Beyond Frequency

Seth's Blog : The problem with cable news thinking

[I agree with Seth Godin's blog today wholeheartedl!]

...from Seth Godin

The problem with cable news thinking
Not only the networks of all political persuasions that come to mind, but the mindset they represent...
When I was growing up, Eyewitness News always found a house on fire in South Buffalo. "Tonight's top story," Irv Weinstein would intone, "...a fire in South Buffalo." Every single night. If you watched the news from out of town, you were sure that the city must have completely burned to the ground. 
Cable news thinking has nothing to do with fires or with politics. Instead, it amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction:
Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what's important.
Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
Unwillingness to reverse course and change one's mind.
Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
Confusing opinion with the truth.
Revising facts to fit a point of view.
Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.If I wanted to hobble an organization or even a country, I'd wish these twelve traits on them. I wonder if this sounds like the last board meeting you went to...

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Five Reasons It's Tough For Us To Be Redskins Fans?

...the five last place teams that have made up the Redskins' schedule.  As the article below points out, every team the Redskins has faced this year has been win-less. 

I am leaving the Giants out since that was the first game of the season and they are of course not the dregs of the NFL as the other teams are...including my beloved Redskins.  It is painful to write, but you cannot run from your past or your favorite team. 

At least the Phillies are bringing some happiness!

Redskins are first in history to play six straight winless teams

By Chris Chase

If the Washington Redskins' schedule was any softer it would be on a package of Charmin. If the Redskins were a college team (which, at times, they resemble), pundits would mocking the team's strength of schedule.

As the great Joe Posnanski pointed out this morning on his blog, when the Redskins host the 0-5 Kansas City Chiefs this Sunday, it will mark the team's sixth consecutive game against a winless team. I'll repeat that because it doesn't sound as impressive the first time around: So far this season, every team the Redskins have played has been winless at the time of the game. According to STATS LLC, it's the first time in the history of the NFL that this has happened. The last team to have faced five winless teams was the 1954 Giants.

According to my dad (whom I had to call to get help with the equation), the odds of this happening are 1 in 32,768. (Feel free to check this and let me know if our numbers are wrong.)

Here's the way the Redskins schedule has broken down so far, along with their opponent's record at the time:

Week 1 -- at New York Giants (0-0)

Week 2 -- vs. St. Louis Rams (0-1)

Week 3 -- at Detroit Lions (0-2)

Week 4 -- vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers (0-3)

Week 5 -- at Carolina Panthers (0-3 -- Note: Carolina had a week 3 bye)

Week 6 -- vs. Kansas City Chiefs (0-5)

Obviously, the Giants were winless because they had yet to play a game. Since then, the Redskins have faced the dregs of the NFL but could only muster a 2-2 record against them. (Which is pretty much all the evidence one should need to pass judgment on the future of Jim Zorn.)

New York excepted, the current combined record of the rest of the 'Skins opponents is 2-22, with the only two wins coming against the Redskins themselves (by Detroit and Carolina). After Sunday, last place Washington will have faced every of their last place peers in the NFC, as well as one in the AFC too.

The streak will end in week 7 when the Redskins host the Philadelphia Eagles, a team with a whopping three wins to its credit thus far.  

Related: Carolina Panthers, Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, St. Louis Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Washington Redskins

What Does A Daily Show Body Slam Feel Like? Just As CNN!

If you look at the opening segment from The Daily Show Last night, you will learn as John Stewart simply blasted CNN for dropping stories, failing to focus on facts of legitimate news items while focusing on 'fact-checking' Saturday Night Live. 

The SNL fact-check earned CNN backlash from a wide range of organizations, but launched a well-deserved tirade from Mr. Stewart and The Daily Show crew.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

I have made no secret of the fact that I believe that CNN has generally abdicated its role as a hard-hitting news organization in favor of fluff and soft ball insight.  That is not to say that there are not stories that are worthwhile, but for a group that has 24 hours in the day and a strong international presence, the quality of the 'news' here in the US is mediocre at best.

The most disturbing part of the Daily Show piece is their display of the CNN's lack of fact-checking when it really counts; on little things like health care statistics.

I have finally stopped watching the sporadically relevant CNN American Morning and will now be tuning to BBC World News in the morning.

GCECS Follow Up And Social Network List

Innovation Philadelphia deserves a note of congratulations for a successful Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit event today at the Convention Center.  The session that I was fortunate enough to lead, "SaaS – It Takes A Village To Raise A Venture"  was filled with a great, inquisitive audience, which made or a dynamic, interactive workshop.

It was a pleasure.

In response to one of the questions from the audience to me about social networks that our platform supports, the links below give a few lists of them. Because we are able to integrate any social networks under a single sign on environment through a personal homepage and dashboard, any of those listed below can work.

