Many of the better known commentators on the future of social media hail from the United States, but we are lucky to have some great thinkers and practitioners in Europe too. This week I stumbled upon a TV broadcast of Anthony Lilley's recent Royal Television Society lecture, which was absolutely brilliant. Really. Brilliant! Anybody involved in the future of television as a medium should watch it if they want to understand the real issues behind convergence.
A few days earlier, I also had a chance to get an insight into how BBC people see their relationship with blogs and user participation at a seminar organised by Jem Stone and Robin Hamman to discuss the BBC's blogging strategy, which included BBC News supremo Richard Sambrook, Jeff Jarvis and smart cookies such as Graham Halliday and Adriana Cronin-Lukas. This was part of a piece of work we are doing with the BBC to analyse their blogs trial, and what I found most encouraging was the attitude of the BBC staffers who turned up - they were realistic in their scope, but they also saw many oportunities to amplify the corporation's value rather than focus on potential threats that social media might pose to their rarified position as the world's leading broadcaster.
In the world of print media, I have been chatting to some of the people who are trying to bring social media to centre stage inside some of the leading national and local newspaper groups, and there are some seriously smart cookies in this group who need only the patience to stay the course. These people stand in sharp contrast to the laughably backward attitude of the National Union of Journalists, who Neil McIntosh of the Guardian this week took to task and then offered some adviceto in response to their recent suicidally stupid attitude towards new media.
We are involved in a few interesting media projects at the moment, including a rather ambitious participative media project for a big international media group that will launch next year. It is worth bearing in mind that there are some great things going on in other European countries as well. In Berlin this week I bumped into my good friend Dieter from Knallgrau and he showed me a great regional newspaper portal they recently launched for the German region of Nordrhein-Westfalen, where registered users are offered a nice combination of blogs, video and picture uploads and feedback on editorial. Local media aggregation and social media-based portals are an area of particular interest to us, since Livio and I first started out in the mid-Nineties doing online local community work with Brixton Online - an application area that has seen a resurgence of interest recently with project like outside.in in the United States.
Also worth noting in this area is the work Paolo Valdemarin has done with Il 24 ORE in Italy called Nòva100. He first showed me this at Emanuele's Web2.Oltra conference in Milan during the summer and it is good to see that it is now doing very well. The treatment of tags as a navigational element is very interesting, as Paolo explains on his blog.
Entirely new forms of social media are emerging and will surely change the way people receive their news and community updates in the future, but there is a lot of social and financial capital already invested in media companies and newspaper groups that suggest they still might be major hubs around which people can congregate if they can get their acts together.
Comments on this Entry:
The Headshift blog feed