[chrisbrogan.com]

Posted: 24 May 2009 10:50 PM PDT

We talk a lot about what it’s going to take to keep The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal and all the other papers of the world alive. We talk about the future of publishing books and magazines, and what it’s going to take to change the music industry. Let’s stop for a minute.

If you were given a few million bucks from a venture capitalist to build a media company, what would that look like?

Not so easy, eh? So, I’m going to think about it, but then, it’s your invitation to think about it, too. Because some of what you and I come up with here might be useful, don’t you agree? Maybe we’ll figure out where some of these companies might hop next, or maybe we’ll just invent something new.

The Next Media Company Manifesto

Here’s what I believe might need to be true about the next media company:

Stories are points in time, but won’t end at publication. (Edits, updates, extensions are next.)
Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff.
Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow.
Everything must be portable and mobile-ready. (Mobile devices need to evolve here, too).
Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.
Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.
In-line content marketing, clearly delineated/disclosed/explained is one revenue stream. One of many.
Contributors come in many shapes: onstaff, partner (how pros like TechCrunch link to Washington Post), guest (for love and glory only), and conversational come right to mind. Who else?
Value-add services are another revenue stream. Why not book hotels and flights from my travel magazine directly? Why not buy how-to information on marketing from Ad Age or FastCompany?
Collaboration rules. Why should I pick the next cover? Why should my picture of the car crash be the best?
Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want the publication to be a business periodical, then I don’t want to have to read a piece about sports.
Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand.
Do-it-yourself publishing is next for us all. At first.
We will all audition for mass physical distribution.
It won’t matter (mass physical distribution) to us, lots of the time.

What Else?

Am I way off here? Is this too Pollyanna? What makes sense? What’s just wrong? How far am I off from your perspective?

I welcome the conversation.

Thoughts on Nowhere and Nowhen

Posted: 24 May 2009 03:30 PM PDT

The web gave us the perfect “nowhere.” A Star Trek fan in Houlton, Maine can talk with another fan from Reykjavík, Iceland, without thinking a thing about it. We can be anywhere, and if you follow through, anywhen, and thus, we don’t need proximity to build relationships (or customers, or much of anything). The first web, the brochure web, gave way to the second web, the two-way web. What if the third web is about the relationship of things and places between the physical world and the placeless, timeless world? I’m calling this vplaces (more in a bit).

Our web has already shifted. Bridges tell us when they are up and down. Laundry rooms report their status. The web of things now connects the physical world with the web world. Here’s where my thinking started getting into something else.

vplaces, pplaces, and tplaces

The web of nowhere relates to vplaces. You might be thinking Second Life. I’m not. Well, okay. Second Life can be part of it. But the web of nowhere is the web we have today. I can write this blog post anywhere in the world (Seattle, Boston, Fresno). You can read it anywhere (Mumbai, Glasgow, Detroit). It’s the web of “it doesn’t matter where things are.”

The web of nowhere is not necessarily real time, either. Blogs and plenty of websites Thus, the web of nowhen is also the non-realtime. As we’re starting to become more and more interested in realtime, with tools like FriendFeed and other lifestreaming devices and applications, there’s also more and more pull for the time-shifted web, or tplaces.

What do I mean? Phone calls are synchronous. The real-time web is synchronous. Events and real space activities are synchronous. But there’s value in time-displaced events, too. For instance, if I mix a combo of physical world places (pplaces) and timeshifted information (tplaces), I get services like BrightKite, where I can leave notes in the air in a place for someone to come along and find them.

What other combos are there? If you mix vplaces and pplaces, there are many opportunities. Think about all the various Apple iPhone apps that use GPS as one component, like NIN Access. Think about Microsoft Tag. Think about situations where the web doesn’t have to be a static page any more. Think about a web that comes together are things, around objects talking to each other and us, around places that are a mix of physical and otherwise.

What Am I Ranting About?

I admit this doesn’t have immediate and obvious application, and yet it does. To me, it does. I see this as clearly as anything. To me, if you design for the web of today, you’ll get what everyone else has. If you start planning for these new webs, of places, of timeshifting, of mapping the physical into the web and back again, you’ll start to find the new vectors, the new possibilities.

What does this say to you? Anything? Did your eyes light up?