In the middle of a storm, it is difficult to see the bottom of the ocean through the muddy waters

This is one of Plato’s stories:

It is about a ship in the middle of the ocean. On this ship was a gruff burly captain who was rather shortsighted and slightly deaf. He and his crew followed the principles of majority rule on decisions about navigational direction. They had a very skilled navigator who knew how to read the stars on the ship but the navigator was not very popular and rather introverted. In the panic of being lost, the captain and crew made a decision to follow the most charismatic, eloquent and persuasive of the crewmembers. They ignored and ridiculed the navigator’s suggestions, stayed lost and ultimately starved to death at sea.

While the navigator tries to read the signs and suggest there is a need to change directions,  most people do not like to change directions at all. It makes them feel uncertain about the road ahead. They feel agile, uptight and warry. Why do they need to change? Live is comfortable and I don’t want to think about something new and risky! And then they look at the navigator and actually find him an incredible pain in the butt!

In order to see the bottom of the ocean,  the storm has to lie down, so the water is calm again. In order to navigate we need to trust upon the skies. But here’s the story of today: The storm is not about to lie down soon. And the sky is full of diamonds. Some are false and some are true. It’s not easy to find your way these days. But maybe it’s a good idea not to blame the navigator, this time.

To me “Alice in Wonderland” is one of the greatest meta-stories there is around. Is see it as methaphorically for the work I do, helping media companies going through the “rabbit hole”. How symbolically that it is this story that today illustrates how Disney is trying to get cinema’s to enter into the ‘rabbit hole’.  It is imminent for a while now, that the current business model of subsequent release windows for films (and tv series for that matter) is collapsing. With the “battle for Alice” the fight is coming into the open. While cinema’s are hanging on to their “last straws” to keep their windows as long as possible, publishers want to adjust to the  changing market conditions.

So what is happening?

The development of the realtime web is putting ever more pressure on the release dates of properties. After airing any new film or series, within the hour you are able to get it from a torrent. This has resulted in the habit of people to not wait untill they are “officialy” able to see the film in their region, but instead going for instant satisfaction and grabbing the material.

So, the publishers are seeing their windows collapsing, especially a (still) profitable DVD window. But facing reality means there is actually only one first window, and that is a global release moment. Instead of getting into a fight with the publishers, agile young film makers are  looking for smart new release models; using social media to gather public and fans and planning exclusive screenings in film art houses as a festival tour of films. They understand that the social experience of watching a movie with friends is what they need to support (in their own interests)

Now curiously enough there is an advantage to seeing Alice in the cinema. As this makes it possible to engage in the 3D experience of the film, where as a DVD will not grant you that experience in your home  (…yet, for 3D television is in fast development as well).

So cinema’s seem to feel robbed of their last chance to attract audiences on the bases of a superior film experience. This is a fight that was bound to happen and Disney (as one of the big publishers) has chosen to take the lead..

Moving from stories to legends..

This is part of my 10 years old quote:

….Some people think we are made of flesh and blood..

Scientist say we are made of atoms.

But actually I believe we are made of stories!…

& here is what I was thinking of recently..

Now we have come to a time where we have the chance to change our relationships with the stories in our lives.

Once as an audience we where separated from our stories by impermeable walls, forced into being mere spectators.

But now these fourth walls are becoming liquid.

And the real is merging with the imaginary.

We have come to a time where our lives are materialising in digital traces.

Where we continuously flow between parallel presences, real and digital, actual and imaginary.

Where we have the chance to go from just telling stories to

Building legends.

A Legend is a living story

That creates meaningful ritual relations with others

Legends build and grow as we go

We can invite others to get involved, to crossover from one form of connection to the story, from presence in one medium onto the next one. Moving from the real to the imaginary and from the imaginary back into the real.

The stories of our lives are mingling, through our conversations and the real time sharing of our live experiences. Meanwhile weaving wonderful tapestries out of the digital traces of our lives.

When hero’s journey they have to overcome many obstacles and face life changing challenges. Going these paths transforms them. In our lives we too face many quests, choices and doubts. And that is what makes us relate to our heroes. We too are continuously transforming on our paths of life. The motivations to connect get involved and move through living stories together, lies in the power of those stories to touch upon our lives and transform us.

