Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

BarCamp Boston 4

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

Panelists:

• Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group
• Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting
• Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City
• Jim Nail, Cymfony

Description:

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can “count” engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

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Notes:

Jim Nail – Cymfony is a brand monitoring company – tell enterprises what users are saying about them.

Maury Giles – GSD&M Idea City – ad agency / interactive agency in Austin. Background in political campaigns, where measurement is paramount.

Stacey Lynn Schulman – new to Turner. Previously at Interpublic group – consumer experience practice. Measurement in the old media are well understood and stable. Walks through history of shifts in measurement – movement into multi-network world (cable), move to “people meters” in households, etc.

Bruce Leichtman – based in Duram NH. Boutique analyst firm focused on future of entertainment. To understand the future we need to begin with the present. Talked about needing to avoid the sample of one problem. We don’t represent the masses – need to focus on quantitative research across broad audiences.

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SF – Place to start. The Writers’ Strike.

BL – The writer’s strike over the 4.6 billion in revenue that could occur – but the hockey stick curves aren’t real yet.

SLS – We don’t know how big the pie will be – but that doesn’t mean that writers should have a piece of the pie. We have difficulty really quantifying this stuff – especially when it comes to fusing samples across media. People starting online then watching tv, rewatching things they downloaded, etc – we don’t have any way to capture this information reliably across channels.

MG – For me it comes down to how you measure success. Are we going to stick with eyeballs, audience size, etc., or can we adjust to a different way of measuring to understand the control users have. The old paradigm, based on eyeballs, is falling apart – rather than tracking the diffusion of media throughout channels, we focus on what is enabled by all these niche audiences. If we focus on the impact of content on niche audiences rather than mass media – it’s not about how many people we reach as opposed to our impact on niche markets.

JN – the challenge is that those hockey stick graphs are just opinions expressed in numeric form – the real discussion should be not about the size of the chart, but about what assumptions are made to generate them and what direction they indicate things are changing. But we cannot forget about the consumer and how rapidly they change, which is a slowing effect on change, no matter how much the technology changes. This has to come down to the number of times something is viewed, downloaded, etc – not a flat fee since we don’t know how much revenue this will generate.

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SF – Is it someone’s fault that their isn’t a viable revenue stream?

JN – The networks have been in control for 50+ years. As their control and revenue stream erodes, they are struggling. It isn’t anyone’s fault it is just a fact of life.

BL – 6 minutes of video/day is the mean number in terms of what users are viewing. People talk alot about the YouTube phenomenon, but not much about “Don’t Forget The Lyrics” – but that is still something which got more eyeball time than YouTube did. It’s more about evolution than revolution.

SLS – When I was on the agency side, clients just wanted to be on the next big shiny object.

JN – I call that the GMOOT – get me one of those.

SLS – What happens is that the industry gets this sense that everybody is in these spaces and that they have to be in these spaces. But that’s because 80% of their mindshare is on that big shiny object. But the reality is that 80% of their dollars are in that traditional media, because thats where the audience is. They want to see these new bright shiny objects expressed in terms they understand – which means they want the market numbers they get for traditional media.

JN – During the bust, people were pointing at companies which spent money online going out of business failing and saying see – online advertising doesn’t work. At the same time, however, the % of time people spend online keeps increasing – the percentage of consumers media consumption online outpaces the marketing spend.

SLS – the flipside of the bright shiny objects crowd is the lean back arms crossed posture – the marketing folks who don’t even believe anything new is important or signficant. Yeah, but everytime I put that commercial in old media I sell X amount of Y.

BL – but as we see these things evolving, old media is not dead. We just saw the largest cable event ever in history – high school musical 2. Audience segmentation is important, and we can’t think that we are the audience.

JN – Appointment TV isn’t dead – it is just that the user is setting the appointment.

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SF – Jericho / CBS. Fans rallying for a show. But also fans saying we’re watching, how come our eyeballs don’t count?

