• Paul Graham writes on "Why TV Lost" – Lots of interesting points in Graham's essay, but I found these two, about the underlying media component of many startups, and the temporal aspect of TV-watching especially thought-provoking: "Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks. That's what a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal. People only have so many leisure hours a day, and TV is premised on such long sessions (unlike Google, which prides itself on sending users on their way quickly) that anything that takes up their time is competing with it."
• Where does Twitter go from here? – My post on Core77 about how Twitter can think about evolving its overall user experience as it straddles lead users and mass awareness
• Logic+Emotion: Skittles Smackdown, A Sociological Viewpoint – Nice words from David Armano, pulling out something I wrote yesterday about the Skittles/Twitter PR experiement

• 1981 news story about online newspapers (YouTube) – Long before anyone had heard of the Internet, early home computer users could read their morning newspapers online … sort of. Steve Newman's 1981 story was broadcast on KRON San Francisco.

• MediaMaster is shutting down – We did some really interesting user research to help define the overall value proposition, concept, and user experience. Exciting to see what they were able to do but obviously disappointing to see where it ended up a few years later. "Don’t wait for large corporate partners to make your business viable, it needs to be so on its own. Design it well from the start, it helps when you don’t have to re-engineer the interface, it’s the most complex part! (That was not a problem we had)"

Just over a year ago I blogged about the push approach that Wal-Mart was taking to drive adoption of energy-efficient fluorescent lighting, spending money on persuasive marketing rather than addressing the known barriers to adoption. A year later, it seems to be okay to acknowledge the problems with the bulbs. The New York Times recently looked at the problems that people have with the quality of light created by those bulbs (nothing new, of course, but the fact that the angle of the story has changed is thought-provoking). Most recently, they offered up this this interview with a Sylvania technologist who speaks to the ongoing work to improve the quality of the light that people experience.

Of course the efforts to improve the bulbs were always ongoing. I’m intrigued by the cultural story that was created by marketing and the media, spending money to force a behavior under the guise of “educating” people.

Make a better light bulb, already. One that is energy efficient and doesn’t make us feel (and look) like crap in our own homes. We’ll beat a path to your door.

The New York Times looks at Ludlum and other dead authors who continue to (sorta) release books. This isn’t new; in recent years we’ve seen post-Frank Herbert Dune and other Asimov/Robots books. John Gardner and others have been writing James Bond books for a while now. But as media continues to talk about “brands” and (ugh) “franchises” then I guess this is what we’re in for. It’s easier to sell (and buy) something that is already known that break through with something new. Movies into games. Games into movies. Sequels. Prequels. Remakes. The book people may just be getting started.

Whether it is fair to readers to publish the Ludlum books posthumously – in the form of spruced-up old manuscripts or new novels written by others – is not a serious concern to the estate or to Grand Central Publishing, the former Warner Books, where the rights to all new novels moved from St. Martin’s Press.

“I don’t think anyone objects as long as you maintain the quality of the book,” Mr. Morrison said. “The Sherlock Holmes novels have been a business since ‘The Seven-Percent Solution,’ and some have been better than others. It’s the characters that interest people.”

Just the other day, more news that dark chocolate can help lower pressure (seems like old news, but okay). Here’s how the SF Chron presented the story:

Front page. Two columns. One of those columns is simply a (confusing) image of swirling chocolate, providing absolutely no information whatsoever. What the hell is the front page about, here? Advertisements, eye-candy imagery, very non-news stories.

Contrast the NYT treatment of the story:

Tucked away on page 11. No hype or imagery. The front page of the New York Times is still for news, apparently.

Although these are both products in the same category (newspaper), they are really not the same kind of thing at all. Their purpose, intent, motivation, audience differ vastly. I need to stop thinking of them as a set of like items, because that lulls me (as the user) into a misleading state of expectation.

One of our recent clients, MediaMaster

just launched their product, that “lets you store all your music on the internet and play it from any internet-connected device.”

Their path from idea to launch has been a fascinating one (and I don’t know most of it, I’m sure). They came to this with a hand-coded technology to rip (via a CD jukebox) many albums in sequence, sort of a mass-scanning technology for CD ripping. But if you are going to rip the same albums over and over again, it’s time- and cost-effective to simply already have a copy of them already ripped and rather than rip, why not just check liner bar codes for proof of ownership and download the songs already on hand? And since the songs are already online, why not tie it to purchase of a new CD, and why not keep the music online permanently?

