.)

Fine, O'Brien was not pulling the ratings as Leno did in the same spot, but that is really not the point. Conan's comedy and sense of the world is so vastly different than Leno's. And the folks that get Conan are the Gen-Xers and below...the smallest generation in many years. Who also happen to be the snarkiest too, and that is why these guys are funny. And being snarky means you actually have to think...you think the snarky, pop-culture reference come easy?!?

So, what does this have to do with PBS's "Explorer" archetype? (And for the record, professionally, I think this works pretty darn good...again, its a now 3 am post so cut me a break.)

I don't want to be lumped into the Boomer+ generation; my idea of engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking content is NOT the same as the true Boomers; plus the snark level is turned way down low...this stuff need to go to 11. (Did you get the reference? If not you are not Gen X...Spinal Tap for God's sakes!)

What I want, as Jimmy Kimmel said it so eloquently on Leno's own program (take that!): "all you have to do is take care of cars, we have lives to lead here. You have like 800 million dollars, please leave our shows alone." Or perhaps in the case of the Explorer archetype: "please sir, can I have at least one show?"

The Mogul’s Dilemma: Our Mystic Guideposts to Failure

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:04:00 +0000

In The Mogul’s New Clothes (Atlantic, Oct. 2009), an article with many interesting insights, I was struck by a paragraph to the final biting point of failure of leadership within the media industry:

“In the media industry, senior executives seem to prefer “strategic visionary” to “first-rate operator” as an appellation. There is nothing wrong with searching for ways to reinforce competitive advantage under threat. But once the barriers have fallen, managers are left with the most unglamorous of activities – improving the efficiencies of their operations.”

The dichotomy of “visionary” and “operator” seems to be a little discussed issue within public broadcasting today. As television, and to some minor extent radio, squarely move into a “post-broadcast” world a lot of the industry’s attention is being overwhelmingly directed towards new forms of media creation and distribution. In other words we are almost totally enamored with the “visionary stuff” over what it takes to be a “first-rate operator.”

As I have written in the past – stealing a great phrase from Rey Ramsey – we operate in a “21st Century Digital Ecosystem”, where audiences are no longer simple bovines happily munching away in the media fields. Rather consumers have evolved from prey to predators themselves; using new tools to aggregate their own content feeds, if not their own networks. Consumers are blithely skipping from technology to technology to feed their own interests and desires. The essential lesson of the digital ecosystem it is a highly personal, highly referential and individual to the person in charge. Some think of this as fragmentation, but in reality it is the creation of a new order that requires new analytics and tools; a new digital ecology.

As I delve more deeply into the economics of public media I am starting to color my thoughts on what are the solutions. While I still believe public media needs to embrace and invest in “multi-platform, multi-application, multi-form” content, we have to struggle with the reality that most, if not all, public media stations are relatively fragile entities. Yes, they need to transform themselves into “digital ecosystem predators”, but what is their capacity, at what rate and at what cost?

My initial reflection on the “mogul’s dilemma” of being visionary versus being a good operator is slightly different for public media. In the new digital ecosystem I don’t think that public media has much chance, in its current configuration to be visionary, or even innovative in the sense of the whole industry. (There is a whole other essay/prescription there…) Rather public media is better placed as an innovative adopter that takes the best of media advances and applies it to the public service media mission. Therefore, rather than a mogul’s dilemma, we have something a bit more pedestrian, especially at the station level: the speed at which we adopt innovation versus a focus on sustainable systematic efficiencies.

Ho hum, until you think about how the resolution of this dilemma is worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the next two or three years, then it starts to get interesting…

While I do not know of any person or institution in public media that is so dull that they subscribe to one side of that equation: “we think we need innovation more than revenue” versus “I live in 1974 and always will”, there are certainly proponents that tend to shade themselves into either camp. Those that live on either extreme are going to fail and that means critical capacity in the public media system will be lost.

There are a number of folks within public media that are pushing very, very hard on the innovation side. They are deeply passionate about the semantic web and implied metadata, mobile gaming, structured data and the full-scale adoption of interactive social television. Their focus is on pushing public media to brink…of what?

While I would not dispute that the bleeding edge innovation will not eventually have profound impacts on media there is a real question on how much they should or will affect public media today.

The adoption of these technology tools are highly challenging to the present leadership and culture of public media. The new technology is being mastered by people in their 20s and 30s and its application is extremely technical and has profound impacts on business models. It is unfortunate that many in the public media world dismiss this new leadership as everything as dangerously destabilizing to just plain confusing.

But, frankly, they have a point… The risk equation for a Ken Ikeda at Bay Area Video Coalition or Avner Rosen at Boxee looks very different than the one held by a CEO at a public media station. At the moment if BAVC or Boxee craters it would be a shame, but the impact would be limited. If KQED (SF) or WNET (NYC) disappeared there are far deeper consequences beyond the immediate loss of jobs and programming. We are talking the potential loss of spectrum, the livelihoods of hordes of independent producers and, while depreciated, a couple of hundred of millions of dollars of assets. Public service media a practiced by a producing public broadcasting station is not equivalent to that as practiced by BAVC or my old digs at One Economy.

What public broadcasting needs more than visionaries are first-class operators, but first-class operators that understand that they are in a new digital ecosystem.

The majority of first-class operators in public broadcasting are first-class at television or radio engineering and/or production. Frankly, they don’t know squat about being an operator in the new digital media ecosystem. They don’t understand the network; the technology stack, the economics of digital content creation, workflow or the business models of distribution. They don’t understand the impact of digital media engagement, nor the importance of audience segmentation. They don’t have the right analytical frameworks, the wrong information dashboards and generally a lack of a coherent digital media strategy.

I think that the real problem lies not in the calcification of the age of the managers, rather the appropriate hesitation of experienced executives who see their margins as just too thin and the lack of adequate (and appropriately structured) risk capital. A wholesale change of leadership is not the answer.

