Tweetup! Social Media, Online PR, P2PR

If any of you are in Victoria, London tomorrow am (December 16, 2008), I'm free from just after 10am until noon and would love the opportunity to talk to you about some of the themes we've been discussing on this blog and on the p2pr community.

I'll have a video camera along for the ride to record your thoughts, too - if you're game.
Keep track of where and when via twitter!

Last time I did one of these we came up with the Eighth Mass Media. :-)

The User is the Destination Now

I was lucky enough to present at Widget Web Expo in London earlier this week (which ran on October 6-7).
It gave me an opportunity to speak about the eighth mass media for the first time. The title of my talk was The User Is The Destination Now: Widgets' Role in the Eighth Mass Media.
In the usual manner, I've made the slidedeck available via slideshare. And I was also recorded on a Flip Mino, so you can see and hear me talk about the topics on the slides, while you view them.
Some credit where due: The eighth mass media builds on Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore's concept of mobile as the seventh mass media. Find their work at Communities Dominate Brands. It's an idea in prototype and one I've been working on with Jonathan Macdonald.
The notion of widgets as great enablers of emulation is inspired by the ideas of Mark Earls' Herd (and particularly the Homo Mimicus reference).
The video is hosted by google, which means (unlike youtube) you can download it AND it can be more than 100mb and 10 mins (it's actually about 35 mins and 120+mb).

It's all below. Hope you'll enjoy.
It's messy at the edges - so do pick up the tools and join in.

By the way, I'm in Amsterdam today. Drop me a tweet if you are too.

The User Is The Destination Now

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cushman david)

Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media: Download and share

I'm off for a little R&R. So I thought I'd leave you something chunky to download, read and digest while I'm gone.
 Tomi Ahonen (of Communities Dominate Brands) is about to publish his sixth book - Mobile As Seventh of the Mass Media.
Regular readers of this blog will know we're fans of the concept (originally worked up by Tomi and his co-author on CDB, Alan Moore).
Jonathan Macdonald and I are now pushing the idea into what the Eighth Mass Media can become.

But right now you can download a free 30-page excerpt of Mobile As Seventh of the Mass Media in advance of publication. And, should it tempt you to buy (it will, particularly if the mobile space and digital convergence fascinate you) you can pre-order here.

Tomi says: "Here is the pdf file of the book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media. It includes the Foreword by Pekka Ala-Pietila (CEO of Blyk and past president Nokia), the Introduction Chapter, one of the case studies (Flirtomatic) and the fourth chapter, Mobile as 7th Mass Media, as well as the index of the 18 chapters and 16 case studies.

You may freely quote from this document, and you may freely forward it. I am shortly going to launch a blogsite for the book as well, so there will be a place to collect the feedback, news and developments in the 7th Media space. If you blog about the book, I would appreciate it if you could include a mention of the futuretext.com website where potential buyers can already order the book today, before it appears on Amazon in a couple of weeks.

So that's the deal. Enjoy. (Image by Norma1 via flickr)


Pleased to say I'm co-hosting a two-day course at Oxford University on the subject (Mobile As The 7th Mass Media)  with Tomi this winter. Check here for dates when confirmed.

And I'll be presenting on The Eighth Mass Media at WidgetWeb Expo in London in October (6-7) and at Mobile Content (also in London) in November. Tomi and Jonathan Macdonald are also on the bill of the latter. Unmissable really ;-)

Now, where's that suntan lotion...

I'm in media! Oh really? So are my children...

I responded to Paul Bradshaw's interesting question about the future of training for journalists here and by way of introduction mentioned that: "I've been in media for 20 years, unless you count the fanzines I wrote as a kid."

Actually, I was in media as soon as I could be. I even made my own comics and newspapers before I had any means of distributing them.

Which makes me think today's kids will be in media rather earlier and rather longer - and they'll understand the power that gives them rather earlier.

As soon as they connect via the likes of habbo hotel, club penguin, or many of the other social networks for kids they are in media. (image by Terry Lloyd Smith)

They have the tools to enable what we've all become:

We're all publishers now, we're all distributors now, we're all advertisers now, as I've said before.

Which means as soon as we start forming into groups via the network we're in media.

Perhaps we are really in media even before we reach out for our first mouse - part of the eighth mass media I've started exploring here and here?

Portability is the new pointworthy: Why links won't matter

I often advise teams creating content to focus on doing what is worth pointing at - the pointworthy.What I mean by this is that the web is awash with repeated press releases.

They don't stand out so you're less likely to have your half-heartedly re-written and rushed-out version pointed at by the fickle citizens of the web than something they find genuinely, stand-out, useful (and relevant).

Do loads of what everyone is doing and you're lost in the blur. Do the right stuff and other people will point you out.

But, with the shift towards portability in rss, widgets, gadgets, apps (etc) distribution becomes more complex; less about a central destination from which to broadcast (and to which to be pointed) and more about networks of people looking at and sharing among each other.

In the world of user as destination we have to think about a web in which links don't matter.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Links perform a fantastic task in extending networks of trust. They point people who are interested in one piece of content, or one person's view, at another they might find useful.

They did a great job at discovering people through content.

But we're entering a world in which content is discovered through people.

Here being pointed at is less important than being taken with.

Of course you still have to have something useful and relevant for someone to choose to take your service or content with them.

And your service or message should be adaptable by the receiver so they can better shape it to be relevant to the community of purpose they are currently interacting with.

The rules that make something pointworthy remain true. You can't just make your press releases into an rss, for example.

But portability is the new linking.

It's how we share stuff with each other, through our connections with and to each other.Users are off on their own journeys and if you aren't ready or useful enough to be taken with them and shared among them, you'll be left on your own.

By the way, you can take FasterFuture with you (latest posts and tweets) in the widget you'll find at the bottom of the left column.

Blogs dead? Who cares? Ubiquity of Connectivity is what matters

The eighth mass media is not about tools. I care little who says blogging is dead or who claims microblogging is the next big thing.

The eighth mass media is where:
we are the connections and the way the connections are made; beyond silos. It needs tools but it isn't made by them.

It's the direction we're headed in. The sixth and seventh medias (internet and mobile) are helping us on our way.

How we choose to connect, in which silo or with which tools, is less important than that we do connect - and, crucially, as widely and instantly as possible. Blogs are quite good for this. They are considerably less silo'd than your average (what we traditionally think of) social network. Don't write them off just yet.

More importantly Hugh refers us to one of Clay Shirky's more oft-repeated lines (my emphasis):

"Yes, again, it's all about what Clay Shirky said four years ago, in a wonderful interview he did for Gothamist:

"So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

Amen to that. We all have cheap, rapid, easy ways of sharing our metadata. That's what publishing has become. Publishing for all. Advertising for all.

We can all share content. Content is the conversation starter, conversation is where ideas turn into action, action is where value is created.

Now we can all share in sharing this. We can all share ourselves.

That is what changes everything.

In some ways the eighth mass media is also the first (as J_Mac pointed out in a comment on the original post).

Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen's work on Mobile as the 7th mass media lists them thus:
1. Print
2. Recordings
3. Radio
4. Cinema
5. TV
6. Internet
7. Mobile

The eighth is where we are moving towards: We are the eighth mass media. But we were of course always the first, too.

The difference between the pre-mass information age and the post mass broadcast age is speed of transmission and scale of spread both enabled by the ubiquity of connectivity.

We need the sixth and seventh mass medias to enable the eighth.