Culture of the Information Age (2)

Arts and sociology

At Budapest airport I was picked up by a hostess of the Kodolanyi Janos University College. We arrived late at Siófok, a lakeside town at the Balaton lake. As the season has passed it is very quiet in town; the railway station is deserted. Today I hope to have a glance of the lake.

The conference will start today. I have been thinking about the title of the conference and looked at the presentations to be given. There are roughly two streams. In one stream culture is narrowed down to art in the information age; this gives way to presentations about contemporary art, an exposition on art education and media design studies, but also to preservation of net art. There will even be a presentation on a digital installation. On the other there is the sociological stream about mass media, culture 2.0, private and professional publishing and even e-commerce.

I have chosen for the more sociological stream in my presentation, stressing the change in the use of technology, looking at the use of the computer and the influence of computing. In 1970 I returned from the USA to the Netherlands to start a career in publishing. I got a job with a publishing company which was just setting up a new general encyclopaedia. The project remotely introduced me to the computer, which was hidden in a locked room and closely guarded by a small group of people. In the next ten years I remained in the encyclopaedia domain and saw computing as a production improvement and perhaps as a new way of publishing. By the end of the decade there were roughly 100 people in the Netherlands who could spell the word online and most of them had a library or a publishing background. In 1980 I moved into digital media setting up a studio which produced videotext pages. Without knowing, we were busy with e-commerce, producing pages with advertisements and job vacancies.

But the culture started to change when by 1990 internet was transferred from the academic realm to the business and consumer environments. The personal computer became a household product, and e-mail was the main trigger. From 2004 internet started to change from a social point of view. For the first time a link was laid between culture and technology with Web 2.0. The French sociologist Dominique Wolton had already remarked that the greatest renewal of digital media was the two-way communication which worked from a clear cultural identity. “Communication is not only a technical phenomenon”, he said, “it is an anthropological phenomenon. Communication is more than an exchange of messages. It is also the ability to listen to and understand the sender of the message. No message makes any sense in itself, but the sense comes only within a context, a cultural identity within which the message can be understood.” (NRC Handelsblad, Nov. 20, 1998). (This quote I have borrowed from an article by my business partner Hans Sleurink on open source)

Information changed from one way information from a sender to a receiver to e-content: “E-Content is digital information delivered over network-based electronic devices, i.e. symbols that can be utilised and interpreted by human actors during communication processes, which allow them to share visions and influence each other’s knowledge, attitudes or behaviour. E-Content allows for user involvement and may change dynamically according to the user’s behaviour. It is a subcategory both of digital and electronic content, marked by the involvement of a network, which leads to a constant renewal of content (contrary to the fixed set of content stored on a carrier such as a CD-ROM, or the content broad-cast via TV and Radio). This constant renewal of content in tie with its dynamic change allows for a qualitative difference, thus making it E-Content.” (Bruck, Peter A. et al. (2005), E-Content: Technologies and Perspectives for the European Market. Berlin, New York, pg. 8)

And not only internet started to change, but professional publishing and broadcasting in general started to change. Private publishing, called fancy publishing up to that time, became en vogue with user generated content such as blogs, Flickr, YouTube and social networks such as Linkedin, MySpace, Facebook started to show up as well as mobile social services like Twitter and Jaiku. Internet has penetrated our life deep into our nerves.

It looks like it will be an challenging day intellectually. Yet I hope to catch a glimpse of the Balaton lake.

Two students have set up a blog on the conference. It will report on the lectures and have photographs of the sessions and event.

Blog Posting Number: 890

Tags: art, sociology

Tags: journalism, media, culture

Culture of the Information Age (1)

The luggage is standing ready in the hall. I still have to get mentally ready for the trip to Hungary. I have been invited to the conference Culture of the Information Age at the Kodolányi János University College at Siófok. From Google Earth I learned that this college is at the Balaton Lake, outside Budapest.











It will be my second time in Hungary. In 2000 I was in Budapest for a weekend workshop. It was a nice stay and I had some time to look around the city. I went to the top of Pest with the beautiful church and I saw the parliament buildings along the Danube. Later in the week I will go to Budapest and stay there till Sunday morning, when I will return home.