The answer, for me, is mixing three things:

1. A bit of guts to take on new risk even if it means leveraging some of the core assets. (But let’s do it with our eyes wide-open and under the full powers of an experienced media executive.)

2. A bit of new blood by investing change management with people who have a sense of what direction to head in within the digital media ecosystem. (Nobody knows the exact path…)

3. A bit of sense on the part of funders, like my own employer, to restructure our funding from grants to investments; from pilots to impacts; and from casting out seeds to having a coherent planting strategy.

I think that are examples for us to follow in the public broadcasting world. All is not bleak and what is truly depressing is that people within public media, even to the highest offices and boards perpetuate the “sad state of affairs” and how “far we have fallen”. Here are the people I like to watch; who exemplify what it means to be a good operator in the fullest sense of the new digital media ecosystem.

Tom DeCarlo at KPBS in San Diego – when he took over he saw the future of reorganization around content not means of transmission and double-down in the future of journalism. He also cleared the path for a couple of smart, hard-charging women who understand the vision and how to execute.

Kinsey Wilson & Zach Brand at NPR – totally reformed the interactive division, understood that to create and distribute content that will build audiences you need a strong system development approach, coupled with new types of talent. They have a business vision and are executing against it every day.

Jason Seiken & Jon Brendsel at PBS – ditto, ditto and ditto. Their genius understands the power of the PBS platform to lift the whole of the public television broadcasting industry and building the systems to make it work.Jake Shapiro & team at PRX – recruited an all-star team who understand that they can innovate within the public broadcasting business model, rather than just trying to dump it overboard. The leadership knows how adopt innovation and harness that to strategic goals for public media.

Tim Olson at KQED – built a strong technology base, talented staff with relentless attention to the bottom line. Tim and his team are deploying new forms and formats of content, building strategic partnerships with Bay Area tech companies in pursuit of improving the user experience with public media.

Sally Jo Fifer & team at ITVS – has developed one of the slickest soup-to-nuts video production-distribution-monetization models I have ever seen. She understands her market – independent film producers – and has wrung out every efficiency possible in pursuit of improving the value of ITVS in serving that audience.

Rod Bates at NET – is retaining the core value of broadcasting, but understands the importance of enhancing the broadcast with digital tools, especially in the area of education. He is a seasoned media executive who knows when to push and when to stay steady in a marketplace that changes all the time.

Just as I wouldn’t hand my expensive digital camera to my seven-year old while atop a 10 foot boulder surrounded by other boulders and hard ground (again), I wouldn’t suggest handing the reins of public media to those who don’t fully appreciate the spectrum of risk associated with revolutionary change. And yes, we could pick up the pace – reauthorization cometh – and yes we could be more articulate about our strategic goals – not an easy feat in a $2.5 billon dollar disaggregated industry – there is enough innovation and change that is leading public media to very different landscape. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the commercial media industry by equating being visionary with value, rather we should appreciate the first rate operators among us that stock it on our public media shelves everyday.

In Praise of Scribes

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:04:00 +0000

In Clay Shirky’s s book, Here Comes Everybody (2008), he has a brief discussion of the fate of the poor scribe who, upon the introduction of the printing press, did not realize his fate was sealed and his profession’s utility would disappear. The scribe’s specialization was replaced by what Shirky characterizes as “mass amateurization,” or the radical shift away from an enforced scarcity professional skills (i.e. the guilds) is replaced with a new plenty.

It is important to note, as does Shirky, that the invention of the printing press did not immediately result in mass amateurization. Rather, it took over a hundred years to construct a rational intellectual infrastructure, as well as the accumulation of capital to take advantage of the technology. Between the Guttenberg Bible and the Enlightenment was a chaotic period of creative destruction as people tried to figure out how to use the new technology.

As more printing presses fall silent it is not difficult to draw a parallel from that time to our experiences with mass, digital, universal publication tools. The same transition that occurred between Guttenberg’s technology and Martin Luther’s radical realignment is now sweeping through our own society and economies. The newspaper industry is just the ‘canary in the coal mine.’ Companies, institutions and social groups are beginning to reorient to the new realities. They are experiencing broad access to mass media. (Governments are also feeling it too. The unfortunately violent and extreme the events that unfolded in Iran are but a microcosm – though not to those living through it – to the changing relationship of governments to the governed.)

Individuals gain tremendous advantage through mass amateurization and reformation of social capital. We have new avenues for expressions of democratic will, personal expression and collective action that accomplish important economic and social objectives with more efficient use of capital. The evidence of what is gained is well documented in thousands of breathless pages in magazines, books and blog posts. And while those positives are real and material, we also have to note how much we lose in the bargain as well.

The waning of professionalism (or elitism…let’s call it what it is) that is being buried under the avalanche of seemingly ubiquitous amateur production capacity has made it more difficult for us to know what is essential. Does a professional ‘author’ have more value to offer? Or is the unleashing of the amateur’s offerings provide the diversity and value we have been missing? The effects can be seen as traditional professional print journalism, long lauded as the “Fifth Estate” is seemingly speeding into oblivion. We can also see the waning of professionalism in publishing where book shelves (virtual or not) are bulging, but reading remains flat or even declining.

Shirky, tongue firmly in cheek, gave his take on the dilemma in a chapter entitled In Praise of Scribes. The title refers to Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, who published Laude Scriptorum (“in praise of scribes”). That he had it printed instead of copied by hand (irony) in 1492 (irony 2.0). As Columbus was making landfall in the New World, the elites were seemingly fighting a rear-guard action against the wholesale change they saw happening in their world. However, rather than look at Trithemius’s treatise as a valiant, but pointless attempt to hold back progress, I think that we should consider it, perhaps sadly, as a mourning of the art and skill of the scribe’s profession that would be lost.