They dealt with a crazy mess of technological afforandances, changes of behaviors, retail and other partnership challenges and on and on. We did an online survey with some concepts, and then took concept boards out into homes to talk to different types of hypothesized target customers.

The product development process deals with a lot of moving targets, but startup folks deal with an excess of that challenge, collating input and constraints from so many quarters, it must make them crazy.

I’m excited to see the product launch, and to see where they’ve ended up with it, given where we were at during those rounds of research. I don’t know their business model, since the service is free right now. It’ll be fun to watch what happens with it and see if they make it succeed.

You can (with a single download) get 739 mp3s by 739 artists from the SXSW festival. That’s a lot of music. As someone points out
on MetaFilter that’s over 37 hours of music. Someone else bemoans the organizational task that will create (I’m about to do that task myself).

I downloaded about half as many songs last year, and I really enjoyed them, but it’s an intimidating-if-wonderful gift.

Our digital technologies and the massive capabilities they afford us still continue to exceed or at least push the edges of our capacity as consumers. Indeed, the word consume may hold a clue. Do we consume music? Eat it up, digest it, and excrete/delete when we are done, or are we collectors, accumulating more and more? I imagine many of us are in straddle positions, not being ready to delete an MP3, or many MP3s, because we already possess them.

Update: am slowly working through listening to the songs…some real quality control issues with their distribution. One track with a skip in it, and about two dozen that are seriously truncated.

Boomers Aren’t Happy With What’s on TV

A study conducted by Harris Interactive suggests that the television industry’s obsession with youth is backfiring.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that most TV programming and advertising is targeted toward people under 40, the survey said. More than 80 percent of adults over 40 say they have a hard time finding TV shows that reflect their lives.

A significant number of baby boomers _ 37 percent _ say they aren’t happy with what’s on television, according to the study.

Note that there’s a difference between TV not reflecting my life (i.e., Sopranos), and not being happy with what’s on (i.e., how O.J. would do it).

“The amount of people dissatisfied with television overall was a pretty big eye-opening thing for us,” said Larry Jones, president of the TV Land cable network, which commissioned the study.

Because TV Land of course aims at this forgotten demographic with rescued-from-the-garbage-pail programming. Who’s up for a Benson marathon?

To a certain extent, the generation that decades ago warned against trusting people over 30 can blame itself for the predicament. The TV industry’s slavish devotion to ratings within the 18-to-49-year-old demographic started when most baby boomers fit into that group.

The theory among advertisers is that it’s important to reach young people as their preferences are forming _ get them hooked on a certain toothpaste or soda early and they’ll be hooked for life. Advertisers will pay a premium for young viewers: $335 for every thousand people in the 18-to-24 age range that a network delivers, for example. Viewers aged 55-to-64 are worth only $119 for every thousand, according to Nielsen Media Research.
…
To a surprising extent, advertising is also alienating. The Harris Interactive study found that half of baby boomers say they tune out commercials that are clearly aimed at young people. An additional one-third said they’d go out of their way NOT to buy such a product.
…
Some advertisers have responded to the aging population. Financial services firms, for example, see many potential customers advancing toward retirement. Two decades ago drug companies didn’t advertise on TV; now you could fill a medicine cabinet with all the products hawked on the evening news.

Not to mention those commercials for Hoverround home mobility devices where an old lady sings “you made me love youUUUUUU” while she plays with her hair coquettishly.

TV Land’s Jones is already using the survey in his business. The results have convinced him that, more than ever, his network of mostly classic TV shows should be boomer-centric, he said. He also comes armed with the survey when he meets with the Madison Avenue types who buy advertising time.

At least the article is clear on this part.

One statistic he’s sure to cite: The survey found 51 percent of the postwar generation describe themselves as “open to new ideas.” Meanwhile, only 12 percent of young adults think the older folks feel that way.

Why does that matter? Jones said the average media buyer or planner is under 30. Many are undoubtedly hired for their know-how in appealing to a specific generation, and it isn’t the baby boomers.

After both Nicolas Nova and Rudy Rucker recommended Accelerando to me, I bought it and just started today. This passage caught my eye.

Manfred [the protagonist] is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them…There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.

Not too far off from the truth for many of us!

Bruce Sterling said something similar in his talk on Design Futurism

Futurist activity of “scanning” – newspapers Internet, television, conferences, other futurists, landmark events, reports, weak signals. Always asking “What are the things out there that might affect clientele (which could be anything!)?”

Note: Nicolas Nova blogged the same quote several days before I did. Copycat or coincidence?