SLS – Engagement is the beginning of that. Trying to determine how much people like a show based on how much they talk about it. When Lost first was being talked about, everyone thought it wasn’t going to work – but our analysis of buzz said that it was going to work. In that case it turned out to be right. But there are also small, highly engaged audiences in some cases – Veronica Mars, The Office, Friday Night Lights – these are shows which ranked very high in buzz, but small in audience. The small engaged fan cultures are something we should be looking at. We also can’t forget that consumers are themselves channels – they are distributing content as well.

MG – The content seller has a need to validate the value of the content. What we’re trying to do is measure engagement in a context – what role that engagement has in the decision cycle of the consumer. Is it having an impact on how they purchase?

BL – if it doesn’t sell, today, tomorrow, or at some later point, it isn’t worth it for the agency.

JN – but branding does work. People deny it, but we’ve seen it time and time again – they may see an ad on toilet paper, and then later they pick that brand in the store – without even knowing it.

—

JN – people don’t like to talk about advertising. But they do talk about what is important to them, and how they talk about what’s important to them, it helps you figure out how to engage with them and how to position your products and where to position your products. Criticism is a useful metric because users who are critical of your product they tell you that because they want you to get better. Engagement is about also listening – you have to let go of that total control and develop a relationship with consumers where they help create.

SLS – We need to question this notion that as a marketer you have a portfolio of brands. What if we thought instead about having sets of consumers whose needs were meeting. What we have, what our asset is, is the consumers we are serving, not this portfolio of products we’re trying to sell.

JN – the control marketers or advertisers ever had was always a myth. We never had the control we classically thought we did. Now we can see that co-creation of meaning happening in much clearer ways. You cannot just surround people with integrated marketing messages and think that we control the conversation.

BL – Between DVR and On-Demand, about 5% is when the user wants it – the other 95% is viewed on the schedule created by the networks. Even that push is due to it being pushed by providers (cable box integration, dish integration) not end consumer demand (stand alone TiVo box). Even as the number of DVR’s grow, the % of viewing which is time shifted, it will still be only 15% of all viewing time even when we have 50 million DVRs in households.

—

Audience questions:

Q: When you make predictions about audiences over time, how do you account for the aging of the audience over time as well?

BL – My forecasts are based on demand and supply – in a 3-5 year time frame those issues don’t impact as much.

SLS – But it isn’t always about studying a single generation across time – the millenials have an impact across time, but when you project their teenage behavior over time, don’t assume they don’t change.

JN – it’s valuable for how to connect to them now, not what they will be like in 30 years or even 10.

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Q: What about the kids market? What kind of research are you doing in terms of how to reach that audience?

SLS – More difficult because there are restrictions and regulations about doing research with children, especially in the context of trying to sell them stuff.

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Q: What about users recommending things to each other and how you can track that?

SLS – recommending products is something being enabled in facebook. It isn’t about the reach of one distribution mechanism but the reaggregation of all the various sums.

JN – 80% of word of mouth is still offline, so even measuring online word of mouth is only a proxy for the recommendations people make. If you think about the never ending friending report about MySpace, the revelation in that report to me was the importance of the widgets and portability – people putting that widget in their profile is so much more important than having your own brand page or banner ads.

MY – You also have to be very careful about that “facilitate” role – if you’re actually creating it and pretending people popularly / virally created it you’ve got a problem. I love the Nike/Apple iPod integration example – if we can provide a real service that happens to also be branded that is the loyalty solution. Facilitating the experience in order to drive to real results. The goal of the campaign is to have a specific impact on consumer behavior and that behavior might include telling friends about something, subscribing to a feed, etc.

SLS – Mass media isn’t going anywhere, even as we hear alot about fragmentation.

BL – We hear about how cable is beating broadcast – well, there are 4 broadcast networks and 100 cable channels – shouldn’t cable beat broadcast? Those 4 channels are still very dominant and that reflects something about human nature and centrality of shared experiences.

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Q: Other than word of mouth, what other engagement metrics do you see.

MG – Some of the softer, traditional metrics from branding and advertising – it’s about what makes people think, feel, and act – and thinking and feeling are hard to measure, especially when the “act” comes much later.

JN – It’s about return on marketing objective. The right measurements are different in different places – growing awareness, repositioning a product when it relaunches, etc – those are valid metrics in different cases. It isn’t alwyas about specific ROI – there are things you do in marketing which lead to future sales, which you should do, and you have to do them whether they can be directly tied to sales or not.

