There’s Something Happening Here…

Obama before 84,000 fans in Denver….

New technologies demand new ideas.

Really radical new ideas.

The biggest mistake people can make is to try and jam new technologies into old business models.

Newspapers, for example,  are in serious, serious trouble. The new technologies are telling us what they have to do to survive, if we will only listen to them.

What are they saying?

Newspaper readership is way way down, and falling all the time. But that does not mean that the idea of news is dead, nor is the interest. Only that the way that we are gathering and delivering it no longer works. This also applies to local TV news, but their time is still about a decade away. For newspapers, it is now, as the web impacted text a decade ahead of video.

Today, the average American watches 4.5 hours of TV a day, every day. This number is projected to go to 5 hours a day as video migrates to the web, and the difference between TV and online video is erased. Now, you might draw the conclusion then that newspapers should move to video. Many do, but I am not so sure that is the right conclusion to draw.

We have been watching video for nearly 60 years now. 4 or 5 hours a day, every day, for two generations.

This act of watching video (regardless of content) has created a kind of culture. It has to. When everyone in a society spends 4-5 hours a day doing the same action, over and over and over, it has to have an impact.

If we as a culture spent 4-5 hours a day, every day, every one of us, playing tennis, from the age of 5 until death, we would be one hell of a tennis-playing culture. If we all, every one of us, spent 4-5 hours a day, every day, practicing the piano, from age 5 to death, we would be the most musically literate nation on the planet.

But we didn’t.

Instead, we have all, every one of us, spent the past two generations watching.

Watching.

What does 4-5 hours a day, every day, everyone watching… what does it ‘teach’ us?

People who talk back to TV sets… we send to mental institutions.

You are not supposed to do that.

In fact, spending 4-5 hours a day ‘watching’ reinforces the notion that you are not, in fact, supposed to talk back. You are not supposed to participate. You are supposed to watch. That is our job.

And watching, particularly for 4-5 hours every day, reinforces a very basic truth. Passivity. It is, in fact, your job to be passive. To watch. Television is not about participating. It is about watching.

This passivity has had its impact on American society for a very long time. It could be measured, for example, in the declining number of people who voted in Presidential elections. Fewer and fewer almost every time. Overall a massive declination since 1948 in participatory government.

That as television for you. A television culture.

Then, along comes to the web. Slowly, at first. Uncertainly. But a new technology with a new basic architecture: The web is not about ‘watching’, it is about participating.

The web and politics merged slowly – as television and politics did in the 1960s. The Checkers Speech, the Kennedy-Nixon Debates. It took time. The selling of the Candidate. All about watching.

Joe Trippi and Howard Dean started to realize what the web could do for politics, but more interesting was what the web would do to politics. The power of technology to shape the world on its own terms.

Now. Obama, a virtual unknown is the Democratic Candidate. An estimated 40 million people watched him on TV on Thursday night. He has raised more than a third of a billion dollars, much of it online.

The GOP responds by naming a totally unknown woman as their VP choice. Something is happening here.

What is happening is the politics of participation is beginning to replace the politics of passivity. The web is a participatory medium. Television is a passive one.

The DNA of the web is beginning to infect politics. It will equally begin to infect other things as well.

And what does this have to do with newspapers and their fight to survive?

Newspapers are also a passive medium. We write it, you read it.

But newspapers are in trouble, and they are nested in communities. The LA Times, The Miami Herald. They have roots in a community that now is just starting to awaken to the notion of participatory democracy.

What those communities need now is a locus – a place where they can focus their ‘participation’.

What, after all, is The Huffington-Post but a kind of embryonic online participatory journalism event? What is Facebook or MySpace but unfocused participatory loci.

Aren’t newspapers, with their dying breaths, perfectly poised to shift gears (if they can) and become the digital community nodes for the online world?

It’s a new business model for them. Instead of going out and gathering the news and printing it, they now are, or could be, the editors, sifting through, empowering, ordering and publishing the voices of the people?

