Message From Michael -- October 20, 2008

RETURN TO SENDER; ADDRESS UNKNOWN.

WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE

WE HAVE TO INNOVATE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS

COCKTAIL CHATTER -- MILESTONES

OF BRICK WALLS AND HEAD FAKES


We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.

RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESS UNKNOWN. The lyrics from the old Elvis Presley song may soon apply to the Internet. In the growing category of things I didn’t know -- In roughly two years time the last Internet address available on the original Internet naming system will be given out. That totals 4.3 Billion numbers. (Internet addresses are, of course, actual numbers.) Just for perspective, there are 6.7 Billion people in the world. Part of the problem, and the solution, according to research by computer scientists at University of Southern California, is the management of the original addressing system. They say there are whole blocks of numbers, maybe as much as half, that are only lightly used. Now you’ve probably heard about ICANN which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They’re the ones who decide if you get a dot-com, dot-net, or dot-tv domain extension. Well, part of that group is another group – the IANA, which stands for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They’re the ones that actually give out the blocks of Internet address numbers. Starting today (Monday, October 20th) they’re all getting together for the Internet Measurement Conference in a seaside resort near Athens, Greece. To further share with you something you probably don’t need to know but that’s interesting to know… the original Internet Protocol number system (IPv4) was ‘deployed’ on January 1, 1983. That’s the one used by all of us and the one that’s about to run out. The next version (IPv6) was ‘deployed’ 16 years later in 1999. It has – get this – 51 Thousand Trillion Trillion addresses. So, there’s obviously more than enough, except that the move to that system is costly and complex. Several groups including the U.S. government have mandated users switch to IPv6, and for good reason. IANA figures that the last block of IPv4 addresses will be given out somewhere between 2010 and 2011.

WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE. You’ve no doubt heard that old management maxim. Advertisers have a variation of that – what gets measured gets sold. The challenge is being able to measure all the various platforms people use. You will recall NBC’s TAMI (Total Audience Measurement Index) launched during the Olympics to measure its cross-platform delivery system. Now a small research firm called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to do that using cell phones. The company has embedded software into the cell phones of 4,900 panelists, to catch the audio from ads on TV, radio or the Internet. The audio is then coded with the company’s database, so that it can tell if a consumer who listened to a movie trailer or an ad for a TV show actually watch that movie or TV show. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company is now working with a national grocery chain to see if it can use the same technology for shampoos and toothpaste. Meanwhile Federated Media has launched a beta version of its ‘measurement tool box’ to track ‘conversational media campaigns’ – aka, social networking. It pulls together standard metrics such as impressions and click-through-rates along with data points such as whether people post blogs, use widgets, and bookmark sites. Finally, before you jump all over the new forms of advertising, take note of a study by Montreal-based research firm iPerceptions which found that simple text ads work better than rich media ads. A survey found that a quarter (25%) of the 14,000 visitors to leading media sites clicked on text ads while one in five (20%) clicked on display ads on the right side of the page and only one in eight (12%) clicked on the top of the page banners. Rich media ads only snagged between 7% and 11% of the clicks.

WE HAVE TO INNOVATE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS. That’s what a consulting colleague of mine used to say when faced with a client challenge. And it’s what the young people on the M.I.T. Technology Review’s list of 35 innovators under 35 have done and are doing – on everything from the Internet to medicine, from biotechnology to nanotechnology. These are the people whose work is changing our world. So, besides Twitter (whose creator is on the list), be prepared to add to your lexicon -- synths, Drupal, FLOw, SRAM as well as DRAM, Graphene, Instructables and Xobni. That last one is Inbox spelled backwards and is the brain child of Adam Smith who, the Technology Review editors say, is helping to make sense out of “e-mail madness” by scanning every e-mail you receive, extracting information from phone numbers to files exchanged – translating it all into a sort of e-mail social networking display of the most relevant information. Drupal is Dutch for droplet and is the creation of Dries Buytaert. While the idea of publishing on a global scale seems to be inherent with the Internet, in actual fact all you have with the Internet is the ability to distribute globally. Actual publishing is much more and Buytaert has developed a system to do just that. Synths is short hand (I’m semi-assuming) for synthetics and are 3-D renderings of such things as the Rocky Mountains from photos you’ve taken. Creator Blaise Aquera Y Arcas who works for Microsoft created the Photosynth system which allows you to create full scale three dimensional worlds. FLOw is the creation of 26-year-old Jenova Chen who has been, according to the TR editors, playing video games for 20 years. It comes from a psychologist’s theory identifying “a state of focus that people find enjoyable and fulfilling.” The result is a Web-based ZEN game in which players control a sea creature that swims, eats… and evolves. You all know about Blinkx (because you read MfM) but innovator Xiang-Sheng Hua has taken online video search to a whole other level. The TR editors say Hua is “teaching computers” to recognize objects, scenes and elements of digital images using tags provided by experts but also descriptions written by grassroots Internet users which is then put through an automated filter.

Side Observations: Out of the 35 innovators named, three work for Microsoft. Most are associated with universities. Also interesting (as always – at least to me) only four had what you might call westernized or Americanized names. To state the obvious, I have barely touched the range of topics and ideas from these young innovators. I will do updates in later MfM reports. In the meantime, you can see them for yourself at http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35.

A TELEVISION MILESTONE: All right, that may be somewhat of an exaggeration but not if you’re the one doing it. The University Of Georgia’s Research Foundation officially took possession of former Media General-owned WNEG-TV. This will make it one of only three commercial television stations owned and operated by a university. The others are WVUA-TV owned by the University of Alabama and KOMU-TV owned by the University of Missouri-Columbia.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: Another milestone of sorts as Facebook reaches one petabyte of storage space and that’s just for photos alone. That translates into 10 Billion photos. A petabyte is the equivalent of 1000 terabytes and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. The latest ‘hot’ device hitting the market is a sort of poor man’s Blackberry called Peek, which does only e-mail, but does it well and does it everywhere. Maybe just to prove it isn’t an old line college, even though it is celebrating the 800th anniversary of its founding next year (makes some of our colleges seem like freshmen, doesn’t it?) the University of Cambridge is offering lectures on history, arts, and business free online at the iTunes store.

OF BRICK WALLS AND HEAD FAKES. Here are some thoughts to share: brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something bad enough. The best way to teach somebody something is to make them think they’re learning something else. (That’s called a head fake.) Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. When you’re screwing up and no-one says anything to you, that means they’ve given up on you. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care for you. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. The best gift an educator can give is to teach students to be self reflective. You don’t know where the bar is, so you do a disservice to students by putting it anywhere.

Okay, this has nothing to do with media, new or old, except that you can find it on YouTube and other video websites. It’s all from The Last Lecture by former Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch. The lecture was given in September of last year after Pausch had learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer and six months to live. But there is nothing maudlin about the lecture. This is a guy who tells the audience that after he learned of his situation, he did have a death bed conversion – he bought a Macintosh. The lecture is peppered with such jokes, along with witticisms and pointed observations. Normally, I give you a summary of longer reports so you don’t have to read, watch or listen to them. But in this case, do yourself a favor. Get up early one morning -- an hour and sixteen minutes early, to be exact -- and watch the lecture. Actually… there is another media element to this. Pausch was an expert in human-computer interactions and virtual worlds. Pausch who also worked with the Walt Disney Imagineering Team had created the Entertainment Technology Center and was working on an infinitely scalable technology teaching model for virtual worlds titled Alice. As he himself put it, like Moses, he got to see the Promised Land but he never got to set foot in it. He died on July 25, 2008.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.