MG – The thing that fascinates me currently is using complex scientific approaches to create virtual environments and test in them based on metrics tracked over time – you create virtual agents and introduce different stimulous and then see what emerges. Basically become predictive, rather than reactive – it isn’t just about measureing how effective this last campaign was, but predicting how effective the next one will be.

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Q: What about an open, transparent approach to measurement? It is frustrating that we (users) have no access to how things are measured?

Great idea, but unlikely to happen – lots and lots of money in this space and lots of investment in how it is done today.

–

Q: Consumers as a channel for us to think about – what about Bebo Channels? Couldn’t the revenue in that space be shared with the writers? (Back to the WGA strike).

SLS – In terms of the writers strike, it is very layered here. It is just more complicated than simply saying because ads are there it is therefore profitable. It’s all too all over the place at this point to know what we can and can’t support from a cost/revenue perspective. Even the sites the networks are building have a hard time competing with bittorrent, file sharing, and other mechanisms out there which provide more control – so they are having a hard enough time creating the ability to actually get online distribution they control rather than the distribution users control, let alone worrying about paying more to be able to do it.

BL – but it also isn’t necessarily all incremental revenue – is this in place of other syndication later? Does the value of the show in broadcast, in rerun, in syndication, diminish as it is spread more broadly online?

—

Q: Are there any specific metrics you’ve seen advertisers believe which demonstrates people paying attention to ads?

SLS – IAG and the rewards tv model – there is a measurement here in which the user needs to recall copy points, but is the expectation it is setting real? This is an example of a metric the industry has accepted largely accepted because there is nothing better.

MG – What we’re trying to do is connect to the metric which really matters – incremental improvement in revenue. Skin in the game, tying marketing/advertising to how the company actually does – if we fail to have a positive impact on your revenue that puts us in a different position to worry about these other intermediate metrics which ultimately connect to improved company performance.

—

Q: What about online versus offline: we tend to think of offline as about brand awareness and online about direct action – but online can also be used to build brand awareness, can’t it?

MG – the interactivity of being online can still be a brand building experience – so the actions users take (click here, send this to a friend, whatever behaviors you offer) *are* part of building awareness and brand recall.

JN – TV is still very influential. What online can ad is reach to the lite tv viewer once you pass the point of inefficiency in tv.

SLS – Although TV is seen as the reach medium, remember that things are changing. In an on demand environment more options are available – TV may be growing into a medium which offers more interactivity . . .

JN . . . and those studies were all done on banner ads – as we get more online video, so both are evolving toward each other in terms of capabilities.

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Q: Any case studies which surprised you about the impact of various kinds of media? Times where what happened was unexpected?

BL – High School Musical. The mass still does exist. How Disney was able to move that across media – an album, a show, a skating tour, etc.

JN – I’ll give you three: MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook. All of these really took the world of tracking influence by storm as places for people to express how they feel about various products and ads. A fourth is the people talking about their ads in advance of the superbowl – the tradition was to keep things quiet and try to make this big surprise. Instead, as folks were sharing info about their ads in advance of the big show – but we found that they still had the same influence.

BL – AppleTV as a great case study. 2 million by the end of the year? Now they won’t talk about it. Now it is Steve Jobs hobby – the case study was already written – people don’t want a standalone box.

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Q: Any other outside examples in terms of measuring engagement, which didn’t originate in media but come from other fields?

SLS – check out a company called Neuro focus. Measureing brain waves to measure engagement.

MG – swarm theory, chaos theory – these worlds are increasingly relevant. Studies of complex biological systems and how they evolve – marketing is increasing like an organic system.

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Q: Problem established. Tell us how you are addressing it

BL – not my problem. I’m trying to help understand the consumer and clearly define where we actually are not just where we are going.

SLS – our biggest challenge is trying to figure out how to keep commercial minutes relavant to content minutes. (New ways to get advertisers involved in the content, new ways to keep consumers engaged and get them to see messages from advertisers without interrupting your primary reason to be there).

MG – we’re focused on studying how the consumer engages with the product. Dynamics, triggers, stages of decision making – looking in depth at what “reachable moments” exist to influence that behavior.

