Guagua Pública

Sobering implications of this presentation. Regardless of the accuracy of one slide, the rest of the conclusions here are very believable.



This is a thought provoking video by Marc Goodman, "The Business Of Illegal Data: Innovation From The Criminal Underground."

I think an underlying observation here Marc is suggesting is: "it is difficult to anticipate how anyone (criminal, governemental, or individual) might use the massive amounts of data we generate."

Certainly something to consider more carefully.

- Tough competition from video and music

Been thinking a lot over the holidays. Words are too plentiful and can only generate deep engagement with a small percentage of people. As culture continues to converge, we are surrounded by media much more engaging than words on a screen. With a strong push by an increasingly SMS dependent culture, we are consuming words with shorter and shorter attention spans.

It's really no surprise that micro-blogging has become so successful. With Pinterest, we've reduced micro-blogging to a caption and a title. The photo replaces the text. I pity the fool that is hoping to earn a living writing words for screens, because all signs point to ADD-centric populous.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting the death of words or reading. Technology, especially one that has been with us for over 500 years, never dies. No, the fate authors face is much worse, it's  irrelevance. that's what happens to technology, it becomes irrelevant, that is, unless it has some un-reproducible value. What quality does a book have that will keep it relevant?

Image via Wikipedia

- Huge gap between what people are willing to do and what they are "allowed" to.

With the rate of people joining the Internet growing exponentially, we are way beyond being able to anticipate just what someone is willing to do. Whether it is a transmedia story, an open source project, an alternate reality game, or any other crowd sourced activity. Heck let's add revolution and regime change into the mix, while we're being honest.

Transmedia

Culture convergence forces us to look at all of these people-powered initiatives as being essentially the same challenge. Each becomes a simple problem: How can we tell a consistent story across multiple mediums, that inspires people to care.

The Rub

Unfortunately for content producers the most common currency on the web is attention. For me, I have to tell you, I can't deposit attention into my company's account and spend it to buy the services I need to grow my company. But I digress...

Honestly that would be a nice problem to have, first we have to generate the attention first. For it seems backwards, to think about getting more attention than revenue, when you don't really even have the attention. Heady times indeed!