Obama began as a community organizer.

Palin was a disgruntled hockey mom.

They found their platforms through politics, but what they had to say seems to resonate.

Listen to the technology. Watch what is happening. The answer is out there.

Listening To The Technology

What is it saying?

Andy Grove, former Chairman and co-founder of Intel said, ‘listen to the technology. The technology wil tell you what to do”

We are in an industry created by and dictated by technology. As the technology shifts, so does our industry. To fail to shift with the technology is to set a path to oblivion.

Grove’s partner in founding Intel was Gordon Moore.  Moore is most famous for his observation of what has come to be called ‘Moore’s Law”.  It states, in simple form, that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. In effect the speed will double while the cost is halved. Every 18 months.

This ‘Law’ has proven true since Moore first published it Electronics Magazine on April 19, 1965, and seems likely to continue for at least another decade, if not more.

This doubling of speed while halving cost has had enormous, if not seminal impact on our own business.  Computers were able to process words… then audio… then video.  Editing went from half-million dollar CMX rooms to software that is almost free and yet incredibly powerful.  Video, once having to be pushed through the air at almost incomprehensible cost is now transmissable to more than 2 billions homes over the web for free – opening broadcasting to anyone who wants to play.

When it comes to cameras, video cameras have become increasingly faster, better, cheaper and easier to use. This too has lowered if not destroyed the barrier to access for those who would like to make video content.

The lowering of the barriers to access to video production, compounded with the web’s capacity to carry video at no cost, has of course, provided a strong attraction for newspapers to incorporate video in their online product.  The task of capturing and delivering that video has, quite often, fallen to those who were traditional photo journalists.

Now that blending of photography and video takes another step forward, much in keeping with the impact of Moore’s Law.

The Nikon Company, long known for its outstanding stills cameras, today releases D90.

This is a high-end still digital still camera that also captures video.  Hi Def video.

And it allows the photog to use Nikon’s vast range of high-quality lenses, married to video.

12.3 megapixel, Hi Def video, 32 gigabyte SD cards, Nikon lenses – $1000

What this means is that anyone can now record for video a range of images from macro shots of insects at work for Discovery to extreme close-ups of sporting events for ESPN or wild animals for Nat Geo.

The audio still has a distance to go, but you can see what is coming.

Nikon has never been a serious player in the world of video before, but you can see where the technology is taking us. The separation between ’stills’ and ‘video’ is being blown away. And as the difference between acquiring stills and video go away, so too will the differentiations between publishing video and stills go away.  Soon online newspapers will not care. It is all the same.

And who will be out acquiring all that video?

The guy who has been carrying around Nikon on a strap for years.

Just push the button.

Adam Kushner, MD

Albert Schweitzer, MD

A few years ago, when I was still running the DV Dojo (a video bar/cafe in the East Village), a young man walked into my place, had a drink, and signed on for the one-week video training course.

He said his name was Adam Kushner, and he was a doctor headed for Africa.

This was in 2002, so that was 6 years ago.

Since then, Adam has faithfully sent me and many others monthly updates on his progress and the work he is doing. I just got his most recent update today.

The funny thing about having a video bar is that you never know who is going to walk in through the door. One day it’s Al Gore, and one day it’s Albert Schweitzer.

Albert Schweitzer, you may recall, was a German doctor who went to work in Africa; founded the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lamerene, French West Africa (now Gabon), and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. (He died in 1965 at the age of 90). He is best known for his medical work in Africa, and for the phrase ‘reverence for life’. He was an astonishing man of great accomplishment.

The funny this with Schweitzers is that you never know them when you meet them, and certainly I did not think of Adam Kushner as anything remarkable – at least, nothing more remarkable than a New York based doctor who was going to Africa for a few weeks and wanted to learn to shoot a little video.

Kushner’s monthly emails over the years have proven me wrong on that assessment.