JN – one of my notes from this panel has been SLS on the reaggregation of meaningful sums. In the future it isnt going to be who is the audience of this tv show – at the end of the day it is about reach and impact, regardless of the channel or mechanism. Advertisers want to reach a certain number of certain kinds of people in a certain timeframe with a message – they don’t care what *channel* is used – so maybe again it is aggregation from a lot of smaller more passionate audiences.

• Convergence Culture Consortium Blog
  • FoE2 Opening Remarks
  • FoE2: Mobile Media
  • FoE2: Metrics and Measurement
  • FoE2: Fan Labor
  • FoE Day 2 Opening Comments
  • FoE2: Advertising and Convergence Culture
  • FoE2: Cult Media
• License to Roam
  • Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green Opening Remarks
  • Mobile Media
• Isabel Walcott Hilborn on Day One
• Ad Pulp
  • Brand Narratives Will Benefit from Transmedia Storytelling
  • Really Smart People at MIT Actually Study Advertising
  • Content for and from Portable Multi-Platform Network Devices
  • Reporting Live from MIT’s Media Lab
• Talent Imitates, Genius Steals
• Fallon Planning
• Raph’s Website
  • Futures of Entertainment 2: Fan Labor
  • Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media
• Media Maven
  • Cult Media Panel
  • Fan Labor Panel
  • Fan Labor Part 1
  • Beginnings of FoE2
• Media Is Culture and It’s Converging

I’ll add others as I find them – or leave a comment. I’m using the tag foe2 for what it’s worth.

Panelists:

• Marc Davis, Yahoo!
• Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting
• Alice Kim, MTV Networks
• Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Description from program:

Beyond the launch of shiny new devices, the mobile market has been dominated by data services and re-formatted content. Wifi connections and the expansion of 3G phone networks enable pushing more data to wireless devices faster, yet we still seem to be waiting for the arrival of mobile’s “killer app”. This panel muses on the future of mobile services as devices for convergence culture. What role can mobile services play in remix culture? What makes successful mobile gaming work? What are the stumbling blocks to making the technological promise of convergence devices match the realities of the market? Is podcasting the first and last genre of content? What is the significance of geotagging and place-awareness?

Notes:

Alice Kim – lots of interesting challenges.
– How do we get compensated?
– How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis – an MIT Media Lab alum. Early Stage Products at Yahoo! focus on Mobile
– in the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
– Nokia N95 – which unlike the iPhone is programmable easily
– Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live – that’s what gets me up in the morning

Anmol Madan – a PhD student upstairs (Media Lab).
– Research interest – computation models on how people share things in media
– Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai – VP of Wireless/Mobile at Turner
– I mostly live on a plane. 90% of our research is outside the US.
– The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind.
– We can learn a lot from other geographies

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JG: How do we account for how far behind we are?

Bob Schukai – he’s got more phones than anyone else at the table – I counted seven, I think. (Of course none of them work since there is no cell phone coverage here).

7 different standards, from which we’re still suffering.

In the US, we’re still talking about coverage. Standards are definitely an issue.

Marc Davis -But it is also about business model – bundled data is huge leap forward, and this is one place where we’re ahead. The iPhone isn’t just about the UI but about the bundled unlimited data. Then there’s the challenge of mobile development.

Internet, Telecom, and Content industries all fighting over true mobile innovation. The one thing we share is an interest in advertising.

Alice Kim – we all agree standards are an issue, business models are an issue. Less than 25% of those who are on data plans access mobile video on a regular basis. The consumer behavior just isn’t there either. Is there an opportunity to leverage some of the ad budget to subsidize the cost of content delivery to mobile devices?

Bob Schukai – but we’re still building for coverage not bandwidth – text messaging is where the margin is, which is low bandwidth.

Marc Davis – carriers have an effective monopoly on messaging via the phone – once you get IM on the phone you no longer need SMS

Anmol Maden – I think the big issue is interoperability. It’s an order of magnitude worse than the PC 15 years ago. This leaves users dependent on the carrier networks which they should not have to be. (Bluetooth, Mesh, Wifi – these will help solve the issue but are opposed to carrier business models).

