Tweeting with Rupert: impact on sentiment?

Rupert Murdoch's recent arrival on twitter has sparked off a thought in my head regarding sentiment. You can read it here on Google+ and please do comment there as well to maintain a singular flow of conversation.

Enjoy :)

Tweeting with Rupert: impact on sentiment?

Why Google+ will defeat Facebook

Have expanded my thoughts re Google + and had the article published on the Real Business website. Do check it out.

What I think about Google Plus

Well, it's happened. I just blogged publicly for the first time on Google Plus. A blog about what I think about Google Plus, natch. Says it all really. Enjoy.

Post Murdoch? Post Newspapers?

An esteemed writer that I once had the brief pleasure of working with has written an article arguing that what may come next post-Murdoch may be worse.

He is of course absolutely right in such a heated mob-driven climate to tell such a cautionary tale and full kudos to him for having the critical thinking capacity to even consider such a scenario whilst most lose their heads (perhaps including this writer) around him.

But I see more of an opportunity, I think, than he does.

As a function of delivering daily news, newspapers are just clung on to for the wrong reasons. They are becoming entertainment because that's all they really are now. Entertainment. Not news. Not anymore. If you want news you go online for it. You get it on your mobile whilst waiting for the bus, train, at the lights etc. Ubiquity is eating into the very soul of newspapers and there is nothing they can do to stop it.

I would even go so far as to say that in a world post Murdoch, with a freed up polity, a more disloyal digital readership, a more level playing field, with lower barriers to mass communication, with a stronger and more powerful watchdog, with stricter rules on what it means to be fit and proper in relation to owning mass print media, that perhaps the shoring up of the newspaper industry, the subsidy-led survival thus far of said dinosaur may yet yield to a newer, more interesting, more competitive, more live, more transparent source of information for people.

Witness the birth of the Huffington Post in the UK. Clearly timed to perfection. Witness the birth of thousands of credible niche blogs drawn together seamlessly by the search box on Google.

Most news online is free because it's mostly ubiquitous. Why fight that? Add value if you will and charge for access to premium content but let's accept the basic fact that in a post-google, post-iphone, increasingly mobile world (it's often said that most web activity in 2014 will for the first time be via mobile not desktops), content and thus news, especially for newspapers, is basically marketing collateral to attract ideologically interested readers, who can then be sold a plethora of other relevant content, products and services. Charging for easily-available content, in any format to be honest, is not an option.

Cynical? Too soon?

So, whilst this might not suit many, in reality, it is a massive opportunity for those able to see and grasp it. The death of Murdoch allows the UK, yet again, to leapfrog the world and especially the US. First we moved faster than all or most in terms of broadband adoption. Let's be first again and move faster in the move to a post-newspaper and even perhaps, post-news, society. What dreams may come!

The Al Tepper Show - episode 3

Welcome to the 3rd episode of the Al Tepper show, where I pick out some of the best tweets of the week and thus edit the world as I see it. Enjoy :)

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Featured tweets:

ONE OF MY FAVE ADS: Carte d'or sunday roast 'He's not your dad' advert http://t.co/0E6NEuP
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/84895226363265024

HA! Damn straight! Liz Feldman on 'Gay Marriage' http://yfrog.com/kfn71wj
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/84567990699429888

GENIUS! Seinfeld: "Jerry the Great" re-cut trailer http://t.co/lnXIjgr
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/84715139974176768

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence. - Vince Lombardi
via https://twitter.com/#!/BobWarren/status/82193400023093248

WOW: Type 2 diabetes in newly diagnosed 'can be reversed' - http://bbc.in/kHtqZJ
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/84414486374645762

One last thing: SAY IT AIN'T SO! RT @dwallm: r.i.p. Peter Falk, sadly this was the "one last thing"
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/84335012442411008

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Innocent bystander tweets that just got caught up in the madness and didn't get out of the way in time and in front of the camera:

Level playing field: What would happen if the govt eliminated all energy subsidies? asks @marcgunther http://grn.bz/mScB7C
via https://twitter.com/#!/makower/status/84427080057622529

Everybody i need video clips and photo's of people protesting about the cuts please asap! It's for a new music vid i'm doing!
via https://twitter.com/#!/NxtGenUK/status/83231938386739201

What actually kills startups isn't competition, it's the back button. -- Paul Graham, Y Combinator #quote
via https://twitter.com/#!/jackschofield/status/84033650462695424

Great stuff by @EvanHD - watch him 'freerunning' at BBC Television Centre -http://bbc.in/jDQAGm
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/82201761519124481

RT @AronStevenson: Tony Blair's personal contacts book leaked by LulzSec rival TeaMp0ison http://ow.ly/1dreBk
via https://twitter.com/#!/altepper/status/84422796377194496

BBC News - World's oceans in 'shocking' decline: http://me.lt/2S9q8 #overpopulation
via https://twitter.com/#!/NormanGrande/status/83004442391224320

Councils & Police to be ordered to reveal speed camera stats? Money earnt and accident stats b4 and after cameras http://tinyurl.com/66nkhz7
via https://twitter.com/#!/LynnFOI/status/84969456303996928

"Remember, the mightiest oak was once a single nut that held it's ground"~Winston Churchill
via https://twitter.com/#!/Foodimentary/status/84016409172127744

Gutenberg, Berners-Lee, Aristotle, McLuhan, Chomsky, Rubel & Zappa's Eyebrows all walk into a blog post...