Here’s a sample:

It is an often mistaken belief that crocodiles are the most dangerous animals and that hippopotami are cute docile creatures. The reality is that more people die every year from attacks by hippos than from crocodiles – at least that’s what I’ve been told. Actually though, a few nights ago the distinction didn’t really matter. I was on call and heading to the hospital at night to operate on a woman we were presuming had a midgut volvulus (twisting of the small intestines) – she did as I ultimately found out at 3 am; there was however, a delay.

The delay was caused by a guy who was transfer in from Deza District Hospital (about an hour south of Lilongwe.) The story is he was out in a river or marsh cutting reeds and a croc took a bite of his right leg. His lower extremity wasn’t totally amputated, but looked like it had been used as a toothpick. Given the extent of the injury and the long time before he arrived at KCH our only option was to amputate. He is currently doing well.

So there I was thinking things like this just wouldn’t happen in New York. First of all, its rare enough to have a case of midgut volvulus in an adult – although it could happen and I remember doing one case as a resident – but a crocodile bite; never. Unless of course someone got into the crocodile tank at the zoo, but the likelihood of that, well, not worth considering. I was though sort of reminded of the time shortly after I arrived in San Antonio for residency and was called to see a guy in the Emergency Department with what was billed as a Rodeo Clown injury. Many injuries are often related to the local environment.

Anyway, I digress. So the crocodile victim is having his leg amputated and I’m waiting to operate on the woman with the volvulus when I’m told there is another trauma patient that just arrived from Kasungu District Hospital (about an hour north of Lilongwe.) So, I go to casualty and take a look. The story is he was riding a bike and was attacked by a hippo. Yes, as in hippopotamus; and it wasn’t pretty.

His trip to Africa for a few weeks led to a lifelong crusade for improved medical care in the developing world. I lifted the following from his bio:

Dr. Kushner has worked as a general surgeon and educator in Malawi, Sierra Leone, Sudan,
Ethiopia, and Haiti. He also conducted human rights assessments in Iraq for Physicians for Human
Rights; taught trauma care and emergency management of landmine injuries to medical personnel
working in landmine affected regions of Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Colombia; and worked as a health
specialist with the International Rescue Committee during the Indonesia tsunami response. Since
2003 he has participated in US military training exercises where he functions as a subject matter
expert for human rights and humanitarian assistance issues. He is a director of the New York
Society of International Humanitarian Surgeons and a board member of AMEND.ORG.

But I also urge you to take a look at his webpage

We in the TV business like to say, it isn’t brain surgery.

But sometimes …..it is.

My First Job in TV

No God but The God

I got an email this morning from Rosemary Stanfield-Johnson, Professor of Safavid history at The University of Minnesota.

Let’s hear it for the web.

I have not seen Rosemary Stanfield since 1980, when I left the graduate program in Islamic Studies at NYU to go to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. We were grad students together. That was 26 years ago.

I had not set out to be a journalist, nor had I set out to work in television. I was in graduate school studying Arabic and Islamic History when it was still in the realm of Sanskrit studies. I hoped one day to finish my PhD and teach. That was where I met Rosemary. She was also a graduate student, specializing in Farsi and early Persian history.

I was on a Fellowship, but it only paid my tuition. In need of additional cash I took a number of temp jobs, mostly typing transcripts at $5 an hour. A temp agency called Career Blazers sent me to law firms, accounting firms, banks. Pretty much anywhere.

One day, they sent me to a TV studio.

For me, it made no difference. I was happy to type transcriptions anywhere, so long as I got my $5 an hour.

On the third or fourth day working at the TV studio, the place suddenly went nuts. All the phone started ringing. People were running around like crazy. I turned to the guy sitting next to me.

“What’s up”? I asked.

“The Iranians just seized our embassy in Teheran” he said.

OK by me. I kept typing.

Suddenly, George Merliss, the Executive Producer for Good Morning America (where I had been assigned, apparently) came crashing into the room. He was like General Patton at the Battle of the Bulge, tossing out orders to everyone in sight.