I therefore believe the most meaningful story relations are ritual relations. The ones where we progress through paths and go through transformations be that either personally or as a shared experience. And that is why we need to move from just telling stories to building legends, creating meaningful ritual relations with our stories. May these stories be our own, sharing that of our friends or the ones that become manifest in imaginary worlds.

We will be the first generation where the stories of our lives become manifest and ordinary people become extra ordinary legends. Where we can go from ordinary acts and together build extra ordinary events that will remain to transcend the times of our lives. And leave us with a truly inspiring digital heritance for those that come after us.

For we are made of stories and if we die, this is what remains, the legends of our lives, and the monuments we have build together, may they have originated from the real or the imaginary.

Yesterday we had a kick-off of what we call “dondersteendag”. We plan to do special stuff for our clients and relations on Thursday. It’s a quick thought up word joke; as in our company name ‘Dondersteen Media’ associates with “donderdag” the Dutch word for Thursday.. Together with CMBO, knowledge organization for digital media, Syntens, subsidiary of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands and the MA Factory, the Amsterdam Media Academy, we could off a free-of-charge game workshop.

Ward Geene from Dondersteen Media has two big passions in life.  One of them is gaming. He has probably gamed “all of his life” (since he happens to be in his fine young twenties, that is quit normal behavior as we will see in this article). Besides working for Dondersteen Media he also writes for Power Unlimited, the biggest game-title in the Netherlands. For our kick-off of Dondersteendag he gave this presentation about video-games, discussing:

• Who is the gamer?
• What is a game (which is actually quit a profound philosophical question..)
• Why are games important from a crossmedia-transmedia perspective?
• And what can other entertainment industry learn from the great successes that games have in the digital entertainment field?

It was quit a special day. So many beautiful people have supported us. First of all, the people from CMBO, Syntens and the MA Factory. They made it possible for the workshop to be free of charge. But I want to most specially mention my friend Steven Kruijswijk (@kruithoph on twitter) who made our day by taking care of the live U-stream we could broadcast from the presentation, so that people could hook in through the web!

You can watch the embedded stream (it’s regular web quality

Since it is Dutch let me also give you a recap of the presentation in text here.

The gamer:

First there is a bias towards ‘the gamer’. For starters according to TNS-NIPO who did research in 2006, 73% of the Dutch game. That is a very large figure, because it incorporates casual as well as hardcore gamers. The bias of “the gamer” is towards male, aged 19 to 35, hardcore gamers. What you see from the figures is that people in their teens and twenties practically ALL game. When they grow older, they spend less time on games and it gets up in time again at around 50 years. But considering this 10-20 generation has really grown up with games, compared to the 30-to-50 aged group, who did not, one could conclude that time spent on gaming when the younger group gets older will probably not get less. Since gaming is more a part of their natural entertainment habits.

The game:

Game philosophers are still debating what exactly is a game? In the opinion of Ward a game is about the present, about the NOW. Since if there is no player, there is no game and the game unfolds in the here and now. Gaming is a process, more than a linear route. The process of going through the game can be different every time. What you do as you game is you learn, by continuously exploring the “what if..” Gaming takes a lot of time. There may be other and more efficient ways to deliver a message.

Games and crossmedia-transmedia:

Looking from a crossmedia-transmedia perspective, what is interesting is that games are able to ‘move people’. If you want your public or community to move towards a next ‘step” you need to reward them for their actions. That is basically a very important design implication. Furthermore the game communities that are being developed right now by Microsoft and Sony for example give you a profile that you can share with other gamers, going beyond single play gaming. The gamers’ profile however is bound to the platform, making a lock-in for next generations, since you do not want to loose your build up achievements. Disadvantage is you cannot play a game together cross-platform. Microsoft as well as Sony anticipates on a probable opening up of their walled gardens by supplying very rewarding community features.

Last saturday Jennifer Hicks from the inkstudio met Ward Geene (one of the Dondersteen People). She decided he was a person to know more about.
So she put him in her ‘hot seat’, talking about games, the things we do around here and his favorite nuts.. Read all about it at the tattletech blog

I am putting in this link of the You Tube video of the Susan Boyle moment that has been watched more then 100 million times!!

Why do I have to put in a link? Because I cannot embed the video anymore!!

How illustrative!  This is the way traditional media parties are dealing with social media reality!

