Research critique

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cooking ideas and reputation, is it enough?

In our hypothetical tribe, however, people give what they have into the pot with no guarantee that they’re getting a fair exchange, which smacks of altruism……. But on the Net, a cooking-pot market is far from altruistic…… Your effort is limited to creating one – the original – copy of your product…… but millions of unique goods made by others!

I guess the cooking pot markets make sense to me in that this is what I see on the Internet, especially through my everyday life. The model makes sense, but probably not enough for media companies who wish to make money, or cash in reputation. Each individual on the Internet might be producing their work for fun, only asking for ideas in exchange or gain some reputation, but media firms want to find a fast way to convert bits and bytes into real world currency. Subscription model does not work and online advertising is increasing, but uncertain where it is going.

Google creates new ways for ad methods, such as AdSense, with complicated equations, but what else? Cumulating reputation and then cash in the reputation is similar to your cash return credit card: before you reach a certain amount of credit (reputation), it cannot be cashed in (maybe a little with advertising). But if you cumulate enough reputation, one day you can cash in whatever you have at hand for millions or billions, if lucky enough.

So media companies buy Web sites that already have a good reputation and a good audience base, such as Google bought YouTube. In addition to this, after investing in a Web site and since nothing can be cashed in immediately, how can media companies survive if the cash flow keeps being negative? Media companies cannot just do it for fun, can they? (so far I guess only Google say they do?)

The cooking pot market

Using the cooking pot market to explain the free online product and services seems purely genius at the first glance, but it only accounts for one part of what is really going on in the dual online media market.

If we look at the participatory media from users’ perspective, it is simply true that--

If a significant part of your needs are for information products themselves, you do not need to trade in your intangible earnings from the products you create for hard cash, because you can use those intangibles to "buy" the information you want.

Consumers would like to create content for reputation or exchanging for other valuable information provided by their peers. It explains why Bloggers.com, YouTube, and MySpace can exist and keep on expanding over the years. It will be hard to put a price tag on the value of user generated content online, but it is possible to quantify the utility of it with the measurement of how people perceive its usefulness.

From the media company’s perspective, the idea of cooking pot market offers a way to manage the supply of the content and maintain the audience base. But eventually, they will starve without cashing out the information resources they possess online. One common way to do it is through ad selling. Many new media platforms, which establish success in a cooking pot market, still have hard time to finance themselves. For example, YouTube, as the future for television, is considered to have a lot of buried treasure in term of making ad revenue.

The smartphone and you

Gutenberg’s movable type had its financial glitches in the beginning. It then went on to revolutionise the printing world. I guess you already know where this thought process is going. Like the printing press figured out a way to thrive, so will online advertising. And with the future of the world being online, advertising will slowly figure out its place in the whole scheme of things. Till then, I guess the world has to be content in being prophetic about the future of the Internet.

In his article, Weblogs and the epistemology of the news: some trends in online journalism, Donald Matheson spoke of the line being blurred between journalists and readers when readers adopt current technologies. The current trend of the Internet, in my opinion, seems to be social networking sites (SNSs) and blogging. This indicates how much people want to be a part in the creation of the content, rather than being passive consumers of online content.

Blogs allow for news to be in a democratic and interactive space. They (news blogs) may be biased, but if this is what I want to read, I know where to go. For instance, I follow my friend’s blog for goings on in Bangalore, where I come from. This helps me keep track of a very niche interest. And we just learnt how The Rantings of a Sandmonkey got popular!

Industry pundits have redefined the ‘digital divide’ to be more of how to use the technology you own than haves and have nots. Mobile devices are more common than computers. And recent developments like the iPhone and G1 (Google Android) could probably herald a new era where a smartphone will replace your computer. This brings me back to my point that the future will be online, be it blogs, SNSs or even checking mail.

web 2.0 and online newspapers

After reading Gauntlett’s article called “Media Studies 2.0,” I was wondering how web 2.0 could change online newspapers in future. Web 2.0 emphasizes the interactive feature between internet users. For example, it is very easy to see many comments posted by readers under news articles on online newspapers. In fact, these comments are my favorite feature of online newspapers. I always read users’ comments after reading an article. It is very interesting to see how people react to certain issues taking advantage of their anonymity.

In fact, this became kind of serious problem in South Korea in recent years. Internet users sometimes post very offensive comments to some controversial articles to attack reporters and sources. These comments, which are really the direct product of web 2.0, became so powerful in Korea that online newspapers started to censor many of its comments. Some major newspapers in Korea started to force internet users to use their real names when posting comments, not nicknames. What’s ironic about these comments is that many online newspapers also started to put these comments into news articles as valid sources for stories. Reporters often times put these internet users’ ID and comments to reflect what public thinks about certain issues. I find this very controversial. I don’t know if I can consider these random users as valid sources. But then, these comments are indeed what people are honestly thinking, so I can’t ignore these comments either. Is there similar issue like this in America, too? If not, do you ever think these comments will be used in online news article just like Korea?

economist audience thoughts

Reading the article, I wondered if having Semel lead Yahoo hurt the company in some irreparable way. Yes, Semel learned a lot from his daughters and others who taught him about the internet and new media. But are competing companies doing better because or in part because they're led by techier people?

The talk about the Long Tail reminds me of something I've heard about musicians in the new media economy. I don't recall where I heard it first, apologies. Anyway, the statement was that, to make a living, all a band needs today is 1000 "true fans." These people are die hards and go to any show in their area. They buy the CDs and shirts and really enjoy the music. Today, with the advent of the internet, bands can more easily find these true fans and communicate with them more directly, ensuring that they get more of the proceeds of their own works.

As the article was talking about how companies like Google are very different from traditional media companies, especially in that they don't create content, I was reminded of a few videos on this subject. They're kinda old but I'm not sure if y'all've seen them so I'm including links here:

EPIC 2014
EPIC 2015 (an updated version

There is another that I have in mind too. I'll have to try to find it back. But those two are probably more on target for our purposes.

Update: The second one I couldn't remember is: Prometeus

the future of media landscape?

I really like the article in terms of how it can be related to what we are doing here: having a blog and act/write as bloggers. We are a small group indeed, but “such small number is common in participatory media.” We have similar interest (at least to some degree?) and exchange thoughts and opinions here. Each of us benefit from this blog by reading others’ posts and comments.

Having a personal/group blog is more common now than three or five years ago, and just as the reading suggested, maybe in five years, everyone is going to have a blog, just like everyone has (at least) an email account now. How many email accounts do you have? How many blogs do you have? Compare with what you had five years ago, what is the percentage of growth? So where does this technological development or growth take us to?

Of course I cannot foresee the future, but somehow I believe in the potential of mobile devices. Something similar to iPhone or GPhone. I do not mean mobile devices will replace our desktop or laptop computers (even though it is possible), but I think a great amount of people want to be connected, either by phone or by the Internet, or both. They might not want to talk to a real person all the time, but they want to be connected to the (cyber?) world more often, especially those who grew up with broadband Internet and their sidekicks.

Here's a blog post of the next Internet.