JG: but will we ever get beyond walled gardens?

Marc Davis – we will. Think of the history of IM. As we move into social applications, you have to be able to reach out beyond the end of your walled garden. We will shift from a walled garden model to an open internet model.

JG – how does the shift from Walled Garden to Open Internet get sold as a business model? Why didn’t we get the real internet is the first place?

Bob Schukai – the carriers see that off-deck plays are going to be huge. They understand the walls are coming down fast. Initially it made sense because of the limits of handsets which couldn’t handle web content.

Anmol Maden – the ideas here are coming from startups and 17 year olds in finland – not coming through the on deck models from carriers.

Marc Davis – another challenge has been the lack of an interface – why didn’t we get the web? We didn’t have a mouse on the phone. This was a significant barrier – the UI paradigm of web browsing and using a phone are different. Both are evolving, which is why things are changing – new phone interfaces, new web paradigms. It is just about to happen – we are at the point of convergence. Back in the 90s Media Lab paper about Data Cameras – but the iPhone is the realization of the Data Camera. It isn’t just about consuming content but also creating it.

Alice Kim – for a while we liked the walled garden. That’s what seeded many content providers’ mobile organizations. We’re experimenting with mobile device oriented productions. Short series, etc. American Idol’s vote via txt. This is in a sense a realization of the old “interactive tv” model, but the buttons were on the phone not the TV Remote. So we’re experimenting, but we’re also waiting to see where real interactivity comes from, technologically.

JG: How can we make smarter devices by taking advantage of the social-ness?

Marc Davis – it is important to remember what a modern phone really is. A programmable, portable, location aware, video camera, connected to the internet. The real opportunities have to do with leveraging what makes the phone a new medium for content production. Think about the opportunities of large scale production.

audience – why do you call it a phone?

Marc Davis – the primary reason people carry these is to make a phone call from anywhere.

Bob Schukai – you can try to call it a portable multimedia computing device as Nokia does (in finnish accent) but most people call it a phone.

London 2 bombings on 7/7 and photos from them – first large scale location aware event where those photos were the best reporting of it.

Marc Davis – the new diegetic realm that mobile makes possile is storytelling in the physcial world – what mobile will make possible is stories that live in space and timeout in the real world. What does news look like when there are 50,000 streaming mobile phones in a real time event? Real time, geo aware, time-aware content production across the planet.

(Demoing Zone Tag)

Bob Schukai – your life isn’t private anymore. This is fraught with anxiety. I think there is going to be a backlash as part of this – it won’t be all fun.

Anmol Maden – what if we think of phones as behavior recognition devices, not communication devices. What if your phone is aware of your routine, your friends, your movement through time and space. How you use this potential awareness is what is most interesting but also most potentially troubling.

JG: How do we get there? How do these location aware social apps actually get created?

Marc Davis – “the new vegetarian restaurant all my friends like that I’ve never been to” example – this isn’t an app it’s a gift. People are going to have to own their data – but if we’re getting people what they want when the want it, it will happen.

Bob Schukai – there’s a demographic bit here too.

Alice Kim – but that same demo (under 35) is also most anti-commercial, at least in terms of old forms of advertising. Millenial demographic is part consumers part producers part curators – more innovative in terms of content production. New forms of advertising will have to be created to meet them.

JG: Will the unease about location awareness be less important for “entertainment” contexts?

Marc Davis – fire eagle – an open platform for location awareness (desktop and mobile) with privacy built in. Granularity matters a lot – and should be user choice. Knowing I’m in Cambridge, or the Boston area, versus that I am in *this* auditorium is very very different.

ZoneTag demo – flickr map of phots. And this is with folks taking the time to drag images on to a map (like me). Tagmaps at research.yahoo.com – tag cloud over the map. A map of collective human attention – which is what media is really about.

JG: Where is innovation coming from?

Marc Davis – there’s lots of innovation – bringing it to market has been the difficulty.

Anmol Maden – the presence of location awareness (and availability of it to the OS and applications) is growing rapidly now.

Bob Schukai – the real innovation to me is where you are breaking the business models. Putting Skype on the phone, removing roaming charges for data access (X series phone?) across Europe. Until we see this kinds of stuff happening we will keep halting process and takng way too long to get new innovative apps into the mainstream.

