Category: Four pillars

Dominic Sayers, an old friend, erstwhile colleague and fellow cricket-lover, commented today on a post I’d written sometime earlier on “learning from the comments people leave on my blog“.  What he said was:

I thought you would enjoy this quote from a Cricinfo article today: “Kaif was cruising on 91 when Panesar stunned him with a Youtube moment”.

How soon before “a YouTube moment” joins the verb “to Google” in the dictionary?

As you would expect, I did two things. I googled “YouTube moment” and found it returned just under 18,000 hits. Then I went to YouTube, found this video and watched it. Looks like the Test series coming up will be interesting. Incidentally, I fail the Tebbit test spectacularly. I watch and support England every chance I get, have even had the good fortune to have been at two Ashes-clinching tests. But when they play India, things are different. it’s not Tebbit but Thatcher I land up following. TINA. India.

[The video is also on my VodPod in the sidebar in case you want to watch it later. I use VodPod to liberate the video link from the post].

On to the real point that Dom was making. YouTube moment as a neologism. Until Dom’s post, I never quite realised how useful the web is for tracking neologisms, one can almost associate a nascent phrase with a buzz factor and watch it grow. Or die.

And that set me thinking. YouTube moment. Whatever next? A FaceBook romance? A Flickr opportunity?

Wish I was a Kellogg’s Corn Flake
Floating in my bowl, taking movies

Simon and Garfunkel, Punky’s Dilemma

Take a look at what Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer does for a living. A retired oceanographer, he studies flotsam. I was reading about the flotilla of rubber ducks heading Britain’s way after they confounded earlier predictions and made it through the Garbage Patch. Apparently they’re due for landfall here any moment.

And it made me wonder. What if these ducks had had GPS? How much more information would we have gained?

We are heading towards a world where GPS-ed plastic ducks are part of the wisdom of crowds.

I’ve been fascinated by the Because Effect, ever since Doc Searls first discussed it with me, set against the backdrop of Doc’s Making a New World and Stewart Brand’s The Long Now. What is this Because Effect? Doc describes it better than I can, but if it helps you any, I use the following definition:

When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect.

Prince has often struck me as an incredibly talented artist as well as someone who really understands trends. So it was with some amusement that I read this story, where he is described as having done a deal with the Mail On Sunday to give his latest album away free before it hits the shops.

Now that’s avant-garde. Don’t just give a track or two away, give the whole thing away before you put it on sale. I know, I know, you’re going to say “he should have made it a free download” or something like that; or rather, the Mail On Sunday should have done a deal whereby anyone who signed up to their free online edition had the right to download it for free or something like that.

Whatever. The point is that Prince understands how he makes money, what’s scarce and what’s abundant about it. Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them.

A word of caution. Some people are just not comfortable with abundance economics, so they try to create artificial scarcities as they go along. Second nature to them, I guess. So please don’t be surprised to find that someone dreams up a scheme whereby concert tickets start being offered as triple plays at grossly inflated prices, bundling together the concert with the CD and the T-shirt. [In this context, there’s a lot of noise about artists being offered “360-degree” contracts by media companies, this is a dangerous trend.]

You cannot bundle abundance with scarcity, it’s like trying to implement region coding of the air that you breathe. But then some people will try anything.

Yesterday, while watching Madonna at Wembley, the stadium was pin-cushioned with thousands of tiny points of light. This time around the light sources were mobile phone screens. Thirty years ago, when I started attending concerts in earnest, I saw the same pin-cushioning. In those days the light sources were cigarette ends. There wasn’t a cigarette end to be seen at Wembley yesterday.

How times change.  Or do they? As happened with cigarettes, mobile phones emit light at concerts, are habit-forming and appear to have the capacity to make people ill.

I’m taking my family to watch Live Earth at Wembley today; whatever their interests, I’ve always encouraged them to watch things “live” rather than on television. So we land up in the strangest of places every now and then.

This time around, we booked a hotel in London to make a weekend of it, and I woke up at the crack of dawn as I am wont to do.  My wife was reading the paper in bed, and remarked that the concert line-up timings had been published. That triggered something in me, and I decided to try out the Live Earth on MSN coverage.

I guess I wasn’t expecting much. After all, I was on a Mac, on what passes for wireless in a London hotel, about to try and watch something via MSN that was sponsored by Chevy. Shall we say the omens were not good?

This is the site I went to. This is what I saw when I tried, somewhat pessimistically and resigned-to-my-fate-ically :

LIVE EARTH: THE CONCERTS FOR A CLIMATE IN CRISIS

THE CONCERT IS AVAILABLE FOR MOST INTERNET BROWSERS,
BUT FOR THE BEST VIEWING EXPERIENCE, USE INTERNET EXPLORER

We believe you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer. To proceed, choose the single video you’d like to watch:

Australia |  Japan |  China |  Germany |  United Kingdom |  United States-DC |  South Africa |  United States-NY |  Brazil |  World |  Green

To watch all concerts in a single player and at the highest quality, close this window, start Internet Explorer and browse to http://liveearth.msn.com.

In Internet Explorer you can:

• Simultaneously view updated status for artists at all venues
• See constantly updated information on all concerts
• Toggle between any concert venue you wish and watch additional “green” footage

And my heart sang. Some of you may be purists who want a lot more, but I hope and pray this is the shape of things to come.

I was no longer being forced by Microsoft to use Internet Explorer to watch an event live on MSN. I could choose another browser. My choice. Connected not channelled.

Far more importantly, I was no longer being forced by Microsoft to use their OS. I could choose another operating system. My choice. Connected not channelled.

In the past, whenever I didn’t go “native”, I had a serious degradation in quality; do you remember MSN Messenger on a Mac in the early days?  This time, thankfully, the QuickTime quality was quite acceptable. If I used Firefox and tabbed my way along, I could move from venue to venue, but what I couldn’t do was figure out how to manage the audio sensibly.

This was more like it. Next time around I expect to see other browsers offer more differentiating services, all around the same video content. Connected not channelled.

Anyone at the BBC listening? I cannot believe the decisions they made, especially when they are meant to be a public service.

But back to Microsoft. Maybe Hugh’s Blue Monster is having an impact after all. My faith in humanity is slowly being restored.