The lesson I believe is that we should not preserve our own scribal practices, but rather promote the preservation of important traditions. The intellectual rigor, the attention to detail, the expectation and acquisition of skill of the scribe’s era should be preserved and respected in our own. In Praise of Scribes should be a warning to us today about what we may lose in the process of technological change.

In legacy broadcasting – television or radio – the technology has little to do with the content that is being distributed on the network. Yes, there is some higher level structuring of the content based on the spectrum, data exchange and so on, but it is not like the shaping of the content with our current and emerging tools. In other words, the “form factor” of content is now, more than ever, tied to the “form factor” of the technology; perhaps never more so since the printing press was the main broadcast platform. With a book, content is limited to words on a page presented in the accustomed order – even Joyce’s radicalization of the written word in Finnegan’s Wake was set down and broadcast in the same manner as Betty Crocker’s Cook Book. (For all of Joyce’s rule breaking, scribes actually had more freedom. At least the scribes could draw in the margins…)

The evolving form factors of technology – how devices receive and transmit content, both the limitations and opportunities - are incredibly freeing. They allow the combination of various forms of communication – video, animation, audio and the written word. They are also limiting: all you are going to have (at least for now) is 140 characters via short message service SMS. Twitter and its foundational technology, SMS, are excellent in their ability to demonstrate how tightly wound is the package of content and technology form.

Twitter is instructive as we consider how we can innovate within the limitations of each technological medium. Within the 140 character limit in each Twitter message, users have spawned new language formats that give Joyce a run for his money. Take a recent tweet: {IsCool: this thurs 1pm et: #pdfnetwork call w @katrinskaya (fixed!) on #iranelection and power of social media http://bit.ly/hxfUe #pdf 09}. To those not actively using SMS, Twitter and hashtags, this is almost undecipherable but to the practiced twitter user, this is a clear and economical message, and allows the reader to follow the idea onto the next communication platform for more information. Beyond the innovation in the language, the brilliance of Twitter is its easy integration, almost without barrier, as an instantaneous communication channel, just one in a multi-part stream of communication channels that we use to connect with our world.

I am struck by Isaac Asimov’s vision of personal transportation in his Robot series. In his image of the future, our streets will be replaced by parallel ribbons of moving walkways. The outermost ribbons, those next to buildings, will be moving relatively slowly, with ribbons becoming progressively faster as you move inward. The fastest ribbon capable of ushering you over great distances of the city. Asimov even dreams of young boys and girls playing tag or follow the leader by nimbly jumping from ribbon to ribbon, trying to lose the other players.

At our disposal are communication vehicles that operate just like Asimov’s ribbons. In fact, by choosing to distribute this essay (going over 500 words it’s an essay) via a blog I am choosing a ribbon on the outside of the communication road. As an alternative, I could publish this as a self-published, online book or a monotonous series of tweets, which is at the fast center of the communications road. However, turning this into a series of tweets is a particularly bad idea; the format of that “inner ribbon” technology does not match the content.

The essay format, only hangs together if you can lead the reader steadily along a pathway of concepts to a series of conclusions. Twitter is much more successful in bringing you short bites of information, particularly if they are ephemeral. The form factor of an observation “floating across your transom” is better communicated through a portable, ubiquitous and immediate technology. Indeed, it is the very nature of the 140 character limitation that prompts the user to send out ephemera, rather than essays. (Note Pear Analytic’s recent study that 40.55% of tweets being ‘pointless babble’)

The form factor limitations in the content/technology bundle has not only led to internal innovation with the language, but also started to deeply affect the type and quality of content being produced. By its very nature Twitter is successful at two particular types of content: linking and thinking out loud.

Starting with an SMS and linking to additional sources of information replicating the web experience, as people pass articles, video and other content to each other through tweets and re-tweets. But this was only possible with the creation and widespread usage of URL shortners such as TinyURL. By mashing down long URL strings into bite-sized pieces we now get the fragment of a topic sentence, tapas of an idea, with a compelling little link to the main dish. As Shirky pointed out in his book, information overload is only happens when you don’t have the right filters. I suspect that the TinyURL is a proto-filter crawling its way out of the muck. The TinyURL phenomenon is akin to the elongated footnote, a David Foster Wallace moment that can take tight ideas using a marker that leads users to broader expository information. (In fact, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest might be the best long-form version of what I am talking about.)

Because of the ephemeral nature of SMS it encourages the instant transmission of whatever crosses one’s mind, even if banal and self-reverential. Dipping into a person’s stream of conscious does not result in much clarity (again, try to read just one page of Finnegan’s Wake), but taken as a whole, over time, even the most trivial series of thoughts starts to tell us something about the greater whole: how the person thinks, what is their point of view, what attracts and repels them, and so on. The tweets are a part of a pathway, but have a very specific purpose of providing support to the big thoughts; the stream of consciousness thinking that moves the intellectual (or what stands for intellectual) content along.

A Modest Proposal: Twitter Scholar
What would a Twitter Scholar look like? Twitter is part of the family of instant communication and collaborative tools – mobile video, commenting, chat and IM. They all have an important place in our intellectual discourse. The form factor of the technology, while limiting the morphology of the content, has a specific role that I feel is currently under exploited. We need an injection of professionalism without the elitism; knowledge but with a common touch. We can obtain these old-world scribe-like values by using the new tools wisely, even as they spread the content far and wide.

I would propose that we recruit a tribe of Twitter Scholars, those that will adopt the use of Twitter to help open up the elite institutions of art, research, science, literature and even journalism. The “Scholar Project” could have two goals: the first would be to utilize the spirit of openness implicit in Twitter-like instant communications to broaden intellectual discourse and give the wider audience insight into the thinking of influential people. The second goal would be to demonstrate how the new communication tools can widely distribute key bits of knowledge in what can be esoteric fields.

