Ok, let’s be honest. Would you rather read a good story or a bad story? Do you like happy endings (non-Hollywood style), or the dramatic melancholy of an unresolved dissonance?

If you think about the new media meta-narrative, it strikes me that we’ve become fixated on the drama that’s affecting incumbent media. You’re familiar with the story: mainstream newspapers and TV are “losing” while new media like consumer-generated content and social networking is “winning.”

Just about every media debate I can think of – blogging vs. journalism, the future of advertising, digital rights management, mobile content – fits into this paradigm. Every conference, panel discussion or private meeting I’ve enjoyed over the past two years has roughly echoed this story. And it’s a fascinating story, even if it sometimes seems overplayed. It’s fascinating because it echoes other big underdog stories that capture our attention: David vs. Goliath, Vietnam vs. the United States, Maxine McKew vs. John Howard. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new social networking revolution brewing. Let me tie together a few threads.

There’s a growing chorus of people who rightly observe that social networking sites will begin morphing into something even greater this year. A reporter from The Economist eloquently argues over on Chris Saad’s blog that stand-alone social networks will dissolve. It’s not just an opinion. MySpace’s growth seems to have stalled, according to Creative Capital’s coverage of ComScore numbers.

Then it’s interesting to read between the lines of what Google’s Marissa Myer told VentureBeat:

I think there is the possibility of taking a social network and combining some element of annotations and searches done. For example, if I have 400 friends on Facebook, and I knew 10 of them all searched for one topic today, that might interest me. So aggregate statistics might work. In truth, there are a bunch of things you could try.

Marissa talks about “social search” because that points to Google’s machine-oriented mindset. Patterns and relationships among social networks can be automated and analysed by Google’s server farms. It’s a perfect science project for Google’s hoard of engineers.

But there’s a deeper agenda at work here, and it’s connected with our desire to congregate around discreet destinations on the web. In the early days we had public web portals like Netscape and Yahoo! Then we moved to media portals and an interconnected web of corporate sites and third parties. Somewhere in here many of us discovered RSS-powered newsreaders helped us sort through the chaff (I still rely on Bloglines, for example), so they becames something of portal to the web. Next up was the social bookmarking wave with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon notable examples.

In the background, search technology continued to tie the social web together despite the fact social networks like Facebook and MySpace rose to dominate the Internet agenda with grand (back to the future) portal plans. They were building discreet, proprietary social destinations. Walled gardens that hark back to AOL days.

Now it seems Google is creating a new paradigm. As VentureBeat writes of Marissa (in the article linked above): “She hints Gmail may be used to identify your friends, using their search history to influence search results for you and those in your social network.”

The stark reality is that social networking sites come and go. Email, on the other hand, is the great constant. Google, Yahoo! and MSN’s greatest assets are their free email accounts. Email might be out of fashion with some young people, particularly in South Korea, but for the vast majority of people it’s still where we store our contacts, keep valuable documents, and communicate with people.

Put in economic terms, free email providers still “own” (or at least faciliate) much of the baseline social networking and business conversations on the web. Even social networking sites rely on automated email services to notify users of changes to their profiles and sites.

To further illustrate the point, here’s a slide from a presentation that I give to corporates on social media, which shows why small and medium sized companies get broadband connections:

The short answer? Email.

Social networking, search, bookmarks, e-commerce, marketing, and venture capital are colliding to give us Email 3.0. The question is whether anyone can beat Google to the finish line.

We media types spend so much time studying the Internet’s impact on the media business that sometimes you forget that the Internet is busy disrupting other traditional industries, or institutions.

Take Australia Post for example. I thought Mrs J was exaggerating when she told me there’s a good chance we’ll do most of our Christmas shopping at Australia Post this year. “They’ve got everything!” she exclaimed. Yeah, sure, whatever… Then she showed me the catalogue that had been stuffed in our letterbox. They really do sell everything. Kids toys, games, puzzles, tonnes of electronic stuff, and all those creative “what on earth will I get for Aunty Sue” type presents.

Australia Post’s problem is of course a very simple one. Why send snail mail when email is quicker and free (well, almost).  So when your core business is flat you do what any other business does - diversify. You can see the numbers on page 43 & 44 of Australia Post’s annual report here. To grossly simplify things, the organisation’s pacels and logistics and retail divisions are more profitable than the letters business. Ah, ya just gotta love the Net.

Kudos to the folks at australianwiki.com.au for compiling this list of Aussie startups.

I wonder how many of these companies will continue to call Australia home? Companies like Omnidrive and Bluepulse have already relocated to Silicon Valley, and I suspect many more harbour similar ambitions.

Meanwhile, you’ve just gotta love the fact that Australia can give birth to a site called "Fullasagoog". Your average Yank will have no clue what that means.