“You!” he said, “Call the White House”

“You… call the Pentagon”

Everyone was getting a job.

Suddenly, his eyes set on me.

I started to explain that I was a temp.

No matter.

“You”, he said, “call the Islamic Center in Washington DC”.

Well, I didn’t really care what I had to do, so long as I got my $5 an hour.

So I picked up the phone, dialed them up and purely for fun said:

“Salaam aleikum ya saddiq. Ana min al-Good Morning America”.

In a flash Merliss grabbed my shirt collar.

“You speak Arabic!” he intoned.

Some of my profs at NYU might have strongly disagreed, but I just nodded.

“Where did you learn” he demanded.

Just for fun. Just for the hell of it, I said, “when I lived in Iran”.

Now, they don’t speak Arabic in Iran, they speak Farsi, but this being US network television news, who would know…”

Merliss’ eyes opened wide as saucers.

“You lived in Iran?” he asked.

Well, I had been alive, and I have been to Iran, so I guess that constituted ‘lived in Iran”, so I said, yes.

“Do you know anything about these hostages” he demanded.

Well, I knew there were hostages. I was pretty sure of that. So I said, “yes”.

His eyes lit up.

“Get this guy a desk and a typewriter”

And so I was hired, on the spot, to be GMA’s in-house “Middle East Expert”.

A few moments later, we all headed into the giant conference room, where the then VP for news addressed the assembled, pulled down a map of the world, and spent (I kid you not) about 5 minutes searching for Iran on the map.

We (both GMA and the nation, as it turned out), were in for a long and bumpy ride.

That was the start of my television career. The Arabic has stood me in goods stead repeatedly over the years, and my deep knowledge of the rise of the Caliph Omar always makes for great conversation, at least in the back of some NY taxis.

Congratulations Rosemary. You stuck with it and you became a Professor at a major university.

As we say in Arabic, Mazel Tov.

Men At Work

Caution

Cameragod writes to us from New Zealand noting:

Ok so tell two men they each have to race dig a road.
One gets a 10 year but still working fine old bulldozer and the other a brand new state of the art ergonomic shovel… the guy with the shovel is not going to win no matter how good a craftsman he is and if you tell him a poor craftsman blames his tools you are likely to end up wearing that shovel.

The construction crew analogy was driven home to me two days ago, when I was interviewed in rapid succession by Ray Snoddy from BBC 2 and then by Mark Lobel for BBC Radio 4.

Now, Ray Snoddy is an old, very well known and respected journalist with The BBC.  He’s hosting a show called Newswatch on the beeb, and I’ll take the blurb right from the BBC’s website:

One of the country’s most respected media commentators, Raymond Snoddy has been covering the news industry for a variety of publications for the past 25 years and presents the BBC’s NewsWatch programme.

(You know it’s authentic. Look at how they spell program!)

In any event, when Ray came to interview me, he came along with Andrew, his BBC cameraman and Dave, his BBC producer.

Ray and Andrew (in grey shirt) and Dave and Me

Ray apologized that he was now forced to hold the ‘dog’ or the ‘doogie’ as they call it in Scotland, which is the big furry microphone. No more sound guys, apparently.

In any event, an interview, which will probably at best produce a few 30 second bites (or this being The BBC, a minute at most), took the better part of an hour. We had to all meet up. Ray was on time, but the producer was late.  Then we went to the assigned spot, but the cameraman had gone missing. Once we were all in the same place, the interview began.  Ray and Dave conferred over the questions.  Andrew, the cameraman’s opinion on this was seemingly not important.  Shot angles were discussed. But then Ray kept getting the hair of the ‘dog’ in the shot.  He was obviously new at this sound thing, but cuts must come where they must.