As we discussed in the session, our goal is to give the most power and flexibility to our clients.  We provide the value-added tools like semantic search, business intelligence, widget builders and personal homepages to tie everything together, but the selection of the tools can be with you; just as you can choose the apps you want on the iPhone.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need additional information.  It is my pleasure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

http://traffikd.com/social-media-websites/

Futurity & The Growing Importance Of Niche

Last week the Mercury News reported that because of concern that journalismf's economic problems are reducing Americans' understanding of science, medicine and other research, 35 of the nation's top universities announced that they will supply their own news accounts of their discoveries directly to top news sites on the Internet.

The universities have formed their own non-profit wire service called Futurity to provide articles to popular Web sites such as Yahoo News and Google News, along with MySpace and Twitter.

The schools saw the reduction or elimination of science and technology staff at larger organizations like CNN, Mercury News, Boston Globe and others so they realized that the only group that would ensure their work reached the public was them.  With that in mind, I think their is another lesson here for both 'for-profit' and 'non-profit' media, information & content providers.

Not everyone cares about everything.

The power and necessity of targeted, niche delivery, or narrowcasting, is not a new one but it is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception to viable media business models.  Futurity came into being because the broadcast based organizations could not find an audience of enough size to support the operations. 

That is not surprising.

In our 'pull-based' world, those who are interested in a topic can find it much more efficiently than a non-specialized source can provide it.  There is a reason that Triton bought Ando, that Search dominates advertising growth and that Price Waterhouse Cooper projects a 10% shift in spending from non-digital to digital media that can support "more targeted and tailored models that will differ widely within and across segments and geographies.

With the NAB conference in Philadelphia this week, I am excited to catch up with a lot of people and talk about the growth of niche.  We, as consumers, are very demanding and increasingly device and platform agnostic as long as we can get to the information or entertainment content that is most important to us.

Broadcasters have a tremendous opportunity to leverage a large audience and break it down by behavior, location and content and eliminate the barriers between platforms to please both the consumers and advertisers. 

The New York Times and the universities in Futurity have learned that lesson and are passing it on.  

Braveheart Inspiration - All Media Is Social Media...

It was with that in mind that I reflected on Brian Rich's piece in Forbes, "Traditional Media's Revenge". 

Mr. Rich believes that Web 2.0 companies are  "even weaker than traditional media", but I think he did not address the most important point.

All media is social and the next critical inflection point for media is not traditional companies adopting Web 2.0 concepts and methods or battling them for turf.  It is providing a means to eliminate the barriers between media platforms, which will let traditional media leverage their audience to unleash the social power it already holds.

Traditional media has always been social, just with a time lag. That is a point that is often lost in the ongoing and accelerating debate, discussion, merging of and between "traditional" media and "interactive" media (digital & mobile). 

Before Facebook, Twitter and blogs, the water cooler, telephone and lunch debates represented our social interactions around content.  The core differences between these tools and our Web 2.0 tools of today are 'time' and scale.  They have merely made our thoughts and opinions immediate and extended their reach.

As a consumer, I do not care about platforms; I care about my content, information and communication.  If there is a video, product or place that interests me, I should be able to acquire it as easily through SMS as my Bebo profile...and they should be connected. 

Difficult? - 'Yes'; Impossible? - 'Not at all'

As William Wallace may say to all media companies (my apologies to the purists for the quote paraphrase):

Why is that impossible?   You're so concerned with squabbling for the scraps from the table that you've missed your God given right to something better. There is a difference between us. You think the people online exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with FREEDOM. And I go to make sure that they have it.

The capabilities exist now to make these connections, we need only look at the picture through the eyes of the consumer.  We must.

Government Apps

This is my first post from a mobile phone and I think it is appropriate given the topic. The federal government annunced below that it has jumped into the cloud computing and app pool in the name of time and cost efficiency.

I applaud it in the loudest way possible.

The Obama CIO Vivek Kundra blazed the trail for open data and open government apps during his days as the CTO for Washington DC through the popular Apps For Democracy project. I am excited to see that work moving into the federals sphere and I am doing my best along with a passionate and talented group to launch a similar project in Philadelphia.

http://www.gsa.gov/Portal/gsa/ep/contentView.do?pageTypeId=8199&channelId=-24825&P=&contentId=28477&contentType=GSA_BASIC

Collaborative innovation has a place in both the public and private sectors and I do believe it is a cornerstone of true democracy. I look forward to the discussion on October 6 at the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit.

Radio & The IPOD Nano Tightrope

In his blog today, Fred Jacobs talked about The Denuo Group and the observation its CEO Rishad Tobaccowala that:

"the challenge is that today's marketing (and in radio's case, our ongoing, fluid content) are in real time, largely because of interactive tools like Facebook and Twitter.  As he noted, "Only the schizophrenic will thrive: You must have two [business] models.  One is smaller and faster, and more risk-prone, and one regular model."