How would a Twitter Scholar project work? I would envision empowering (e.g. paying a small stipend) a cadre of interesting, influential thinkers who have an appreciation for openness…those that have a natural appreciation of teaching and mentoring. The Twitter Scholars would be paired with an expert to support their maturation with the tool to not only build skills, but continue to evolve the most appropriate framework and ontology to help the Scholar provide real value to the masses of followers. The critical issue that needs addressing is that the limitation (morphology) of the technology is the biggest perceived barrier to intellectual content. We need to learn how to do this and that is one of the most important qualities of the project: utilizing scholars to create a new content format that takes elite concepts and mash them into Shirky’s mass amateur channel.

A critical objective of the project is to humanize, and create a broader appeal, for the intellectual ideas of our modern age. Once we have acclimated Scholars to the technology, they can then use it to “pierce the veil” of their intellectual live with those events, emotions and encounters that create their frame of reference to their thinking. I believe that while many concepts are difficult to unravel, they are all informed by our human connection. To know the frustrations of picking up the laundry, the interesting thought they just had, the fascinating person they just met, what they thought of the last movie they saw…these are the “home movies” that give you insight into what a person does to leave their mark on the world.

Beyond the ephemera of a life, the medium is also under exploited as a way of parsing complicated concepts into strings of logic, albeit only 140 characters long. These singular bits of data, comprise a digital mind that is by far more complicated then the individual bits themselves. The Twitter Scholar will be an interesting opportunity to model the bits into bytes and then into terabytes of complexity.

Lastly, this medium stretches us beyond the one to many communication modes by creating new channels that allow for not only discourse, but openness that can remix content as well as bloom new concepts like the progression of Mandelbrot set. The limitation of the tools is to structure these complex ever twisting conversations: there is no democratic structure to manage the wisdom of the crowd.

The through line for the Scholar project has to be the Scholars themselves to constantly reflect back on the Twitter feed. The last component of the project is activating that teaching instinct within the Scholar to respond, provide feedback and engage with the community. This is going to require the filters Shirky discusses to discover the interesting conversations, provocative points and the sway and flow the interactions.

While the Twitter Scholars project is a modest proposal… …it is in a direct line with poor Abbot Trithemius’s sad embrace of new technology for loss of an era. Let us not let the Abbot wander about among his errata, but prop him in from of an iPhone and Tweetdeck and compete in the marketplace for minds of future generations.

What I Did Over My Summer Vacation: An iTouch Love Story

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:57:00 +0000

I just returned from twelve stormy and rainy days in Northern Michigan and it was unique in two respects. First it was my first time to the Upper Peninsula (e.g. rain), but also the first time that I have travelled with such as powerful mobile media device, my personal iTouch. (iTouch = iPhone – phone)

I have had the iTouch for about two weeks prior to the vacation and downloaded a number of applications, loaded a bunch of music, connected my Gmail account and downloaded a couple of videos for me, my wife and our two children (age 7 & 3). I knew that we were going to be on two long airplane trips and at least four long car trips (3+ hours) and so wanted to have something to fall back on for everyone during the lulls.

The summer vacation was all the more mobile media intense because of all of the rain. My son ran through his pile of books pretty quickly and my daughter is easily bored by sitting one place. It should be known that Sam and Lily had never seen or used an iTouch or iPhone before

There were a couple of observations:

My children instantly fell in love with the iTouch; partially because it was new, but also because it brought instant joy and they intuitively understood the interface – they had no trouble in navigating to and using applications.
There is a striking lack of applications of any merit for young children, and absolutely none from PBS Kids or Sesame Street, though Sesame Street has a very fun podcast. (Apparently PBS is in development on several iPhone apps, the first is launching is Curious George and then 3-4 more before the end of the calendar year.) Most kids apps are for either the very young (<3>
• The audio books were a big hit and there are hundreds and hundreds to choose from. (It was very cute, my two children sharing the headsets.)
There were a number of great movies, and renting them seemed reasonable. ($0.99 to $3.99, need to watch within 30 days from renting, and after starting have 24 hours to watch the movie)
The small screen is very immersive for a child, especially as they sit in a car seat…the picture is bright and clear, the sound high quality.
My children really liked to watch the video and listen to the audio books, but they were very much entranced by the interactive applications. These were the things the loved to use…making things happen with a shake here or a poke there.

The device was so easy to use and portable. The content bought or rented was good, if not great, but I felt that there was a big gap for high quality kids content on the iPhone, especially applications. While the iPhone or iTouch is expensive (+$200), it is a device that is easily handed over the back of a seat and is such as solid-seeming device that I had no worries, like I have with other technology.

The professional implication for me was that this is something that is a good space for more active development and a strong marketing campaign for our tech-savvy parents.

Public Service Media 2.0: Creating a Community Value Proposition

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:45:00 +0000

One of the core values that public broadcasting holds is its ability to serve local communities. It is what distinguishes those in public media from their more commercial brothers and sisters. However, it also a truism that, confoundedly enough, that public broadcasting believes that doesn’t know how to connect with diverse audiences.

It is a very strange circumstance that has stations knowing the community, but not making a tangible connection with important elements the audience. Which of those two statements are true? How could they possibly both be true at the same time? From a community organizing point-of-view if you cannot connect with important elements of the audience, then you truly are not serving the community at all; that public broadcasting is failing its core mission, and that fact will catch up with it sooner rather than later.

However, I do not think things are quite that dire. I think that real problem is that public broadcasting actors truly believe in a community service mission, but just are terrible in putting their role, their value add, into terms that anybody outside of public broadcasting could possibly recognize as a net positive. The spirit is there, but getting anybody to believe it needs some serious work.

At my last employer, at a nonprofit focused on utilizing technology to fight poverty, I spent a considerable amount of time building and maintaining community relationships. This experience has given me a unique perspective on how to leverage and sustain connections with the community. That experience also taught me to clearly recognize that even if I had the right combination of resources, I might not be the best person to create and manage the relationship. The first rule of working with communities is building trust with communities that have their own rules, values and goals. You have to listen to be heard, and give respect to receive it.

