Contentdistribution
Seth Godin’s appearance in this talk show is constrained by the format: a talk show requires “controversial sound bites” and leaves little room for deep analysis of a given issue. That’s up to us, and the ideas he repeats here – “get ready for a ‘forever recession’ by reinventing yourself”, “learn by doing”, “go ahead and do it”, “take risks” – are worth considering during the weekend.
We’ve read two stories yesterday that “clicked” together. One was Seth Godin’s post on media choices and how one must now deal with scarcity of attention. Another was a NYT story on the Disney deal with Youtube. Disney has incredible content, but they don’t have kids’ “ears” anymore – incredibly enough for people over 30, Youtube does. On the other hand, Disney brings Youtube credibility with advertisers and families (the latter worry their kids only go on Youtube to watch what they perceive as useless, mindless, purposeless videos). What can we do as long-term investors? Probably nothing, and that’s OK.
Netflix is pushing into Latin America and the strategy is interesting: it’s trying to acquire content such as soap operas to stream them into customers’ homes. It’s good to imagine the trade-off playing in the Media companies’ strategy sessions – between the fear of cannibalizing sales and the need to partner with this strange ally now, while they’re still offering decent terms. We’re glad to sit on the sidelines.
There’s a wealth of good articles trying to predict the future of reading. We’ll focus on Kevin Kelly’s latest post on publishing – What Books Will Become – which tries to take the logical steps beyond the Kindle and social reading revolutions to imagine where the “book” is going (social reading here enveloping social highlighting, bookmarking, commenting, additions/corrections). We also link to “trusty Kevin Kelly reverberator” Seth Godin and to other posts.
Free e-book organized by Seth Godin sounds a lot like the Red Balloon experience we just discussed on Dec. 6th: it’s less about advertising the authors’ work than it’s about discovering ways that content gets disseminated online – how does an e-book become “viral”? Interesting experiment, so-so book.
DARPA, the US military agency that 40 years ago spawned the Internet, organized a contest to study how people collaborate online and, most importantly, how information spreads virally through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The winning team took less than 9 hours to locate 10 balloons spread throughout the US – unthinkable maybe even 5 years ago… And the implications are quite interesting.