A penny finally dropped today that has been dropping since 1998. I thought it had dropped back then. I was wrong. It started dropping but it didn't finish. Until today. 

I'll start at the beginning. 

DIGITAL DISS
In 1997 I enrolled on the MPhil in Publishing Studies course at Stirling University in Scotland, having completed my undergraduate BA degree majoring in Political Science & minoring in Sociology at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. From Scotland 2.0 back to the beta you might say...

During my PubStud masters (it's the official degree name and a pretty cool name if I may say so) I stood out on the course as rare having been online since 1993. I remember being the only person doing a dissertation looking at digital anything. I remember being the most proficient at HTML on the course, even more proficient than the chap teaching us HTML.

BIGGER PICTURES
I had a keen interest in macro-level societal and systemic observation, analysis and critical theory and this interest and skill set had been identified and sharpened during my PoliSci degree. I now ported all this into digital communications theory and publishing specifically. It was clear my Masters dissertation was going to be either very very right, or very very wrong. I remember the course leader saying to me when I told him what I wanted to do my dissertation on that they had no clue what I was talking about but that they were looking forward to reading it. Oh, and no one felt capable of advising me on the content itself either.

I felt unique but very alone. I felt like such an explorer: scared and excited all at once. I really felt like I was charting new territory. I loved every minute.

CLOSE ONLY COUNTS IN HORSESHOES & HAND GRENADES
I thought I was very very right. Like most students. Turns out, I was only very very half right. I was so close to being fully right but I missed one key element. I failed to make one more degree of progression, a move that would have really made me appear prescient. In hindsight, it was so obvious. I just failed to connect two simple pieces together. Or rather, I failed to disconnect two pieces from each other. I made a logical flaw and I have only just realised that flaw. I failed to realise that the nature of publishing was changing but so were the players.

PICTURE IT, MAINZ, 1440...
It actually all started 557 years before I went to Stirling, in Mainz, Germany with Johannes Gutenberg & it ended with Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 with the first website going live (a CERN page naturally).

For me, the information age we were all bleating about in the early to mid 90s had come and gone. The information age started with Gutenberg when information became a realistically retail (not just retell) commodity with a concomitant value. The information age ended with Berners-Lee creating the WWW as we know it today thus rendering, in the long run, all information ubiquitous and therefore valueless, in essence.

Post Berners-Lee information only has a value in a certain context (time, place, packaging etc) and not just a value in and of itself, as was the case from Gutenberg to Berners-Lee.

For me, I argued, seemingly successfully in my dissertation (althought I suppose no-one I knew really had enough of a clue to disagree back then), that information now had no value and that we therefore, with Berners-Lee contributions to communications, entered what I called the post-information age.

THE POST INFORMATION AGE
I went on to argue that the publishers of tomorrow (after all, my dissertation was titled: 'Go forth & inform: the role of the publisher in the post-information age') would not be the those that, as had traditionally done up until this point, simply lock up and retail information, but rather would be those that free and retell information.

DROWNING IN A SEA OF INFORMATION...
I remember drawing an analogy of how historically we started on a beach of knowledge with direct access to knowledge without effort (Garden of Eden anyone?) and as more noise had disrupted the signal, that we were finding ourselves wading ever deeper into a sea of information which lay on top of the knowledge. As a result, we tended to mostly float on a superficial layer of information with little access to the knowledge underneath which in turn was becoming harder to reach due to increasing noise (water levels) as a result. We are enjoying increased access to information but decreased access to knowledge.

...WHOEVER HAS SCUBA GEAR IS KING
I further argued that the successful publishers of tomorrow would be those that helped us navigate our way down to the sand (knowledge) now under an increasing layer of water (information). I likened publishers of tomorrow to SCUBA gear.

Interesting aside #1: The first king: Google! 

I published this dissertation in May 1998. The Google domain name was registered September 1997 and the company was  incorporated September 1998. I often feel like I should have seen something like Google coming. If only I had committed myself to getting into the SCUBA business in relation to information. I digress.

WHEN THE GAME CHANGES, SO DOES THE PLAYER
My dissertation stopped at the point of realising that the future of publishing involved publishers as they had been. But the very entities and actors, the players, within the publishing business were also changing. At the time though, there were only publishers. And that is why I only got it very very half right.

See, when we spend time doing something it tends to become a habit.

Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. 

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) Greek Philosopher

MESSAGES CHANGE US
As Aristotle indicates, and as Darwin might agree, it would become inevitable that some of us, after much hard work and presence in a new medium, would start to navigate that medium better. To move throughout the sea of information for ourselves more competently.

I loved the theories of McLuhan a lot at the time (not to mention Neil Postman & Joseph Campbell) and if the medium is itself the message then clearly the medium we use ultimately trains our brains to behave in certain ways. Chomsky's theories on Linguistics convinces me he would agree. Digital would be no different. It would evolve us. So publishers were now not the only players in the game. SCUBA gear itself was devolving into the hands of all of us.