The conference is going to be interesting. It is about the culture of the information age. So there are presentations about contemporary art, mass media, preservation of video art and narrowing the gap between private and professional publishing. I have been asked to give a presentation about blogging as a journalistic tool. The lecture will give me plenty of opportunity to go from culture in the information age to journalism and from there to blogging.

I will meet there Györgyi Rétfalvi, who lectures at the university. I will also meet my old friend Milverton Wallace, whom I known a long time for the Netmedia Awards and later on the annual conferences on the Media and the Internet, Europe's premier Internet conference for journalists and media managers (see http://www.net-media.co.uk/).

The program looks like this:
Wednesday 10 October
8.30 Breakfast (Sárkánykert Restaurant)
9.30 – 10.00 Dr. h. c. Péter Szabó Ph.D Professor, Head of Department, Rector
Official Opening of Conference
Morning Session 10.00 – 11.50
Chairman of sessions: Milverton Wallace
10.00 – 10.30 Vladimir Matijko: Contemporary Art: What’s Next?
10.30 – 11.00 Matviychuk A.V.: Mass-media in the Context of the Problem of
Ecological Transformations of Thinking
11.00 – 11.20 Coffee Break
11.20 – 11.50 Dalia Matijkiené: Art Composition Basics in Media Design Studies
12.00 – 13.30 Lunch (Sárkánykert Restaurant)
Afternoon Session 13.30 – 16.00
13.30 – 14.00 Peter Mechant: Culture2.0 Making Human Cultures, Past and Present,
Accessible Online
14.00 – 14.30 Györgyi Rétfalvi: Gloomy Sunday: Life of a Cultural Product in the
Analog and in the Digital Age
14.30 – 14.50 Coffee Break
14.50 – 15.20 Anne Laforet: Models of Preservation for Net Art in Museums
15.30 – 16.00 Jurate Vazgauskaite: Presentation of her Digital Installation
18.00 – 21.00 Dinner and wine tasting outside Siófok (Departure by bus)
Szt. Kristóf Cellar H-8621 Zamárdi

Thursday 11 October
8.30 Breakfast (Sárkánykert Restaurant)
Morning Session 9.30 - 12.00
9.30 – 10.00 Péter J. Sós: Problems in Consequence of the Narrowing the Gap
Between the Private and Professional Publishing on the Net
10.00 – 10.30 Jak Boumans: Blogging as a Journalistic Tool
10.30 – 11.00 Coffee Break
11.00 – 11.30 Maryana Malchik: Problems of Electronic Commerce in Ukraine
11.30 – 12.00 Milverton Wallace: Summarizing the Results of Culture of the
Information Age Conference
12.00 – 13.30 Lunch (Sárkánykert Restaurant)
13.30 – 15.30 Editorial Board meeting of FreesideEurope (Participants in alphabetical
order: Jak Boumans, Krisztina Kodó, Andrey Matviychuk, Lila Marie
Moberg, Levente Olvasó, Györgyi Rétfalvi, Milverton Wallace and those
interested)
18.00 – 19.30 Dinner (Sárkánykert Restaurant)
20.00 – 21.30 Church Organ Concert (Performed by: Miklós Teleki organist)
Makovetz Church H-8600 Siófok Fő street 220.

Blog Posting Number: 889

Tags: journalism, media, culture

E-Book article in Croatian paper

During the first week of September I was in Croatia for the World Summit Award Grand Jury 2007. After the jury work there was a e-Content Summit, at which event many members of the press were present. I got to talk to Vesna Lausic, a journalist for the Slobodna Dalmacija in Zagreb. She wrote an article about the iLiad for the Sunday newspaper of September 16, 2007.

Mindtrek 2007 (7)

Disruptive media in a convergent market

This is a nice title to keep people in suspense. The element innovation is in it as well the consolidation of the present market. Yet the presentation was about TV and print, or to be more specific about TV and newspapers and the presenter was Mr Jan Geissler, a researcher with Vodafone.

Mr Geissler started out with a short presentation on research at Vodafone. Media is the largest section of the research department in Vodafone. The research method Vodafone uses is to start a research project as a submarine; it will only surface when there are results to show. Mr Geissler has been involved in the project Papyrus, a project on electronic newspapers and DVB-H. It was the first time I heard about the project.