This is, of course, the ‘old’ way of grabbing a few sound bites. Tried and true. And it certainly works.  But upon reading Stephen’s comment above, I cannot help but think of all the road crews you pass where it seems an army of workers are there to dig a single hole.  There is, indeed, one guy with a shovel, but plenty of on-scene ‘management’ to get the job done.  This seems, if you look at it objectively, a very very expensive way to manufacture a few 30- second sound bites.  Expand the model outward to all content creation and you can see why The BBC employs more than 24,000 people.  Perhaps they could produce more content with those folks if they were employed in a slightly different manner?

The contrast was driven home to me just a few minutes later, when I was then interviewed for BBC Radio 4 (my favorite, even with The Archers). Journalist Mark Lobel (who normally is a producer for Newsnight, the BBC’s equivalent of Nightline) was doubling for Radio 4.  He took out his tape recorder and we headed for a quiet spot.

Where’s the rest of the crew?

Now, in point of fact, BBC Radio 4 interviews were once done by a crew.

But that was a long time ago.

Technology made that a waste of people’s time.

Now, give producer Mark Lobel a small digital video camera instead of his digital audio recorder and what do you have?

Efficiency.

The Show Must Go On…. or must it?

It’s news Jim, but not as we know it….

Yesterday, I found myself on a panel at the Edinburgh Television Festival with the Heads of News at The BBC, Channel 5 and ITN, respectively (r to l).

The topic of discussion was the future of the evening bulletin. This is what we would call the nightly news show.

These are all very smart guys, and have all reached the pinnacle of their professional careers. Think of the Executive Producer of NBC Nightly News and you get the idea.

First, it was a pleasure to not have to retread the old VJ ground.  This is an argument that is long over in the UK. It’s here, it works, get on with it.

Having transcended that, the real issue is: in a world of web transmission and IPTV, is there any future for the Nightly News show.

My opinion is, it’s over in 5 years.  Theirs: closer to 10.

No… to be fair, they all believe, to varying degrees, that there is some future for the News Bulletin, or the nightly news show.  I don’t think so.

Their audiences are old and getting older.  Soon, sorry to say, they will start dying off. Younger viewers are not replacing them. They are, instead, on the web, and that is where they will stay.  The notion of linear television news is antithetical to the web – a distinctly non-linear, VOD environment.  The notion of waiting until 6:30PM or 10PM to get the ‘breaking news story’ is simply a non-starter in the web world.

Yet the three networks (UK or US, take your pick) pour a vast percentage of their resources into these ’shows’.  Resources that could be put to far better use in the realm of journalism as opposed to the realm of production values. While I think the swooping in shots over Big Ben are great, the music enthralling and the studio set amazing, I also think it is pretty archaic stuff.  Just look at Google’s home page.  No fancy opens, no thrilling music, no ‘host’.

Google is a child of the web. Purely a child of the web.

You could, of course, have built a fantastic video open for Google. One that would come up every time you hit the URL. Music, graphics, pictures, video… they certainly have the money.  You could have a Google Anchor.  Male or Female? Asian? Black? Young and hip or old and wise?  These are the kinds of discussions that still dominate ‘news’ conversations at most TV networks – which is why most TV networks just don’t get, (and never will get) the web.

Which brings us back to ‘the show’.

While all TV networks in the US or the UK (and no doubt in Burkina Fasso) pay lip service to the web (all of these guys sure do), what they refuse to do is to really embrace the basic architecture that the web militates.

They can’t.

The ’show’ is in their DNA. They have grown up with it all their lives.  It’s a hard habit to shake.

Mark Lobel, a producer for The BBC, (and a very nice guy) commented to me later that he felt that people need an organizing principle for news. Otherwise, he said, it’s too confusing. Too much to choose from. Too many options. That is why the world ‘needs’ a nightly news ’show’.

I don’t agree.

Free presses are messy.

They are supposed to be.

The world of Television, particularly Television News has never been a free press. It has been more of a Soviet Union of Information.  THE SOURCE tells you the news. Your job; sit back and absorb and believe.

Well, technology has now consigned that model to the trash bin.  But people still cling to it in the fear that the tidal wave of news and information uncontrolled and unedited is far too overwhelming for the average person.