(link via Frank, thanks mate)

Churning away in the back of my mind this week have been thoughts about the future of online publishing. Tuesday’s packed search engine room conference was another reminder that a vast marketing community is out there looking for new solutions to old problems. Specifically, how do I get the best ROI for my company/client’s advertising buck, and what marketing avenues offer the highest levels of accountability and solid leads?

Skip forward a couple of days, and I notice in the RSS feed that my old InfoWorld mate Matt McAlister is working through similar ideas over at Yahoo! in sunny Sunnyvale. In fact, Matt’s found the sharp end where the old/traditional publishing methods and the new media business collide.

…there’s no metric that will convince me the page view model is going to continue to dominate.

So we have a situation where online publishers must maintain growth from existing online ad models, while constantly search for new products.

To that point, Frost & Sullivan presented research at the search engine conference that contained this tantalising metric: 38 per cent of respondents to its survey said they had "no set limit" on what they would pay for a desirable keyword. That speaks volumes about the lengths people will go to in a hotly competitive market that’s widely perceived to be functioning well. Create more opportunities on the web where restricted supply drives up demand, and it sounds like you’re on a winner.

Just discovered tonight that Google’s instant messaging service, Gmail talk, is live. It’s especially cool for me because it’s an IM system inside the browser. My employer has a desktop lockdown policy that prevents me from installing any application without IT approval. So that rules out IM, until now.  I wonder how many people working inside big companies with standard operating environments are in the same boat as me?

Meanwhile, look me up on gtalk - markhjones

This time of year produces enough online shopping stories to stuff the proverbial stocking, but even so the anecdote in this story has me thinking. There are some people out there who must now routinely do 100% of their gift shopping online.

But there are countless others, like yours truly, who simply leave their run too late and are unwilling to trust the postal system when you’ve got two weeks or less until C-day. And so the usual Christmas shopping madness follows. My wife and I were brave (that’s code for very silly) enough to venture into Chatswood, on Sydney’s North Shore, last Saturday with our very active two year old. Let’s just say it wasn’t pleasant. But we did tick off the rest of the gifts on our list, and there’s nervous waiting by the letter box.

In our case, I reckon we bought about 10 percent of gifts online this year, which was actually down from last year because we’ve been too busy to get organised and buy stuff online when you really think about these thing in, say, September.

Over to you: what percentage of gifts did you buy online vs in person? If I get some interesting answers and you’re happy to go on the record (I’ll follow up offline) I’ll see if we can work it up into a story for the paper.

(n.b. yes, sorry, that will mean you have to register on TypePad to comment. It’s only a little bit painful, you only have to do it once, and has saved me from the comment spam deluge.).

John Battelle writes that Alexa (Amazon.com) is trying to turn the web index game on its head. Very interesting. Question is, does Alexa have what it takes to produce a credible index that will produce decent results? I don’t believe that the index has become commoditised already.

How good is this?! InfoWorld’s Jon Udell has mastered the screencast, and uses it to demonstrate what he believes is the early beginnings of the semantic web (one definition here).

It’s the best demo of del.icio.us I’ve seen, although like Matt, I’m still trying to understand how I can make it work for me (particularly in an online business context). I’ve been diligently using RSS to avoid bookmarks for some time now and the idea of being dragged back into managing (static or dynamic) taxonomies still doesn’t fill me with joy. Maybe I’ll watch the screencast again…

Steve Gillmor calls it an RSS Bubble. I agree in principle, but have reservations.

IP TV startup Brightcove (also check out it’s blog) is the latest example of the Internet empowering entrepreneurs to bootstrap existing content formats for our Greater Good. Preceeding Brightcove by a matter of days/weeks, Odeo is attempting to turn radio on it’s head (see Odeo take on it’s critics). Ourmedia is also emerging over the horizon with it’s open source philosophy.

What’s struck me is that these companies, and the many more that will follow in the RSS syndication bubble, have no choice but resort to mainstream media metaphors. People get it when you say: "TV or radio on your PC or mobile device." People don’t typically get it when you say: "Use RSS to subscribe and time-shift any type of media content." And that’s a big worry, because the former statement’s simplicity betrays the significance of the shift towards personal media.

Once people understand that the Internet is actually capable of delivering massive streams of content, they then have to get their heads around the fact that their consumption habits can change to an on demand model.

And so the great challenge facing these startups is that the TV/radio metaphor they must use in Marketing Campaign Round One must be followed by Marketing Campaign Round Two, the expensive task of changing consumer behaviour.

I’ve got no doubt the "media democratisation" snowball will become an avalanche on the Internet. But I do worry how many rounds of funding these RSS startups can attract to keep them afloat while consumers take their sweet time to get over their collective aversion to another avalanche/bubble.