He started out giving statistics about the average daily media consumption in Germany:
- Internet: 26 minutes;
- Magazines and books: 12 minutes;
- Newspapers: 24 minutes;
- Television: 230 minutes.
And he sketched the average family situation in Germany. The family Miller pays 4-8 euro rent for a 3,5 rooms of 89 meters in a house with multiple parties. The family has a Grundig TV set, cable television and VHS.

This is the background against which the project Papyrus is set and researching DVB-H and newspapers. DVB-H is the standard for mobile interactive broadcast. In 2004 the first trial was held in Berlin with 200 users. In the meantime mobile broadcast is being deployed in Italy. Of course the DVB-H consortium would like to see the use of mobile interactive broadcast for the Olympic Games in China. But Vodafone saw also other applications for DVB-H as carrier for electronic newspapers.

The newspaper business is declining rapidly. It still has a 46 billion euro turn-over worldwide. The newspaper business now invests in online editions and social media and experiments with digipapers like mobile, e-readers and hopes for electronic tabloid newspapers. The advantages are seen as a lightweight newspaper, updates with wifi, to be printed anywhere with dynamic, customised content and advertisements.

Vodafone did not choose for the e-readers like iLiad and STAReBOOK as Les Echos did. It started working together with Benq, a joint venture of Siemens, in developing the electronic tabloid newspaper. But Benq sunk and so did that part of the project. The consortium, in which Bertelsmann participates, is now investigating other digital paper producers like Plastic Logic.

The presentation did throw up observations and questions. Interesting is the observation that broadsheet are getting smaller to the size of tabloids and perhaps in the future to magazine size, while the electronic newspapers are getting larger, from small telephone screen SMS like messages to A5 e-readers like the iLiad and STAReBOOK with a view on an electronic tabloid or even broadsheet.

Another question is: why should the digipaper succeed. Although presently advertisement revenues still go to television, internet takes more annually.

But the real question is of course whether the generation under 35 years of age still need a newspaper, regardless whether it is printed or a digipaper. A generation which has been fed with Google News, why should they buy an electric tabloid?

Blog Posting Number: 888

Tags: newspapers, e-reader, digipaper

Mindtrek 2007 (6)

Lifelong wiki

On Friday morning the Dutch delegation paid a visit to the Tampere School of Media and Arts, a department of the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, where Cai Melakoski was the host. Jarmo Viteli of the Hypermedia Lab paid also a visit and explained how his institute was working. In fact you could only start working in the institute by bringing along a grant from an institute or a company. If the subject is interesting another grant can be requested for further study. Eventually the researcher can end up with a teaching assignment. Many subjects are being covered. On Thursday the Dutch delegation had heard about a study into game development. At the Hypermedia Lab research is performed into the methods of concepting. By describing the methods the researchers and the sponsors of the study, among which is Nokia, the researcher hope to be able to produce a description of effective methods and hope to produce a toolbox for concepting or ideation as the researchers call the first phase of developing a game.

During his talk Jarmo mentioned some research items and hit upon a lifelong wiki or a personal wiki. This created some rumour. He indicated that this could be an item for further research. When people start a wiki early in their life, they can create a personal wiki about their life. Later on they can store their wiki on their stick and present it to a candidate employer.

The idea is interesting. Presently there are already books in which parents can describe the first days of their kids, put in the photographs of the first steps of their child. But with digital media it can be even more interesting with movies and sound. When the kids are in primary school they can keep their own log and integrate the report cards from school. When they are in high school they can integrate their school assignments and reports and the collection they have built up of stamps or songs. But they can also integrate the messages they send to Facebook, Twitter or Jaiku. Of course also the official documents can be integrated, but not be tampered with.

Much of this kind of software is already created by social sites like MySpace and Facebook, but the difference is now that the software stays in the private realm. It will need a search engine, not just text, but preferably also of image searching. Besides this type of software one would need extracting software to create a public file for getting admission to a university or for preparing a job interview. This file could be sent to a potential employer. Or one could take a USB stick along. The USB sticks will have to have a capacity beyond the present 2GB. In a jesting mood, I have suggested that my grandsons of 2 and 4 years would need a USB stick of a Terabyte by the time that they reach the age of 18 years.