My goal in every interaction with local organizations was to find the right balance of “asks & gives” that resulted in a perception of a ‘positive net value proposition’. The outcome being that the community organization should be able to clearly articulate the reason that they should spend their time, attention and precious resources to work together. The second rule is that each party has their own calculus of determining whether they are receiving more than they are giving…and recognizing that the calculus utilized is largely independent of the others.

The goal of any community engagement strategy is get the partner to not only agree to work together, but announce the partnership with what they are gaining rather than what they are giving.

One note before going further: there are a multitude of local stations that are doing a wonderful job of community engagement. This essay, if successful in its endeavor, should provide additional opportunities to raise these best practices for the system to learn from and utilize.

The Environment
Before jumping into observations about how public broadcasting stations can work with community organizations it should noted that the frenetic, resource stretched, limited attention environment of public broadcasting is matched on the community and social service side. Local staffs in community-based organizations (CBOs) are fully engaged in their own mission, raising their own resources and serving too many people with too few resources. They have little time to engage in intellectual exercises and are always focused on the bottom line outcomes of tangible accomplishments.

I believe the key to working with CBOs is to utilize the same framework that stations use to evaluate whether to take the next step and spend treasure and time in a partnership. Just turn it around. Community engagement should not take as a given, rather a public broadcasting station must produce an explicit value proposition to the local community and CBOs. What are you asking for and why should someone listen (let alone agree and do something about it)?

The starting point for constructing a proposition is to conceive of the community’s needs and wants, rather than your own. It is vital that a station be very, very clear in what it is offering to a CBO, and sometimes that relationship calculus will be a net positive for public broadcasting, but also that some partnerships will be a net negative, loss leaders for the future.

Local Public Broadcasting’s Value Proposition
As stations reach out into the community they are finding that CBOs and others already have the beginnings of what is the explicit value proposition for their engagement. Whether these are the same that stations themselves perceive as their value is not the point. Again, it is the opportunity to build a convergence of values. From a community perspective there is perception of three core values that public broadcasting offers:

The Bullhorn – as respected broadcasters with infrastructure that has the potential to reach all residents CBOs value the opportunity to reach the whole audience in an economical manner. While some advocates will want to engage in editorial processes, the majority of potential partners want to leverage the bullhorn with co-created and sponsored information.

As Storytellers – following from the first point is the ability for station personnel that understand media to provide creative support in crafting content, messages, information and action-oriented content. While many in public broadcasting bemoan the capacity to be creative storytellers, the fact remains that most CBOs focus on good service, not good communication.

The Alternative – related to the issues above, many see public broadcasting as a viable alternative for original programming for the community, including in the native language. While not using the same language, CBOs naturally understand “public service media” and want to leverage local stations to create information services for their constituencies.

Leveraging Community Assets
On the other side of the balance sheet, there are a number of opportunities for local stations to leverage community partnerships to complete important service objectives. The key to utilizing these locally native talents and tools is to utilize them on co-founded projects that eventually lead to more integration in the future.

Translation – whether crowd-sourcing or working directly with CBOs that represent minority language groups, the community can provide support to translate materials of a local station. (e.g. WGBH’s Forum Network programming being translated independently) This is especially true where those materials provide clear advantage to a particular community or fits within a curriculum/program services.

Community Profile – there are a variety of techniques, some intensive and others conversational, that allow a station to discern and ultimately reflect the local communities’ needs, wants & interests. They key is conversation continually happening, than a formalized framework. Form follows function.

Public Insight Network – while APM has created a public insight network, this framework, whether leveraging APM’s tools (which are pretty darn good) or not, is a great opportunity for building advisors – formerly & informally – to provide deeper, more specific advice, as well as sources of content.

Outreach & Marketing – whether a national program service, a tent pole series or a purely local program there is some interest group/lifestyle segment that will be interested in that specific content element.

Local Services & Contracts – if local stations work well with communities and start to define themselves as open community assets, what will follow is the opportunity to tap into new income sources, whether governmental or philanthropic.

How To Make it Happen?
OK, so great. Very interesting, but how to make it happen? While people pay lots of money to consultants to help them sort out the answer, there is a core truth that every community engagement is different. There are general guidelines that have and are being discerned from community organization and engagement programs. I am going to try to summarize some of them below, but frankly the key is staying away from high-stakes conversations in favor of ongoing, multiple iterations of discussions. Some operating guidelines for stations include:

Audience - Clearly identify specific audience segments that you want to reach and engage; reach out and meet with multiple organizations and find the one that matches your station’s engagement style, but has an honest representation of the community. (There are untold number of organizations that purport to represent the community, but underneath have limited respect and awareness of that community.)

The Conversation – Stations should leverage multiple opportunities for input and output, including rapid, low-risk cycles (“otherwise pick up the phone”). Spend the time through lunches, coffees, tours (everyone likes a tour) and meetings where you get to know them, how they work, what are their needs. Don’t go in high and fast with “we want to engage”, but start low and slow with “who are you”, “how did you get here” and “what do you think about ________”.

Go to Them – While everyone likes to go into a studio – it is so outside the normal course of life – bringing an audiences into the station is only a starting point. In the world of portable equipment, where a Mac with Final Cut Pro is replacing AVID studios is easy to assemble a ‘digital media in a backpack’. The resulting content might not have as high production values, but for many community organizations we need to understand that the quality of the information is the highest priority, not its production quality. The basic formula is engagement/relevancy + information = action.

Community Planning Processes – stations should identify three to four critical community planning processes and get involved in the work. These are wonderful opportunities to define a net positive value proposition, as well as loss leaders that may result in funding in the future. Some of the most important that match a range of public service media goals include emergency management, workforce development, local district education planning and healthcare needs/program assessments.

Hire Right – next time someone leaves the station and hire a trained and experienced community organizer (preferably one that has some tech familiarity). As a former community developer…well, we come cheap. A very good, experienced organizer can be had for $35,000 with health benefits.

Recruitment – even if you are university licensee or other flavor, target specific board seats for community representatives to fill, specifically with people who can go toe-to-toe with other business and government leaders on the board. Beyond the board there are umpteen opportunities for broader community advisory boards, as well as project specific community conversations.

Over the next several years stations will either revitalize themselves or find a somewhat meaningless existence of being irrelevant. A key opportunity to avoid the fate of self-referential loathing is to invigorate a community conversation. Some stations are doing this through costly capital investment in new facilities that represent a new physical manifestation in the community. While these are fantastic, splashy endeavors, I think that there are just as effective methods for the station ‘on a budget’. These start with removing public broadcasting as the center of the conversation, and replacing that with new conceptions of community needs and how public broadcasting will present itself as solving local problems not just reflecting them.

A Digital Ecosystem & Public Broadcasting’s ‘Silent Soon-To-Be Majority’

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:04:00 +0000

I recently had the privilege of attending a small dinner with Jack Dorsey, Chairman and Founder of Twitter. Hearing him speak about how Twitter is being used beyond the likes of Ashton Kutcher and P.Diddy as a tool in “solving the big problems” was thought provoking. He told us about a growing number of unlooked for and unheralded uses, from emergency managers in LA and San Francisco integrating Twitter into their emergency planning, to poets and writers in New York using it as a new distribution network and robots speaking to each other (and the rest of us) in Boston.

The genius is that this extremely simple tool has spawned extremely complex opportunities for consumers, which are further complicated by new sets of relationships, applications and linguistics. (@RT @grrlboy I totally agree! #topeka). Twitter is a good window into our dramatic new digital landscape by the simple fact that it is so compatible with other forms of media. Thus we see the beauty of chaos theory, from simplicity comes complexity.

The world, as it always was, it a much more complex place than that poor relationship.

When we think about digital audiences, the so-called digital natives, we have to engage more dimensions, such that shift our thinking from old-school demographics to more complex lifestyle-centric groupings. As referenced above, the complexity of the digital audience is and was equally true in the broadcast world, but conveniently hidden behind the blunt instruments of media metrics. Today we know the digital natives more often express loyalty to interests, fancies and attraction then they do with the schedules printed in TV Guide or demographer/marketers labels.

Digital natives are breaking new ground on constructing, what my former boss, Rey Ramsey, has called a ‘21st Century Ecosystem’; where digital and traditional media blend with each other, but also have deep connections with offline manifestation of actual human interactions and transactions. A new digital ecosystem is centered on the consumers who now have easy access to the tools that allow them to construct their own universe of information and services, resulting in a complex deep ecology of people, application and the bits of data that trail behind them.

Ironically, the rush to push broadcast content online now only has reinforced the formation of this new ecosystem as consumers mash, remix, share, comment, tweet and post. For many broadcasters they feed video into the digital world thinking that it is a nice sedate house with a television inside. Actually, they feed their content into a saw mill that chops it into hundreds of jagged little blocks that are the fuel for millions of camp fires where diverse tribes of online consumer huddle.

Today people time-shift, place-shift and device-shift all of their media streams to meet not only the requirements of their complex lives, but also their own fancies. This is the essential lesson of the digital ecosystem – that it is a highly personal, highly referential and individual to the person in charge. Some think of this as fragmentation, but in reality it is the creation of a new order that requires new sets of analytics to perceive useful patterns, niches and groupings; a new digital ecology.

Rather than “punching through the din” of media, the future is following the consumer where they lead us. Rather than unifying the audience we need to provide varieties of multiplatform and multi-application content that escapes through multiple rivulets out into the world. And rather than to try to continually experiment to discover the secret formula, the audience desires the high-quality information that PBS, NPR, PRI, APM and stations are already producing, but perhaps not in the containers that are so familiar to the system.

So, what are the elements of a digital ecosystem? While no expert – because really is no expert frankly – the average digital native lives in a continuum of media inputs and outputs. The continuum travels from simple/quick and immediate (Twitter) through appointment (and one-way) media (broadcast). The rise and fall of usage of any particular media stream moves with the rhythm of the individual’s day. A few minutes in the morning yields a Facebook update, watching an episode of The Office on a iPod on the train to work, a shared video out through multiple networks after getting an email at the office, twittering during a business presentation, watching NewHour in the evening on an HD TV while keeping up with your friends via Twittering online, Facebook and email at the same time. (And then supplement that with Hulu, more iPod and Nintendo DS when someone travels.)

And even this picture becomes more complex when we think about the all of hooks that are being created between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, et.al. Content is fungible and as producers we need to respect and understand that it is an opportunity to provide additional user value.

The multiple dimensions of the digital ecosystem may be confusing to some, but one of the core lessons that public broadcasting stations must wrestle with an ecology defined by the combination of bandwidth, device, time/availability, digital skill level and lifestyle-identification.

The goal of programming is not to hand-off promotion to promotion to promotion, rather producing content that comfortably can be distributed within the ecosystem. While editorial may, largely, remain the same across topics, the quality and temperature of the content may undergo significant shifts as it moves from ecological niche to niche.

This is not a widely understood strategic opportunity within public broadcasting, but one to watch is Tom Karlo at KPBS (San Diego) as he merges his television, radio and online content producers into one unit. Rather than forcing the same story out onto different mediums he is weighing lifestyle, access and opportunity to repackage and re-report content out on various platforms and syndication channels. Tom’s experiment in San Diego should be watched by all of us for lessons and good ideas.

The adoption of robust digital ecosystem development is not an easy leap. While many cite a fundamental generational barrier (perhaps also an ego barrier?) to understanding and operating in this ecosystem, there are other obstacles that public broadcasting must address.

