I’ve been doing some thinking about media recently, and particularly in light of Tom Foremski’s series^[2] on everyone being a media company these days. It particularly got me to think again about my CyberSpark.net project, which looks on the surface of it like just another product, but in fact the goal is to create a seed where community can form. So even CyberSpark is really a media project.

[youtube Weq_sHxghcg]x

[2] Tom is a journalist who was with the Financial Times and just about six years ago left his job to work online. He now writes Silicon Valley Watcher and he’s one of the Traveling Geeks. He wrote the series a few weeks after his Traveling Geeks trip to the UK (he was also with us in Paris in December, 2009). During that trip we were all considering the role of established media—His series comprises:

A kind of “summary” article: 5yrs: Lessons And Insights: Wish Everyone Well… August 21, 2009

and three others as a series:

Part 1: Why I left the Financial Times August 18, 2009

Part 2: Where’s the disruption from the Internet? August 19, 2009

Part 3: Meeting Cisco’s Dan Scheinman and realizing every company is now a media company August 20, 2009

The post The Future of Publishing – by DK appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Howard suggests the critical skills are: attention; participation; collaboration; network-savvy and critical consumption (what Howard often calls crap detection).

JD Lasica interviewed Howard in Cambridge [see JD’s blog post] when we were on Traveling Geeks.

The post Howard Rheingold- 21st Century Literacies appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The FCC regulates the airwaves in the US and next year they’re taking back the portions of the RF spectrum that have been devoted to analog television (broadly-separated frequency bands for VHF in the 1950s with a UHF band of frequencies added to that later on), and the broadcast digital television that’s been “under construction” since 1998 will be what’s left. The new technology can carry more channels and information, and much of that in high-definition, but old television receivers will be unable to decode it.

I’d guess that many people simply won’t convert. Cable and satellite TV users won’t be affected and their old TV sets will work, but millions of old analog sets around the US – those who depends on rooftop antennas and rabbit ears – will receive nothing but “snow.”

And where will Mom and Pop Public go?

Well I’m on satellite, using a TiVo box (a DVR), and I long ago time-shifted almost all of my viewing. I no longer know exactly when my favorite shows are broadcast because the TiVo records them and I watch them when I have a spare evening. Like most time-shifted viewers, I mostly shift “scripted shows” (Lost and Battlestar Galactica, for example) as opposed to news and shows with real-time content.

Well, here’s where I think the viewing will migrate, based on Doc Searls’ and my own experience.

• Some will switch to cable or satellite; and will increasingly move to time-shifted viewing [notes: networks want to take time-shifted viewing into account when setting advertising rates; Nielsen ratings did not take time-shifted viewing into account until 2006 – now it seems everything is tracked.] Cable and satellite are not affected by the 2009 FCC-mandated migration.
• A large number will get their video from online sources, though it will be painful because broadband is slow in the US and has been getting more congested (at least here in San Francisco – I can barely play video without stuttering even when on my 1.5mbit cable connection);
• Over time the “online” users will download more and more shows to devices like iPods which, of course, is totally time-shifted;
• The “rental” model of viewing downloaded video will have to change because the current rental time-period is too short – longer-term rental will have to be made available (perhaps lasting for years);

I’ve always suspected that TiVo was tracking my viewing of time-shifted shows, including looking at whether I skipped the commercials, which I always do. Clearly they do, and I’ll investigate that more. Perhaps you already know more about that and would share your knowledge?

The post The end of analog TV will accelerate a paradigm shift appeared first on Sky's Blog.