Marc Davis – this also comes back to Bob’s original point about the US being behind. In Japan, all the phones have GPS. But the best behavior and intention understanding mechanism isn’t the web it is the phone – and that’s why eventually we will break these barriers.
—

JG – what about Apple and Google’s entry to the market?

BS – the significance of the iPhone is that Apple set the terms of the deal. They controlled the carrier. That’s a big cajones move Jobs put out there and god bless him for it – you’ve got to break the business models to make real innovation. Google, I don’t know what to say about that yet – how good are their intentions? They want to be open, they talk about openness, but they have real impacts on content producers. What will happen when Google buys spectrum?

AM – we also should talk about the innovation of people writing apps for the iphone despite active antagonism from Apple. From a Google / Android perspective it seems like they are trying to solve the right problems but it is too early to tell – lets see what actually gets in the hands of users.

MD – so the iPhone is like .1 % of the market, and Android hasn’t achieved distribution yet. Scale matters. You need to be able to get to lots of people to have a real business model. Things have to become more open, and things which were differentiation become commodity, and new differentiators get built on top of them. We also have to be aware of the lower end of the scale – very inexpensive cell devices that are text only, in places like India.

AK – The iPhone was a wake up call, or a call to action. It was the first time the focus was on the user interface. It isn’t a great mobile data experience but it showed carriers that users really do care about the mobile interface. We need to come at this from the user perspective – it isn’t about product silos which is what content companies and carriers have done (ringtone storefront separate from SMS separate from IM seperate from email) but thinking about consumer friendly experiences. We’re also really happy to see Google entering this marketplace – we’re looking for scale that Yahoo! and Google can bring and aggregate. Their entry will be game changing, and will have to increase the voice consumers have collectively in the industry. Everyone is announcing that they are “open” but until that gets scale it doesn’t really matter – Android becmes just another platform to develop on.

—

Google buying spectrum?

BS – Google getting spectrum will be good for consumers.

MD – owning just part of the spectrum will not make the whole carrier base open. But what Google and Apple are doing (in different ways) is they are force factors – they are pushing and nudging the industries in certain directions. I think Android will ultimately have more impact than spectrum. But they also will have to be very careful about how they treat privacy and trust. They have high risk here of violating user expectations – openness and participation has to include trust and privacy.

AK – we also have to recall Google as the advertising powerhouse, allowing individual site developers even small scale to be able to monetize – they had a giant impact on the web in this way and that may have impact on mobile as well.

MD – search is key to watch in mobile. Yahoo One Search is actually winning in mobile space.

————

Audience questions:

Note from audience: openness is not all the same. Different license / distribution arrangements are different in key ways. Not everything called “open” is really open and as an app developer you run into that in actually trying to get apps on mobile devices right quick.

Q: There’s a lot about information delivery – but when does this get entertaining? Immersive, personal, and fun?

MD: We’ve seen some interesting experiences in augmented reality and the story world. Connecting the physical world and the gaming world – knowing where someone is and having that impact the game or the story.

AM – part of the challenge here is the network effects. There have to be enough users to create critical mass.

BS – Depends a lot on where you live. The Korea example – 70 minute commute is the average and people actually watch tv on their phone. We’re really a driving culture – so the entertainment is the “backseat babysitter.” We have a culture which encourages the short from – small pockets of attention between meetings, or waiting in line for a plane, etc.

Q: How do you see user generated metadata?

MD: That’s the beauty of mobile. The phone adds the metadata – so I don’t have to do it. That’s metadata. Mobile will be the breakthrough for media content.

Q: But what about corporate created media? When MTV or Turner create content, who owns the metadata?

AK: There is metadata we create – for a number of specific search providers. Then there is tagging, which users do. We want users to become cocreaters but we also have brand equity in what we’ve created.

Q: What will the impact of hyperconnectivity? (GPS, location aware, always on devices).

MD – we see this already with Flickr’s impact on photography. It’s not about beauty so much as “status-casting”

BS – but that awareness comes with privacy issues. The London camera surveillance network – that’s a tradeoff people made. But they won’t accept that on cellphones. It has to have the user control.