Could be. Could be until I take a moment to think about where we are.  (By we, I mean you and I at this moment). We are on the web.  The greatest tidal wave of uncontrolled, unfettered and unfiltered information in the history of humanity).  There is no ‘Nightly Web Show’ to organize for poor confused us all the stuff on the web (and there is a ton of stuff here).  Google does not, in fact, produce a slick, well packaged Web Tonight! with host and music.

We like the web messy and open and random and distinctly unpackaged. We find what we want and we go home, or somewhere else.

The Web, for all its messiness is not ‘too confusing’ for us, nor is it too ‘overwhelming’. We all navigate it just fine.

In the early days of the Web, there were those who felt that perhaps this was not the case.  Perhaps people needed an organizing hand to ‘help’ them manage all that messy content. That was AOL. It set about to organize sites and information for you.  It was a ‘gateway’ site.

Anyone here on AOL?

Hello?

Even my 76 year old mother is no longer on AOL.

No one is.

Probably not even the News Directors……

At least I hope not.

This Common Ground

The Common, Bibury, Gloucestershire, England

We are in England. I am speaking on Saturday at the Edinburgh Television Festival. In the meantime, we’re in the Cotswolds, and today in Bibury.

Pictured above, the village’s lovely Common.

Americans who live on the East Coast may be familiar with the term Common. The Boston Common is at the center of the city, and today refers to a park. But the notion of a Common is far older, and in the world of the Internet, particularly with respect to Net Neutrality, it is something worth examining.

For more than 800 years, we have lived under a system of private ownership.

For the most part, we have found that this model maximized the economic benefit of all concerned.

But private ownership might not always deliver the best value on an asset. Sometimes, it might be better to share an asset.

In Medieval times, the vast majority of land in places like England was held in a kind of common trust. That is, even though it belonged to the crown, the Church or a Lord, it was open to everyone. Feudal lords might plant their crops there, and the local peasantry would harvest the crops, but after that the land was open to anyone to graze their animals. Forests were open to anyone to forage for wood or hunt for game.

Between 1750 and 1850, the British Parliament began to pass a series of laws called the Enclosure Acts. These effectively moved what had been formerly public land into private hands. The lands were largely used for animal grazing or agriculture, or great landed estates, but suddenly the vast majority of the English yeoman class were effectively driven off the land.

Part of the thinking behind the Acts of Enclosure was undoubtedly to drive the now landless and unemployed into the great factories in cities like Birmingham and Manchester, where they would work for next to nothing. It worked.

But something fundamental was lost.

The rights of the Commons were restricted to smaller and smaller bits of land, generally at the center of villages and town. Yet these places were still used by everyone and anyone for grazing, hunting and foraging.

The tradition of the Commons can still be seen in English Law in the tradition of the rights of anyone to cross private lands. You can hike the length and breadth of the UK and pretty much cross all the private land you like on foot. You can’t do this in America. It would be trespassing. You could be shot, or at the very least, arrested.  Not so in the UK.

I used to work out of the BBC offices in Newcastle, and I would look out the window and see the Commons, filled with cows or sheep on any given day. Old traditions die hard.

What use of land gives the greatest good to the greatest number of people? Private property or a Commons?

Ironically, and in contrast to our conventionally held private property thinking, it is the Commons that probably puts a given amount of acreage to the best benefit.

We no longer live in an agrarian world of sheep and cows. At least not for most of us. Our commerce today is digital and electronic. We are far more interested in parking or grazing zeros and ones.

Our field is the Internet.

Yet the Internet is very much our Common.

It is the place anyone can go and graze their cows, or their sheep, or plant a few crops or even build a house.

Prior to the Erection of Cottages Act of 1588, any Englishman was free to build his home on any common ground (and that was most of the country). Today, anyone is free to build his ‘home’, whether blog or business, anywhere on the web.