BACK INTO THE SEA WE GO
Therefore, use of the new medium of digital communications offered by the WWW would move us, counter to the direction established by modern physiological evolutionary theory, from land back into the water so to speak. From a world of information with gatekeepers into the world of information overload with knowledge underneath, a world where we are all free to move about exploring knowledge as we see fit, if the right tools are available.

GROWING GILLS
This desire has been met with increased ability in the tools we use i.e. Wikipedia, Twitter etc. And so it became. We figuratively have grown gills and became adept at navigating the depths ourselves. So where does that leave publishing?

WE HAVE EVOLVED, BEYOND PUBLISHING
We became brands, editors and publishers. Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn et al are all the tools of our trade. The majority of us do not use content to generate revenue directly. The majority of us want to communicate with people, establish that we know something and that they should pay attention. For the majority of us, this will define who we are, what we know and what we do.

Commercial publishing used to absorb the vast majority of our media attention spend. I am sat here writing this online, my wife is also blogging. We are both talking to each other about what we are writing. The TV is on pause. We may be unlike the norm, but MSM is losing our attention. Period.

For most of us, our filters (digital and otherwise) on the world are both the best source of information/knowledge available to us and equally the best marketing strategy we could ever have. The oral tradition never went away, it just got drowned out by television, and is now back with a vengeance thanks to Facebook, Twitter et al.

THE DEATH OF PUBLISHING?

So, you probably think I think publishing is screwed. Nah, too easy. I still love books, magazines, music, movies and so on - although I haven't bought a paper in ages. 

So publishing will also evolve, is evolving. Publishers just got billions of competitors for their readers attention that's all. How do they compete? Build faith, trust, authenticity and so on. many are doing just that. But it's not their world any more. 

Like the Church producing bibles pre-Gutenberg in Scriptoria, publishers will continue to package and ship content. But many others will too. Sadly for publishing, it has less to fall back on than the Church, so I expect there will be heavy casualties ahead in the publishing industry. Indeed, that degradation has already begun.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF PUBLISHING

So I got it very very half right. The completely correct future of publishing in the post-information age is that it will become more and more a part of everyday life and not a commercial specialism. It will recede into the background and just become a part of what we do, he said blogging on blogger.

THE SYSTEM CANNOT BEAT US
I have often spoken of my belief that because of all of the above Facebook simply cannot lose to Google. Facebook is us. Google is a machine. Facebook has the emotion, connectivity and authenticity in all of the content we give it to help refine what it puts in front of us. Google just mostly relies on a specific thing we are searching for at a particular moment in time. Mostly. Oh, I know it's algorithm is much more complex than that. But the point is, and please don't lose sight of this key point: Google is an algorithm. That's why Facebook is avoiding search like the plague. That's why Google are gagging to get into social, and failing badly. It's not Google's fault. It's like any machine trying to be human. It just doesn't have the capacity for humanity, for feeling, for authenticity.

In the end, something will come along and be even more human than Facebook. It is inevitable really. We already exist, and our representation in digital space can only become more real, true and authentic over time.

That's the great thing about humanity. How could a machine-based system made up of us out 'us' us? Truth is, the system can't beat us, the machines can't win. They have no capacity (yet?) for emotion, failure, authenticity and much more that makes us 'us'. Thankfully.

Interesting aside #2: Water into wine?

More proof from Steve Rubel's blog today titled 'Social influencers shift SEO' about SEOMOZ's explorations into the impact of social on search. Basically, SEO is also algorythmic but now needs to get into search. It needs to be human. For me, that's like asking accountants to get into design. They are mostly oil & water, chalk & cheese etc. We're not built or wired that way in general. We have two sides of the brain and we tend to excel in one hemisphere or the other, but rarely both. Yet. I spoke with a chap recently who says he grows workforces and is working on creating a creative technical workforce So perhaps that might shift our capabilities?.

THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING?

And so we come back to my dissertation and why I got it only half right. The future of publishing is not about the future of commercial publishers. That was my mistake. Publishing is a function, not an industry. The future of publishing is a story of two parts: 1) Commercial publishing will continue on, will evolve, will shrink and command less of our attention. 2) Publishing as a human function, as a set of practices and tools will integrate into our societies (albeit at different culturally and developmentally different speeds I'm sure) and become an invisible part of the fabric of those societies and the ways they communicate. 

ZAPPA'S EYEBROWS?

On the cover of my dissertation I had the following Frank Zappa quote:

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

Frank Zappa 

Google, SEO, machines, businesses, systems and so on just don't have the eyebrows. Only people have the eyebrows. And as Frank rightly points out, it's always all about who has got the eyebrows ;)

An impromptu Friday Night Disco

Tonight I went a bit 80s nuts and threw a Friday Night Disco (#AlsFridayNightDisco) on twitter. You can view all the tweets by clicking the above link and I am grateful for this massive list of 80s classics to choose from. The ultimate classic for me has to be: