Month: November 2011

Brands as Publishers

This week Ad Age published All Brands Are Publishers, Learn How to Be a Good One, by yours truly. In it I summarize six or so years of work I’ve done outlining terms like “conversational media,” which I first outlined on this site, “brands as publishers,” also written about first in these pages and at FM’s home, and of course the Independent Web (again, here).

But I hadn’t really pulled all of it together in short form, till now. So give the piece a read, if you’re so inclined. It’s written for the print version, so there are no links. (Old school!). From it:

It’s illuminating to remember that five years ago, Twitter was three months old, and Facebook had just opened to non-students. Neither company had a business model. Oh, and Digg was considered the pre-eminent social news service.

Read More
13 Comments on Brands as Publishers

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Video as Grammar: The Supercut

As early as 2003, which was the first year I began writing this site, I wrote about the idea of “video as grammar.” By this I meant (and mean) that I foresaw a day when our culture communicated with itself using video much as we currently use text.

In order for this to happen, a number of things had to fall in place. First, we needed tools that allow for quick and easy “video processing” – we need the Microsoft Word for video.

Second, we need access to a large “vocabulary” of video that we could annotate, cite, cut, paste, and repurpose.

Read More
3 Comments on Video as Grammar: The Supercut

What Role Government?

(image) As I begin to dig into the work of my next book, I’ve found myself thinking about politics and government far more than I anticipated. (For initial thoughts and stats, see Government By Numbers: Some Interesting Insights).  While the body politic was always going to be one of the main pillars of the book, I didn’t expect it to push itself to the foreground so quickly. Certainly the Occupy Wall St. movement is partially responsible, but there’s more going on than that.

Well before #ows became shorthand for class disparity in the United States, I began to formulate a hypothesis on the role of government in our lives. (I focus on the US for this exercise, as I am writing from my own experience. I’d be very interested in responses from those living in other countries).

The headline: Over the past five or six decades, we’ve slowly but surely transitioned several core responsibilities of our common lives from government to the private sector. Some shifts are still in early stages, others are nearly complete. But I’m not sure that we have truly considered, as a society, the implications of this movement, which seem significant to me. I’m no political scientist, but the net net of all this seems to be that we’re trusting private corporations to do what, for a long, long time, we considered was work entrusted to the common good. In short, we’ve put a great deal of our public trust into a system that, for all the good it’s done (and it’s done quite a lot), is driven by one core motivation: the pursuit of profit.

Read More
17 Comments on What Role Government?