AM – as you get more media and better metadata, you also need new techniques for attention management – how do I decide what is relevant and what filters do the systems to provide to help.

MD- the FireEagle “hide me” button – big giant piece of the infrastructure which is absolutely critical.

AK – The cultural connection is important to. The clarity about what people expect to share and expect to keep private is shifting. People broadcast their locations, their tastes, etc – twitter, blogging, etc. What constitutes privacy changes.

MD: big shifting from “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog” to real people and real lives. People are living their real lives online.

Q: Where is voice in all this?

BS – there is a whole user behavior thing which has to change. People are willing to walk around with bluetooth headsets in their ears, but not willing to use voice command like “call fred.” People will sign up for text messages but not sign up for audio messages. There’s also the language issue – trying to do all the dialects in India is difficult.

MD – moore’s law is helping us here. This gets better as the handsets get smarter. We are going to get there, but it will take time.

—

Q: Granularity of privacy. All good for power users, early adopters, etc. But when it goes mainstream people won’t take the time to look under the hood. What role does media literacy play and who is responsible for it?

MD: We have a responsibility to make systems that people feel comfortable using. (Parallel – credit cards. We all use them, but they know an awful lot about us and they sell it. We exchange that for convenience). Designing social software architecturally that enable zones of intimacy and zones of privacy is crucial.

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Q: What work is going on to understand how content is actually consumed in order to create better delivery (for example, curriculum from universities which could be distributed this way)

BS – this is one of the important advantages of off-deck content creation and distribution – because that lets people other than carriers get access to user behavior, including user media consumption behavior.

AM – this is certainly an active research area for lots of people – context and environment is important to how people consume.

All the content creators are looking at consumption patterns – but the context of the question seems to have gotten lost and turned into how content creators from *media* can get better consumption – not the educational / activist piece.

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Q: Politics has been noticably absent from the discussion. What about the questions where privacy overlaps with the political realm?

Marc Davis: (Sous-veillance – surveillance from below). There are terrifying possibilities here for the CIA, NSC, etc. But there are also tremendous potentials – to allow collective action to be possible, to enable massive bottom up collectivism. Providing the power to individuals to act as a collective. The PC brought the computer power of corporations to your desktop. What we’d like mobile to do is bring the power of collective action to non-military, non-corporate entities.

Bob Schukai – you think it is bad here, try it in Europe. They have gotten better, from the point of view of controlling roaming costs inside the EU and such – but there are going to be big companies who control access. The UK has a “lite touch” regulatory approach. We need more proactive policy not reactive regulation. That said, there are times where mandates are critical – part of our problem now is the laissez-faire approach the FCC took to wireless in the first place.

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Q: What about China, the Internet, Telecoms, and Privacy?

BS – some challenges in China – they have created their own standard, which is a problem, and it is difficult to interact as a western company in China.

MD – it is difficult to work with the Chinese Government. If you want to operate in that country, you face restrictions on how you can operate. Yahoo!s actions there were not specific to Yahoo!. What the Chinese government does to operators is untenable (speaking as an individual not for Yahoo!) – but not operating there simply isn’t a real option. Engaging is better than not engagine despite the challenges.

BS – you have to also understand just how quickly, radically, and fundamentally things are changing in China. That doesn’t mean what they are doing is right all the time, but it is understandable the tensions they face as they try to evolve from life under Mao to live under hypercapitalism – there are tremors as that happens as they try to prevent the nation from falling apart.

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JG – what’s the next thing to watch for?

AK – Entrance of Google, Yahoo, etc onto the mobile device in addition to / instead of the “on-deck” play. How media companies will get back to direct-to-consumer approach.

MD – The ability of developers to get access to the mobile platform in a significant way will be the big change, in addition to location awareness. Solving the distribution problem. The kind of distributed innovation Von Hippel talks about can start to happen in the mobile space.

AM – The other thing I’m really interested in is this concept of mining people’s behavior for their own uses – how apps come to understand users behavior and know how to improve applications as a result.

