Have the content & audience, the rest will fall into place

A post on the NYTimes photo blog LENS about a quarterly magazine that costs $25 an issue.

I've always thought that if you have a desired product that is of high quality that warrants a higher price it will work in the business sense. I bet this will work.

Jenkins is a very very smart guy on media users

If you don't know about how people are using media these days, you might as well make steam engines from the 19th century for the 21st. Learn some media literacy by watching this video.

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia - November 2009 from niko on Vimeo.

What's the new revenue model?

Pretty interesting article talking about the changing landscape of Web start-ups as the ad revenue model is breaking down. How companies will be able to survive making money off of their audiences is of major consequence. Newspapers and magazines were just the start of the breakdown, finding the new way is key.

So, Mr. Anderson. Why not make it free?

James Ledbetter questions why Chris Anderson – editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, whose new book proclaims that giving things away for free is the "radical" new business model of the future – doesn't practice what he preaches with the analog version of the magazine.

Pretty good points in this column about how advertising works with regard to audience and magazines. But it doesn't take into account how the ad model is breaking down.

A short good read. Have a look.

Making Art from the web

Here is a very cool idea to take individual musical elements -that happen to be YouTube videos- and allow a user to create something new. It's called remix and it's pretty damn great.

Have a play...

100 Days in Photos

Pete Souza put together images from the first 100 days of the Obama administration and it's hosted on the White House's website. Interesting access issues to think about here.

Found via NPPA's RSS feed

The NEW LIFE.com

All the stories and images of LIFE yore in an online space.

One more time suck to play with.

Documentary Advertising, the future?

Pretty well done production from Honda. The cinematography is nice and the lessons behind the veil of the ad are good too. So do you feel like watching an eight minute video ad makes you want to consider buying a Honda the next time you need a car?

Multimedia Stock Agency

Aurora Photos is launching a multimedia production company. The voracious appetite on the web for video and other multimedia elements could open up a very good opportunity here. Be interesting to see who mimics and who makes the model work effectively. Maybe there's a future there for somebody I know...he'll require he telecommute though. There's not enough open land and mountains in L.A. for the guy I'm thinking of.

Fantastic stop motion video

Serious pre-planning here and attention to detail, but very cool production. Lots of possibilities with these cheaper tools (digital cameras, NLE video suites, etc.) to make content.

Sweet Group Photo Project

Here's a link to A Photo A Day's blog posting about a group photo project on cyclocrossers in Portland by some rockstar photogs. They not only have a fantastic site but they compiled a book out of the sweet images. Just may have to see if there's a way to create such a project here in the 303. Not on psycho-crossers per se, but something with a passionate following.

10 Questions for Journalists in the Information Age and info-overload

Here's some great notions to consider in this overwhelming era of easily accessible information. Having the right information available in functional and engaging access points will be a major component of successful journalism. Too bad most newspapers just shovel all their content into a big bucket on the web and expect readers to "find" what they need to know. Newspapers were barely able to accept the notion that television was a competitor by the time the Internet began to steal even more of their audience. Glacial pace won't work in the instantaneous realm of the Information Age.

Keep it short, sweet and interesting

So data mining is starting to show that online video consumers are the ultimate ADD
patient. (Yes, I know that could be taken as an oxymoron, but back to the point.)

Nearly half the audience of any video has an itchy trigger finger around 60 seconds into the show. So if you are going to be showing anything longer than that, it better be pretty darn compelling to keep them around. You are going to have only 23 percent of your audience sticking around past the two minute mark based on the study.

Web video services provider TubeMogul report after measuring 23 million streams on six top video sites over two weeks.

That's 23 percent of the people that even bothered to click play mind you. So like the fishing guides in Belize say about setting the hook on bonefish on the salt flats: "You gotta rip his lips off mon!" Then you take advertising into account, if it's not a pre-roll, it's not getting ANY eyeballs.

Minority Report meets 2008

Very interesting video showing physical computing and design. And we all thought Tom Cruise was living in a futuristic time.

Umm, WOW! That's a lot of viewers.

NewTeeVee put together an interesting post about the volume of people consuming information on the web during election night. The numbers are staggering.

Check it out.

Tell me people don't enjoy looking at photos

Some serious numbers of photos being uploaded to a couple social networks. Flickr and Facebook are hosting over 13 BILLION photos.

And that's just two of the several popular social networking sites.

Convergence and an election

Here's a good NYTimes article about how the various platforms of media collided while following the presidential election.

After this is all over –thankfully– it will be interesting to compare the results of the American votes to the investments in the various media platforms used to campaign.

We all know Barack Obama was able to build a media empire with his dozens of sites, YouTube channel, Twitter, Facebook as well as applications within FB and others. McCain did as well, but not nearly to the degree of his rival. Did all of the media platforms and the mainstream media outlets play as much of a role in generating interest in the election as the challenges that our country face?

I guess we'll have to wait and see and give all the talking heads a day or two to find new things to fill all those channels with the next big story.

Experiential multimedia

I'm a skiing nut. So when I was looking at my daily digest of New York Times headlines I noticed a little box highlighting a multimedia piece about how to ski the most treacherous downhill course in World Cup skiing.

The Hahnenkamm in Kitzbühel, Austria, is a torture fest of skill, speed and human limits. In an effort to explain how and what it takes to ski this ice glazed course at 80-plus miles an hour they recruited a former downhiller to be the voice for a multimedia experience.

This is a fantastic way to present information and data about a unique topic. The limitations are falling away in ways to share information and educate. So many more ideas are bouncing around in my brain now. Including wanting to take a couple of runs on the course.

Watershed moment in the future of American politics?

"We know it's in the millions," he said of the number of e-mails that lawmakers in the House have been receiving. "But we haven't counted yet, because when you're about to get hit by a tidal wave, you don't count the drops of water in the wave."

Seems as though millions of Americans let their voices be heard not only by calling their representatives. They used the fastest communication tool available. E-mail. And the US House wasn't ready for the traffic.

This is the first presidential election cycle that is saturated with the use of online tools and portals. The ease and effectiveness of the Internet in communication will become more and more integrated into our world. Hence, the iPhone and Android phones are the early stages of the evolution towards the mobility and connectivity of our communication world.

Is digital photography killing photography?

The advent of inexpensive equipment that allows for even more photographers to produce photography. I paid nearly $4,000 for a Nikon D1H in 2004. I recently picked up a D300 that is nearly 20 times the camera for $1700. And don't forget to add inflation, it would be over $4,700. I remember buying a Nikon N90s film camera for about $1,000 in 1994 and thought it was unreasonable. Boy, was I wrong. The Kodak DCS420 was about $12,000 in 1994. Your cell phone now has twice the resolution the 420 had.

Eventually supply and demand market forces take over and the imagery becomes worth less and less. Add to the dog pile the notion of people willing to give their content away for free so that they can say they have been "published" or in hopes of getting "more business" and you have a recipe for destruction. One more layer to make it truly gloomy? Working photographers struggling to make ends meet in this harsh economy begin to under-cut each other's bids to get work.

All that adds up to an acceleration of inexpensive photography to go with the relatively inexpensive gear.

CNN's iReport and the like go even farther to destroy the notion of a working photojournalist. Why pay for the cow when the milk is free?

Sure, I'm a Flickr user. But I reserve copyright on all my images. Many don't and leave their work open to Creative Commons. Others give their work to Getty in an over-saturated stock photo market.

What's the future of photography? I don't know, but I'm thinking of buying a bunch of silver gelatin paper from Europe since it's fading so fast here in the US, finding a sweet Leica enlarger at a garage sale and preparing for the rebirth of traditional process.