a fairy tale (1)

Once upon a time there were two brothers: Colin Content and Barry Business.

Colin Content loved writing stuff. He took great pride in writing and presentation. He had honed his skills in journalism school and on all manner of publications. His years spent sub-editing had also left him a bit picky. He didn't like numbers very much and had three unpublished novels in a drawer at home. Here is Colin:
Colin's brother Barry was very different to Colin. Barry liked money. He had started in ad sales, selling space in the publications that Colin had written for. He had got an MBA. The only things he liked reading were bonus cheques and earnings statements. He had three sports cars in a garage at home. Here is Barry:
Colin and Barry didn't like each other very much but both needed the other.

As far as Colin was concerned, Barry was the kind of philistine who didn't know what "philistine" meant. Why couldn't Barry get him the money he needed to expand his publications? Colin dreamed of the day when his words would sell themselves.

Meanwhile as far as Barry was concerned, Colin was just there to fill the space between his ads. Why couldn't Colin produce content quicker and cheaper? Barry dreamed of the day when computers by themselves could produce words that consumers would want to read.

Then one day, the internet appeared. Barry & Colin were excited. Lots of people like Barry & Colin invested money in it and lost most of it.

There was a pause.

Then ordinary people realised that they could write stuff and record stuff and copy stuff. Most of the stuff they made was for their friends and family - which was fine because it was stuff only your mother could love. Most of the stuff they copied had been made by people like Colin and had made money for people like Barry. Barry & Colin were excited again. And a little scared. Maybe they could finally be free of each other.

Along came someone new: Simon Social Media. Simon had a background in technology rather than business or media. He had three open-source programming projects in his desktop at home. He blogs and twitters and wikis and all that other stuff. Here is Simon:
Simon thinks Colin & Barry are old-fashioned, elitist and stupid. Meanwhile Colin thinks Simon has no quality standards and Barry think Simon has no business sense.

What can Colin, Barry & Simon say to each other that is friendly & nice & productive?

Or are they doomed to huff and puff forever?

pubcamp

So much respect due to Jed White for putting on PubCamp. I walked away with mixed feelings.

We had a blizzard of 6 minute presentations - some obvious pitches, some dull, some sharply observational - favourites were Tim Noonan's session on accessibility and Ben Gerholt's advice on how to be a media mogul. Bronwen Clune & Richard Walsh debated whether new media was "a dagger in the heart" for both producers and consumers - and they are both smart, articulate people but the debate format felt sterile. Defending or attacking a proposition is all very well but it rarely takes you anywhere interesting. Conversations tend to be more inspiring that debates.

Which brings me to the panel. We had a bunch of people with decades of media experience between them - and nothing really interesting came out of it. The whole physical set up was oppositional - the panel on the podium facing the audience. Now quite a few people in the audience were frantically twittering with each other and the twitterstream was put up on the screen - but it didn't lead much in the way of insightful questions. But the whole thing degenerated into "big media bad", "no, big media good, "journalists vital", "no, journalists not vital", "no...". It felt like an unfocused waste of time. The panel format is actually hard to pull off well - it needs a focus and an engagement on the part of all involved. At future PubCamps (which would be great Jed), I'd like to see smart people engaged in a different way or more focus given to the questions the panel have to answer and the conversations they have with each other.

So then there was the unconference bit - which was an organisational disaster. The slots were all shifted about and I had no data projector for the slides below - so I ended up holding up my laptop like an accordion in front of my little group. The talk was an attempt to articulate how a value networks perspective might be applied to new media. It's early days and not there yet - so comments welcome.

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