While Simon Cowell and Fremantle smartly directed there little but Oh soo precious treasure very carefully into the spotlight (the Boyle performance was already taped in January of this year) they completely “forgot” to set up a strategy that would enable and monetize on the moment in our today social media reality!

Jenkins has a very informative post on Boyle. He calls this kind of swarming of media content “spread” with which he points out there needs to be a motif for fans to want to post, link and twitter about the Susan Boyle moment

I cannot agree more, a good crossmedia design needs to motivate people to start acting upon. His post is very interesting and his arguments for people to start ’spreading’ are understandable: People having a ’sense of discovery’ with the video, or ‘the uplifting nature of the moment to give to others’. He points out that ‘the meaning rests in the conversations that Susan Boyle enables us to have with each other’. Jenkins asserts everybody may have different motives to start spreading the Boyle video, because the arguments they give friends and relatives to watch may differ depending on who you are sending messages to.

That may very well be so, but his arguments do not explain the unifying reason why this particular moment is spreading.. So what I find an even more interesting question is: What IS the binding nature of the Susan Boyle moment that makes all these different people want to start spreading?

I think the magic lies in the old metaphor of Cinderella, sleeping beauty, the princess awakening. That coupled with seeing this very everyday woman, “deprived” of any good luck, that finally did get her break-through DESPITE being too old and not in line with “beauty-prescripts”. Now imagine how many people feel mirrored in that image? And I assure you; they will not tell you out loud.

Exactly this contrast makes her a dream to any producer and Simon Cowell knew exactly what a precious gem he was holding. There was only one-way to launch her and that was trough a format like “Britain’s got talent”.

Take away all prejudice in one shot.!! Marvellous, brilliant from a classical television and music producers’ perspective.

But what an incredible loss in creating social media advantage!

Let me sum up the losses here:

I am not able to “own” the moment as a fan anymore (since I am not allowed to embed)

I am not able to make my own fan blog, helping to spread the word about who is Susan Boyle..

Can you do this in a better way?

Recently I have been working on a social media player for Dutch public broadcasting to be able to DO capture these moments and support and enable them as much as possible in today’s social media reality.

Where the BBC i-player is much credited for being innovative, this player is designed to take things leaping even more forward. Being able to grab the content and even pick up your own fragments and off course embed them everywhere.

I was wondering what would have happened if the Susan Boyle moment was accessible to the public from such a player.

Mind you, this player accounts for all views, inside the website as well as embedded anywhere else. Besides probable load balancing problems there would also be You Tube to air the moment as well (that’s what You Tube is for).

But what if the quality of the “official” player will be HD. What if you can do as much and even more with it whatever you want?

I think there really may be a substantial part of the audience choosing for the official player then.

Now let’s look at the potential commercial losses (most painfully as always ;-))

Right after the program is aired:

1. Have an embeddable player (counting streams) available on your official website. Remember: Here YOU control every layer, all the cross-branding, pre-roll/mid-roll/post-rolls. On the web still the commercial rules are different from the television rules (which in this case. Britain’s got talent is a non-commercial television environment)

2. Right after the program, enable the moment to be captured on You Tube (just place it), with an i-tunes overlay offering the whole performance (from the moment she gets on stage to the moment she hears she’s got the vote)

3. Have available all kinds of little widgets containing snippets of that moment.. (Sponsored by.) That I can take away on my mobile phone.

Off course the Susan Boyle moment is staged extremely carefully (Oh. I’m sorry if you really thought this was spontaneous.) But it illustrates very strongly how traditional media just do not capture the power of the social media reality yet. And how the Susan Boyle moment forms a marker for how television has already changed profoundly.

I actually noticed three trends at the Next Web. The first is the focus on smaller particles. There was a lot of business development focussing on getting a ‘feature’ in the cloud.Wauw! Wee makes it easy to upload pictures and text to your site and networks by using your mobile phone.
Bemba is actually a sharing button in your browser, it’s del.icio.us de-geeked. Symbaloo is the search button on your mobile. Fleck a start-up of the organisers of the next web is the yellow notes on the web. Twingly metadates the trackback functionality. They announced an agreement with “De Telegraaf”, one of the big Dutch publishing houses that starts using twingly to generate more traffic.Cocomment aggregates the conversations you are in, or that may be relevant to you. I can see the meaning of that, with scattered conversations in different spaces.
Wakoopa tracks what kind of software or games you use, and lets you create your own software profile. At first I thought heck who cares, but then I got the picture, it’s a two sided knife.. For developers: Get your app out and see adoption rates daily. You can adjust directly, great betatesting. For users: Sharing what you use gives you tips on what like-minded users are using now. And this is off course extremely interesting for the big vendors to know our software-profiles (even be it aggregated).

