The Power of the Users

A friend turned me on to a new blogger today – Buzzmachine, from the mind/pen of Jeff Jarvis. He’s got a great commentary today about the silliness of Viacom (and the Oscars) demanding their video clips be pulled from YouTube. (uh, oh, is the RoeDeo in trouble? Just where did that photo of The Three Amigos come from?) Sample Grab:

If I had the Oscars or Viacom …here’s what I’d do to deal with — no, to exploit and profit from — the inevitable trend toward your audience promoting and distributing your content:

The first goal is to get the audience to pick and recommend your best stuff. That’s free promotion.

The second goal is to make money from advertising, either on the clips themselves or on the pages and videos people come to because they saw the clips.

So I’d work with YouTube et al …to enable viewers to pick out segments in the middle of video. And then I’d let them to post those segments on any of the sharing services that enable me to attach ads and make money. So say the Oscars are up at Oscars.com and you can watch them there — and earn the Academy and the network more ad revenue with every click.

My Jarvis grab wouldn’t be complete without noting his typically-pithy Dave Winer grab:

It seems the entertainment industry doesn’t recognize the power of its users. They’re accustomed to dealing with artists and other companies, esp really large ones, but they haven’t learned how to negotiate with the users, and that’s who they have to deal with, if they want a future.

Yes, already my blog is reduced to quoting a blogger quoting another blogger. How lame is that?

"Listeners of Tomorrow are Online Today"

After three days at the IMA‘s (Integrated Media Association) Public Media conference, followed by a day listening to new-Information Age seers Henry Jenkins, Charles Nesson, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and Dave Weinberger at the Beyond Broadcast 2007 seminar (co-sponsored by the Berkman Center at Harvard and MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, today I discovered this post from Jerry Del Colliano, Professor of Music Industry at USC. Can’t be much more than a dittohead on this one. Worth reading every word. Sample grab:

“….Now, it’s time to mention the killer app.

When universal WiFi or its equivalent is available and consumers can
take the Internet with them then it’s all over for radio. Ditto for
satellite radio.

That is, of course, assuming that terrestrial radio broadcasters don’t
have an epiphany soon and decide to get into the Internet radio
business. Ditto for satellite.

So far, the excuses are pretty lame.

Radio is a fading industry thanks to the misdirected major
consolidators. They’ve lost the next generation as they migrated to
their mobile devices and the Internet. So what does that say? Well, when
they are not fighting Arbitron’s People Meter or when they stubbornly
try to sell HD radio as the next big thing, they make excuses.

Can’t pay the music licensing fees to stream our terrestrial signals. It
would be prohibitive. No, it would be suicide — not to stream the
signals. Pay the fees and get your programming where the next generation
is — online.”

WHEW. And Jerry hasn’t even seen the Resco Radio application I just downloaded on my Motorola Q Smartphone. More on that in a future post.