BS – IMS – internet protocol multimedia subsystem – this is a bit further out in time but not so far. As more and more devices have IP addresses, what does that mean? Connecting from any IP device to any other IP device and what impact that has is the big thing.

http://convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/2007/program/index.html

Opening Comments: Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green

Henry Jenkins
Joshua Green

Longer panels in order to encourage substiantial conversation.

http://jellyfish.media.mit.edu/backchannl/

Starts with TV of Tomorrow – Tex Avery 1953.

Did You Know that 4 out of 5 people now own television sets.

Early attempt to imagine the future of entertainment – already seeing there some of the conflicts we’ll talk about today.

Currently imagined futures – interactivity through VR.

Yet a different kind of interactivity is happening – the Simpsonize Yourself campaign as an example. But really there were few core models – so we call it personalization but it isn’t very personalized.

They also pushed the TV world into the real world – turning 7-11s into Kwickie Marts.

Also CSI episode on Second Life – where people are encouraged to continue the experience there.

Wii remote as a significant new interface. It isn’t just high end graphics which can change the interaction model.

MSNBC Newsbreaker – interactive game?

Of course gaming hasn’t gone away in traditional sense – Halo 3 example. Complex diarama which is touring the country as a kind of musuem piece. A faux veteran reflecting on this war which never happened – saving private ryan version in game space.

Heroes as an example of blurring the line between mainstream and fan media, embedding transmedia content – use of Ninth Wonder comic book in the show lead people to the site where lots of comics were. The interaction between what’s on the air and what isn’t is richer in this show than many others.

The Buffy comics as another season of the show (post-cancellation). Supernatural, Battlestar Gallactica – all overlaps between comics and TV.

Transmedia branding – the Geico Caveman. Ad to web series to Sitcom.

The Minority report clip – personalized content in the extreme. Ends with that surveillance camera.

Personalization as a mixed blessing – tailoring, micromeasurement. Facebook and targetted ad campaigns based on profiles.

Hokie Nation memorial around Virginia Tech memorial.

Graphic of apps – IBM Many Eyes chart – Top Friends, Frun Wall, Superwall, SuperPoke, Video, iLike.

NBC’s break with iTunes and move to amazonunbox. They get perhaps more control over their content. Also Hulu. Hulu will also point to content produced NOT by NBC and Fox.

Writers Strike video – promotional purposes only. Streaming video. DVD rate for digital downloads. Being distributed on YouTube. (Don’t rely on network news to tell the story of why writers are striking against the networks).

But youTube reflects the tension of the times.

Jenkins – what will be the effect of going into the primary season with both Colbert and Stewart are silent?

MIT Romney won’t debate a snowman – but candidates use all kinds of cartoons to discuss election issues – we aren’t allowed to use it to speak back?

Four Eyed Monsters – these new distribution mechanisms do allow independents new ways to get movies out – using online communities to schedule screenings in meat space of the film.

Soulja Boy.

Luminosity – the Vogue/300 parody. Taking content from television and mixing it up – vidding – started out as something done with 2 VCRs and a patch corde. Luminosity’s remix of the filme 300.

luminosity.imeem.com – 20 funniest videos of 2007 – mostly female artists, 20 year history of a do it yourself community which will be shown at USC. Luminosity can’t name herself because she appropriates, yet she is one of their biggest fans and drives interest in them.

FanLib as the example of the tension – this is the year where the implicit contractions in the social contract have emerged.

Harry Potter – a contradiction in the sense that it is one the most MASS culture phenomenons you can imagine. And yet most of the analysis is that mass media success will give way to long tail, niche markets. Is this the last gasp of mass media power?

What about Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore? Is she enforcing some kind of reading on to the fan fiction which will be written after the fact? She is announcing a reading many fans in fact had – but what happens when that becomes the authorized reading?

HP Alliance – Harry Potter as teaching kids how to be activists – get young people involved in the process of political change, inspired by the interest Rowling has created.

Rodenberry demod star trek at a convention even before it aired on tv – so the fandom started even before the show.

Josh Green – the re-emergence of craft as a media phenomenon and a mechanism of participatory culture.

Android and the open handset alliance.

The folks at Skype arguing for access to the handsets using the same ruling which enables users to attach things to phone lines.

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.