A key problem is that there is no effective single package of metrics that allow public broadcasting to pull back to a high enough level to identify clear digital ecology trends and niches. It is not that there is a lack of techniques for this type of analysis. Our friends in political campaigns, business intelligence departments and financial market trackers do a pretty good job of understanding and exploiting trends data. The core problem is that our media metrics have spent too long in front of the TV; they are fat, slow and tired. This is an area of opportunity for public broadcasting to again lead the way.

The new digital ecosystem requires that public broadcasting turn its strategies on it head from a set of “appointment media” programming to variety of engagements – including appointment media - with audience that allow them to break the old rules and formulas of content consumption, distribution and participation. Some implications for public broadcasting include:

Develop and publish editorial and content policies that recognize the digital ecology of its consumers; provide a range of editorial content delivered on multiple platforms aimed at interconnecting interest areas, but also ‘niche-only’ content;

Understand the appropriate use of content creation and distribution tools to tell a story, such as layering high cost/static techniques (e.g. documentaries) with moderate/dynamic tools (blogs, social networking) with cheap/immediate opportunities (Twitter).

Use the opportunity to create ‘digital only’ or ‘digital first’ content as a gateway and starting point for more robust story-telling that may involve multiple future platforms;

Embrace digital metrics not as a ‘winner or loser’ measure, rather as a guide to refining digital ecology strategies. But also break the traditional model by using a variety of metrics and analytics, such as BBC’s trust measures, transactional data, online and offline focus groups and consumer engagement tools to really understand the patterns and niches;

Leverage the investment of others to distribute and syndicate your content, whether it is PBS, NPR, Google, Microsoft or other technologies. The goal is branded content playing everywhere, and not ownership of the pathways; (For a more radical view read http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/pbsCouldBecomeACauseForThe.html)

Accept that your input of content into the world might not be the last say; you are not writing a canon, rather creating high-quality information that will only last if it offers an interesting, important (and dare I say it…entertaining) perspective;

Leverage the public broadcasting brand by attracting, associating and curating (I still hate that word, let us minimize our brand association with museums) the BEST content on the web. Users want a trusted editor that can help explain the context of the world and provide some sense of navigation and action, a perfect role for public service media!

The new Digital Ecosystem in massive, confusing and shifts constantly and rapidly, which can cause terrible indigestion in anyone who attempts to “own the space”. One of the key lessons that we must embed throughout the public broadcasting system is that we must place more trust and expend more energy in understanding the individual/user/consumer. We must sweep away the days of brilliant minds declaiming from the mountain top out to the wilderness. Time to put on our safari hat and jump in.

What is Public Service Media?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:12:00 +0000

It has been awhile since I posted to this blog...partially because of work, but also because of my transition from One Economy as head of media. I am moving onto a new position starting April 20th, and once I land and understand the relationship of my external blog and the new position I will start to write more regularly.

Not to be coy, I can write about it later in April, but the new job will rock. I will have a front-row seat on how public broadcasting is evolving towards a new definition of itself. The term public service media has been bandied about quite a bit to describe how public broadcasting looks as it swings into this century.

It might seem strange to some to think about the evolution of public broadcasting over the next 100 years. There are always dire predictions floating about the fate of public broadcasting and that at any moment it might disappear.

I think that being alarmed about the disposition of the politics around the $400 million or so that comes from the federal government is useful, as it keeps your elbows sharp and eyes focused. However, public broadcasting is a $2.5 billion dollar industry and whatever the political winds a public media system, albeit in a very different configuration, will remain.

Ones view is that Armageddon occurs with substantial cuts to public funding, but is that as things change whether the fundamentals of public media remain strong, powered by digital platforms that allow a new vitality of participation coupled with low-cost entry barriers.

My own position is that the United States and Americans in general are far better off with a robust, engaged public broadcasting system and that comes from having Americans support the system. It is just plain good economics and politics to have an alternative to commercial media that is supported by government.

However, the biggest transformation that public broadcasting needs to undertake is not embracing digital - these are merely tools - but rather truly entering into service to the public. Public broadcasting must go from a "nice to have" to a "must have" for Americans over the age of 10.

What is not being violently discussed with any detail is what does "public service" actually mean?

I am going to write more about my definition for public service, but I think one really, really good sign is the leadership at CPB, most notable Pat Harrison who put the money down for the Economic Response grant program, which is on top of the work already funded at KETC on foreclosures. That type of immediate response and relevance directly touches upon the definition of public service.

I also applaud the work that NPR, PBS, Frontline, WNET and others are undertaking around restructuring news coverage and interfaces with local journalism. Also the work over at PBS Interactive in building the common video platform/community, COVE, and all of the tools spilling out of Station Remote Control.

These are the mixture of tools, platforms and strategies that begin to build the structure of "public service media." However, let's not forget the overall plan for all of the progress being made in assembling bits of the structure. What is missing for me is the heart of the change. That we turn over our actions to be in service to the public; their needs, helping to expose new opportunities and navigate around barriers for the fundamental purpose of improving lives. Right in the heart of our founding documents is the notion of "the pursuit of happiness", and this is the test that public service media must constantly put itself.

It is a bright future and public broadcasting, from the smallest station to the largest national player, has so many assets, talent and passion that the next few years are going to be extremely fun.

A Response to David Sasaki's Very Interesting Post

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:27:00 +0000

On November 18th, David Sasaki posted a very compelling post titled "Toward a National Journalism Foundation" on PBS's MediaShift Lab. As I said, I thought it interesting, but I believe it was too narrow for what public broadcasting is (could) become. My response posted on the MediaShift Lab is below:

The premise of David Sasaki's argument is only true if it is viewed through two, limiting filters: that journalism or in a broader sense 'information' is the ultimate goal of public broadcasting and that public media management means institutionalization.

I would urge a broader view of Public Broadcasting in the form of "public purpose media", meaning that public + media could suggest a wider range of roles of different players, especially in realm of digital media. Public media of all stripes is one of the most focused (rigid?)forms of intentional media with a legislated purpose to inform and educate. However, like all things Internet-related, the old formulations are being subverted as technology allows viewers to become users that work together in new ways to take personal and collective action.