The other start-ups aimed at centralising all the particles around the users through community, or netvibes-a-like thinking and from there on letting them share again- Sharing was obviously a big theme for every start-up -. Focus is on the personal dashboard.
fav.or.it makes it possible for you to centrally assemble all that you want to cast and from there again share it. . Goo-jet seduces you by being the central starting point to assemble your material and take it with you anywhere mobile. Netlog is a social network already growing rapidly and is looking at ways to build new advertising models. Beezbox (currently as I write offline) is another social network app. Like Ning, but it is B-to-B, meaning whereas Ning owns all the data on their/your networks. Beetbox is white label to publishers. Therefore, maybe not technically high end, might fullfil a here-and-now need in the market.

That’s a short pick of the start-ups presenting, you may all find them here at the nextweb

Another important development is the application aggregation. Amazon already has started this and was presenting at the next web. Yesterday google announced its google app engine. Handing out the tested tools available within these companies too the public to start building from there. Including the possiblity to scale (amazon and google now a bit about that) Talk about scaling, according to scobleizer (see later) that’s what they know how to do in San Francisco.

For the real next web issue, The somewhat longer term development of the web. There was a presentation of Nova Spivack, you can find a substract of this 2 posts below. The next web is where we will start mashing beyond belief.. Therefore the focus on particles is logical. The power is truly going to be in the detail ;-). Cloud computing, applications with low data-rate exchanges, and clear benefits, digg being an excellent early example, will add to the stack. Now by unlocking the data in all those stacks we can even more enrich our experience and get relevant information. That is according to Chris Saad of the Data Portability Organisation. I met Chris, a very likeable man who invited me to come and join in the debate about data portability. An invitation that is not ment only for me, but for everybody. So take a look at the Data Portability Organisation

And then off course there was Robert Scoble, who had a very inviting speech where he was not so much sending out a message, as well opening up to a conversation with the public. Meanwhile, in between the lines, he said some very usefull things like that it is wise to gather many friends and that somehow you needed to make sense out of the feed. Scobleizer just hoppes in and out of the pulse (on twitter) when he’s on, he may react. When he’s of, your reply is lost in some endless parallel space.. I had a short meet up with Robert, (great guy) and he just gave me a tantalizing idea. Very valuable. That kind of sums him up, in and out of conversations. Sometimes being highly relevant. So thanks scobleizer, got the grey cells running up a scheme again..;-)

In the midst of the videoplayer storm (almost every day there is a new service launched) I have been working on.. indeed making another videoplayer. There is however a very decisive difference in this player with other services. Most of them are aimed at us, users becoming videochannels. That’s great, a well of new unknown talent comes on board, You Tube already showed this much. But..This player is aimed at getting “regular” broadcasting material into the the social web layer. The question then is how to get a videoplayer that can stand up against all these new initiatives AND add value to the experience of using and working with it?

We focussed on adding ‘watching together” functionality to it. On getting video online “social” itself. What functionality do you need so you can share your viewing experience with others, most likely your friends?
You need to be able to comment and talk about the contents of the video. You need to be able to point out what others should watch, which particular scene..and why
You need to be able to “personalize” the video you want to place in “your environment”, notably your webpage, profiling page etc. All of that and more we designed into a player no larger then the You Tube player. Where You Tube is adding - a lot - of social functionality AROUND the players, in their own website, we tried to get the most significant functionality also INTO the player. Off course we want to direct people to the website of the public broadcaster as well. This will happen because of the added value you can find in the landingspages (the reward to go to the website of the pubcaster is this good, you will). With “uitzending gemist” the pubcaster was one of the first in the world to have a large scale video on demand library available to the public. The service is inmensely popular, but.. it is a closed loop. Coming from a closed environment the movement here is to “open up” to the wishes of the public. To take the content and place it in your own context and enable you to “talk about it” with others. In some upcoming posts I will go deeper into the motives behind this, the things we learned so far and a little bit more about how to get video on the web more social. The answer is in the icing on the cake..