The British commercial interests of the Industrial Revolution crushed the Commons to drive workers into their factories at minimal wages. We must be ever vigilant that today’s commercial interests of the Digital Revolution don’t do the same.

To The Death

We spent yesterday in the painfully beautiful and painfully touristed town of St. Paul de Vence.

Nearby is the far more interesting (and far less touristed) town of La Colle-sur-Loup.

It is smaller, has missed the tourist crush for some reason, and a lot more pleasant.

At the center of town is one of those World War I memorials that France is full of, and generally no one spends any time looking at. It lists the dates 1914-1918 on the top, and then has a long list of engraved names.

Les mortes sur guerre

Normally one tends to give these things a pass, but if you take a moment to look, they tell a terrifying story.

There are more than 60 names on the list of those killed between 1914-1918. There are no reliable census number that I can find for this small town from 1914, but the nearby village of Les Beaux lists 450, so I would guess that La Colle sur Loup must have been of about similar size.

60 dead from a village of 450, all within 4 years.

In essence, an entire generation of young, marriagable men must have been wiped out almost at once.

At the Battle of Verdun (1916), there were more than 250,000 dead and more than 1 million wounded. And this was one battle of a four year war. The French suffered 161,000 dead at Verdun. By the time the war was over, France would count nearly 1.7 million dead.

11% of France’s entire population were killed or wounded in the First World War. That would the equivalent of the US taking 33 million casualties in Iraq.

This is an astonishing number. The carnage must have been incomprehensible. And the impact – the loss of an entire generation for all practical purposes – massive. Even in small villages like this.

How did it happen? How did it happen that so many died?

A great deal of it has to do with the ramifications of technology outpacing thinking. The First World War saw the introduction of the machine gun. A killing machine. Just push the button. Military planning in those days was a remnant of a far earlier era. Two lines of soldiers marching towards each other with sabre and horses. Success on the battle field had more to do with elan and courage. Bravery in the face of death!

All pointless.

Line after line of brave French soldiers marched into the meatgrinder of machineguns only to be mowed down before they had advanced more than a few inches.

Line after line.

Yet it went on and on and on.

General Petain became famous at Verdun for the line “they shall not pass”. And so the killing machine continued for four bloody years, largely because technology arrived ahead of thinking.

This is not at all unusual.

The expression ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is completely wrong.

Invention arrives first, unbidden and generally badly understood. Knowledge of how to use the invention and what it means comes much later.

The Internet is sort of the same.

Its impact of old ways of thinking is just now being felt. Old ways of working, of gathering and distributing information and content no longer work. Old ways of monetizing transactions increasingly no longer make sense. But just as the generals in France kept throwing young men into battle in lines because they could not think really of anything else to do; so too do those who lead major companies facing a similar technology that they just cannot really comprehend.

Those memorials all over France to the 1.7 million dead in the First World War are more than just a memorial to the men who were killed. They are also reminders of our human instinct to resist change to stick with what we know.. even to the death.

Everest

Available for charter for only €200,000 per week

Cocktails on the foredeck?

In 1992, when I was just starting to put VNI together, one of my first investors was Alan Sidnam.

Alan was then Vice Chairman of the ad agency Ogilvy Mather, and he wrote me a check for $1.2 million, based simply on an idea. What a guy!

I had just moved from my walk-up in Brooklyn into my first one-bedroom rental apartment in Manhattan, but boy was I proud of it. Alan said he would come by to have me sign some documents. Great! When he walked into my new place I could see a look of horror in his eyes, even though he tried to conceal it.

“You live….here?” he asked.

I did.

Later I would go to visit Alan at his apartment. He lived in the Museum Tower, on top of the Museum of Modern Art. Floor to ceiling windows. Unbelievable views. I swore then that one day I would live in the Museum Tower also.

Despite many setbacks, (including my ex-wife and former best friend stealing my business and leaving me to die – but more on that another day); I worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to make a success of myself. Then, last year, Lisa and I bought a fairly large apartment… in the Museum Tower. Finally.