A founding principle of public broadcasting that I believe is widely shared is that quality of life largely depends on the quality of information that we can access. Everybody has the opportunity to make decisions and the fundamental question for policymakers and 'public purpose media' providers is how to help individuals become informed decision makers, achieving better outcomes.

Rather than just to be informed, the point of public media has to be how it can materially improve our lives. This takes us well beyond the traditional province of Public Broadcasting. Beyond a goal of an informed citizenry it requires public media to wrestle with the challenge of producing tangible, positive outcomes.

The new public purpose media should look to supporting outcomes that have been referenced in the current media environment, but never truly addressed, such as improving access to financial services (and financial management skills), access to health care, educational attainment, ability to secure a safe and affordable home...namely just addressing the 'should haves' and directly into the 'must haves' of a life.

Beyond broadcast in the digital medium means two things to me; one, we can erase the divide between inspiration and action (you watch, you click to finding a job), and two, the valued providers of 'public purpose media' are wide and varied, and might include folks without a broadcasting license.

Moving beyond broadcast means that content can come in smaller packets of information and action that are consumed across a wider digital universe. The News Hour is truly journalism at its best, but David rightly points out EveryBlock as a valid news source, another example of packetization of media.

However, I think his proposal and viewpoint are two narrow for the true meaning of public media. Where is the place of the financial skills management site in the public broadcasting universe? What is the responsibility for public media to move beyond the 'companion web site' to the the power and authority of public broadcasting to organize a digital diabetes program and into an ongoing resource for helping low-income Americans manage their chronic disease regime?

There are organizations - public organizations, individuals, nonprofits - that are doing this work everyday and using the ubiquity of the web to reach new audiences with new transactions and services, as well as information and education. What is their role in the future of public broadcasting, or for that matter in the proposed National Journalism Foundation?

The Smallest Unit of Information

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:14:00 +0000

I have become a semi-avid Twitter user over the past several weeks as a way to take notes during talks that I found interesting, get the word out on our work and occasionally relate what is strange and wonderful. While I don't use it too frequently, I have found it convenient and a good way to distribute information.

Using Twitter has made me wonder what is the smallest unit of information that is useful to help people make a decision or be "informed"?

Twitter is 'micro-blogging' within 140 characters, about three short sentences. While not clear to me the character limit on a Facebook status it seems they are only effective in one sentence. Most video news clips are not much longer than one to two minutes.

We are increasingly parsing our existence into smaller or smaller units and then distributing those small packets out to our social networks in new ways, back through Facebook, onto Youtube, personal Podcasts and so on.

Public media has always excelled with the long form; the hour and half documentary; the 58 minute program; and even the smallest unit, the 28 minute talk show. This form is effective in implementing instructional design, communicating important contextual information and helping to viewers to connect to the material.

This, of course, all goes to hell when you cut the material down into a two minute clip. But does it lose its value as a piece of information? Does it lose it's public purpose? I think that it probably does because the content was never meant to be digested in the digital age. The fact that it was recorded digitally and posted on the Internet means little other than it is more "distributable".

The problem lies in the fact that while the Internet has begun to make the short-form documentary (<5 minutes) more than just a demo reel for filmmakers, we still have an emerging opportunity to Think Smaller about public purpose content. How small can we go to help fulfill our goals of education and action?

The right answer is probably "it depends"; depends on what is the purpose of the content - education? information? skill-building? advocacy? It depends on the audience and how well you know them. It depends on the level of action/outcome you expect.

One role of ultra-short content is as a teaser to lead people into a fuller form of content. The Facebook status is a great example that leads people to more information. Another role is the short clip to teach a discrete step or a single piece of information, stripped bare. It could have the purpose of linking people together, long chains of individuals each connected by a small content element, like electrons orbiting a nucleus. (Or better yet, chains of quarks.)

One of the things that I most liked about the Internet when it started was the hyper-link, which for me was taking small pieces of information and linking to a related piece of information and linking to another piece of information and so on and so on and so on...until you built a wholly different appreciation of the subject. From the Blue Whale to textile manufacturing in ten easy steps.

In the rush for complexity and structure I think we may have lost the the appreciation of small units of information. Perhaps it is time again to reformulate the greatness of smallness?

Obstacles to Sharing in Public Media

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:48:00 +0000

There was a recent blog post from Steve Bowbrick at BBC Common Platform about the obstacles to "sharing content, technology and resources with the outside world" that is particularly practical here in the States. Steve's graphic of the obstacles he has cataloged:

Besides the very nice handwriting, he makes the point:

The number one obstacle, if the many conversations I’ve had here at the BBC over the last few weeks are anything to go by, is rights. Rights rights rights. Rights rights rights rights rights. The Gordian knot of multiple, overlapping rights regimes and multiple historic rights owners for every asset in the BBC’s catalogue.

Here is the start of my response:

The rights issue is a big obstacle and one that folks just hate to address because if involves the economic interests of folks we love to love, namely artists, documentary filmmakers, etc. and folks that we love to hate, such as Hollywood, commercial media, reality shows, etc.
It also involves lawyers, which can drive media folks batty…so there are lots of obstacles to just getting up enough energy to address the point.

However, there is also another issue that tends to get swept under the rug a bit: “To what purpose?” Sharing is great for self-expression as Lessig suggests, but the leap from “re-expressing” to original content is not too wide or insurmountable. If folks want to create, they can create without having to go to far afield in finding cleared or free content.

Here is what I would ask us to work on: let’s carefully define the purpose of sharing and follow that through the thicket of rights, especially with the BBC or US public broadcasting. If sharing leads to a substantial benefit for a definable public purpose (i.e. fighting poverty) then that should be the guiding point for both pursuing the collaboration, as well as modeling organizational behavior.

For full discussion on Steve's blog here and on, oddly enough, Flickr here.