With the Apple inclusion of FM radio in the new Ipod Nano, the stations, groups, personalities and management should play close attention to those words.  While the NAB and RAB should be happy about the inclusion, they should also be vary wary and ensure there is a nimble, consumer-centric model to accompany their traditional broadcast mindset.  Both the consumers and advertisers will demand it.

Everyone should be wary that under the consumer scrutiny that comes with Ipod visibility, the fact that radio currently programs TO rather than WITH its audience will not hold up.  The NAB and RAB should be diligent in pushing their broadcaster members to embrace an open, social media philosophy both on the web and on mobile devices as a requirement, not an option of their future.

Just as Apple included radio pause and tagging features in the Ipod Nano to force FM radio forward, the industry participants must change their traditional mindset to truly take advantage of this new venue.  With a popular mobile device, the programmers should go beyond static tagging and embrace dynamic tagging that creates an ongoing relationship with those who interact beyond the broadcast.

Most importantly, traditional radio must abandoned the idea that they are solely in competition with each other because everything from the consumer's playlist to Pandora takes the eyes and ears from them and their advertisers.  In order to compete effectively, they must retain the excitement and engagement of the listeners...and passive, one-way communication just will not do the job by itself.

If the stations, groups and personalities continue to program in a one-way, broadcast-only fashion and do not take advantage of the mobile, interactive capabilities of this new device, they will suffer a very public failure and all of the backslapping to get this first win will be meaningless.

One Lesson From Facebook Profitability

Yesterday's big news in the social media business sphere was the Facebook acknowledgment that they turned a profit last quarter.  That is absolutely great news and a tremendous indicator for the future of convergence that has been "coming" for years now. 

Facebook and some analysts point to the low headcount as the reason for profitability despite the basic ad model and the fact that Facebook does not share in the revenue that application makers generate through their network.  While running a lean business is essential, to me the lesson in this profitability turn is that an open strategy can work.

Before opening up its network to applications, Facebook would have probably had a very good run and then went the way of Friendster and MySpace...popular, but not monumental.  The 'perfect storm' combination of an (1) open invitation to applications, (2) Facebook Connect to let users interact with friends outside of Facebook and (3) Facebook Mobile to let us all carry our friends wherever we go is the reason the service has exploded to 300 million members.

While 99% of the businesses out there will never reach that level of audience, those actions of openness are still relevant. The fact is that we, as consumers, no longer live in one place, interact with one community or remain loyal to one brand. 

We are in the 'me' world, but not in an egotistical way, just in one that we seek to have our likes, passions, companions right at our fingertips.  I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day who runs a company with a user base of well over 50 million and he said it well..."we need to give our customers the easiest path to 'me.com'.

Businesses that keep that fact in mind, regardless of the product, service or scale, will do well.

Speaking At Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit

I am very excited to have been asked to speak at the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit here in Philadelphia on October 5 & 6, hosted by Innovation Philadelphia.

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a graphic or web designer, business executive, or something in between, there is sure to be something for you at the conference with more than 100 speakers scheduled for this year’s event.  With a variety of panels and workshops, and keynote speakers such as Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and social media guru Peter Shankman, the Summit is bringing together an assortment of creative industries to network, exchange ideas, and share information.

I will be giving two presentations, one solo (SaaS - It Takes a Villiage to Raise A Venture) and one as part of a panel ( Unlocking Technology: How Open Source Drives Innovation). 

The descriptions are below.  I am taking a page from my favorite VC blogger Fred Wilson's book to develop as much of the discussions based on community ideas, insight and recommendations as possible.  If anyone has ANY ideas, please put them in the comments below.

SaaS - It Takes A Village To Raise A Venture 

Creative entrepreneurship is the sum of innovation, efficient capital use, collaboration, measurable results and social responsibility. Modern business creators must establish their core focus and move to market quickly through the combined use of social, open and proprietary tools, databases, services and applications while still planting the seeds of longevity & scalability. This workshop takes a hands-on approach to proving the power of leveraging software-as-a-service (SaaS) to launch a company. Participants will gain a practical approach to embracing existing tools to launch their own creativity in ideation, operations, marketing and sales for any venture.

Unlocking Technology: How Open Source Drives Innovation

Open source technology has revolutionized the way software is developed, but open source thinking expands beyond the IT world. Peer-based collaboration can be used in all aspects of business and results in better, more effective ways of producing goods and services and disseminating products throughout the marketplace. In our world’s highly competitive market, the more collaboration and exchanging of ideas that happens, the better the outcome. Learn how you can use open source-style collaboration in the development of your products and in the way you conduct business.