One of our friends in the Tower heard we were going to be in Europe for August and invited us on his boat. It would be in the South of France, he said. Come on by.

So yesterday we did.

We called them up and they sent the tender to come and pick us up on the dock.

The tender was a 26 footer.

It took us out to his ‘boat’. 165 feet of white fibreglass, chrome and teak.

Now, I have been around boats all my life, and I had seen things like this from a distance, but I had never spent any time aboard one. Until now. My own boat, (which I was pretty proud of), you could have easily put on the deck of this one, and sail away.

There was a full-time crew of 11. In white uniforms with the name of the boat tastefully stitched onto their shirts. Everyone was extremely accomodating.

Many years ago, I went trekking in the Himalayas.

You start off full of vigor and energy, but the air starts to get might thin, and pretty soon you’re handing the sherpas your backpack…. your jacket…. your watch…. anything that you can get rid of. It’s just up and up and up and up. Like being on a stairmaster for 8 hours non stop. At the end of the first leg, I barely… barely managed to crawl (quite literally) into a village at 11,000 feet called Namche Bazaar. I was on my knees when we reached the lodge house. “Thank God” I said, from the ground. “Thank God”….barely breathing.

Then the sherpa pointed up….. up….. way up. The Khumba Ice falls. “Next” he said. Another stop on the way to Everest Base Camp.

I threw up on the spot.

Yesterday, I saw Everest…. floating nicely off Cannes.

Juice

We are spending a few days with our friend and business partner, Ernest Bujok.

Ernie has recently bought a house in Tuscany, so he invited us (and about a dozen other people) to drop in for a few days.  

The house is lovely, if still a work in progress, but at breakfast yesterday, we all had fresh squeezed orange juice.  The oranges are easy to come by, and the juicer was an industrial standard machine, made in Australia by a company called Breville.

This being the world of the Internet, I immediately went on line to order one from Williams-Sonoma in New York, so it would be there when we got home.

The order site for the juicer had all the standard information about the product you normally expect, plus it had a video.

I can’t embed the video from Williams-`Sonoma, but take a minute to take a look at it. There is something very interesting here

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/e193/index.cfm?pkey=celtbjc&ckey=eltbjc

The Breville Company, which I am sure makes very good juicers (I just bought one!), makes terrible video!

Terrible!

I have come to the site because I want information on a juicer. And what do they give me? A travelogue on Australia! Who asked for that?

The quality of the video should be commensurate with the quality of the product they are trying to sell.

It is not.  The video is crap. On many levels, both content and editorial.

As video moves to the web, companies are going to start producing video for the web in droves.  Breville is not alone.  But the quality of the video is far far from the quality of both the text and the product (we hope).

Why did Breville, in its first shot at video, suddenly turn into The Travel Channel? or the Australian Chamber of Commerce? All I was hoping for was a short video that would really show me the product up close.

When the printing press was invented in 1452, our only experience with books was with religious texts.  So it stood to reason that when the first books were published, they would also be religious texts.  This is what we were used to for ‘books’.

Up until now, video has been the domain of news and TV shows.  It stands to reason, in a strange way, that when everyone starts to produce video, they will naturally gravitate toward the formats that they feel most comfortable with – hence Breville starts making travel videos about Australia, which then bleeds into a kind of very badly shot psuedo TODAY SHOW segment on juicers.  

Its interesting because it is so limited.

But it also means that a massive, almost unbelievable opportunity exists for the creative VJ with a camera, a laptop and the ability to think out of the box.

Breville is not alone. Quite literally thousands and thousands of companies are going to need video produced for their websites. And like Breville, they are not in the video business, and like Breville, should not be! 

But their need for content – content specific to their product, is real. And judging from the Breville video (and a half dozen others I found when I searched Youtube for Breville Juicer) this is largely untouched territory.

Of course, I immediately wrote to Breville to tell them what crap their video was.  

I am still waiting for an answer… but, of course, it’s Sunday.