I wonder what will happen to the stick at the end of a person’s life. Will the stick be burnt during the cremation like the horse was buried in the grave of a general? Or will the stick be archived in the national archive?

Blog Posting Number: 887

Tags: wikipedia

Mindtrek 2007 (extra)

Thursday evening after the conference, a reception was held in the old town hall. It is an old building in the center of Tampere. It is famous as from its balcony the voting rights for women were confirmed in 1905 and one year later the right for women to be chosen to the contitutional bodies; with that decision Finland was the first European country not only to recognise the right to voting to women, but also the right to be elected to the constitutional bodies. The old town hall has a beautiful chandelier in the reception hall and it sports a nice collection of paintings.

After the reception at the old own hall the show Cause and Effect was on the programme. It is a one hour program by Chris Hales and Teijo Pellinen (first picture). The show starts with an ice hockey duel; the puck is pushed forward by the shouting of the audience.










Besides the intensity of sound as an interface, other interafces such as light and yellow gloves were demonstrated. An they worked.










At the end of the module with the yellow gloves, they were returned to the presenters by throwing them on the floor. The show ended with another ice hockey match. The score was 3 to 3, when the light bulb of the beamer died.










By Friday afternoon the Dutch delegation had to return to Helsinki Airport. The bus driever suggested to take a touristic route along lakes and the city of Hämeenlinna. It was a beautiful tour. The Dutch delegation split in two groups, flying with Finnair as well as with KLM. The Finland trip was over.











The photographs marked with the date in yellow have been taken by Cai Melakoski. The last picture was taken by myself.

Mindtrek 2007 (5)

The Finnish gaming industry

On Thursday morning there was a session especially for the Dutch delegation (see photograph by Cai Melakoski) on mobile games. The organisers of the trip of the Dutch delegation, Hans Sleurink of Media Update and myself, had requested this special session with the following brief: (a) overview of the state of art of the Finnish gaming industry; (3) a mobile game developer, which turned out to be Nokia; (3) mobile game development for education; the delegation got an encore with a presentation of mobile gaming education.

Mr KooPee Hiltunen started his presentation with a reference to a recent report about the Finnish gaming industry (please register to read the full report). Here is the summary:
From an industry of a few companies in the late 1990s, the industry has, since the mid 2000s, become an integral part of the Finnish content export industry. According to a study published by Neogames in 2006, the growth rate in 2004-2005 measured both by net sales and employment effect was 50%(Publication of the Finnish Gaming Industri, Finnish Game Companies 2006/Neogames). The growth rate for 2006-2007 is, based on this study with a smaller sampling (11 companies), estimated to be approximately 20% in both sectors.
In 2005, the annual net sales of the gaming industry were estimated to be approximately EUR 65 million and involved the employment of approximately 1,000 people. There is no aggregate figure for 2006 but simply in light of this study we have reason to claim that the above mentioned figures grew in 2006 and the growth seems to continue at approximately a 20% rate in 2007.
According to our estimate, the 2006 net sales of the Finnish gaming industry was EUR 70-80 million and involved the employment of 1,200-1,300 people. In a gaming industry culture export report compiled by Neogames for the ministry, the 2012 vision includes the following figures:
- Employment 2,500-3,500 people.
- According to our estimate, this is the structural employment of the gaming industry in Finland. In addition, the Finnish gaming industry is likely to employ approximately 1,000 people in international subcontracting companies. In addition, a considerable number of Finnish gaming industry professionals also work abroad.
- Net sales EUR 500-700 million of which 90% from abroad
- Net value of sales EUR 1.3-1.5 billion. The figure takes into consideration unit sales but not the indirect employment effect of the industry or the skirt industries.
- 50-60 gaming companies. The industry becomes centralised.
- Average company size approximately 50 people (now approximately 10 people).

In an earlier study, the strong development of the Finnish gaming industry was estimated to be based on four factors:
- technological and content know-how of the companies
- excellent price-quality ratio of gaming production
- delivery reliability
- international growth in the mobile entertainment sector.

In light of this study, the above mentioned issues have remained strong competitive factors.

The study also confirmed the finding that the dependency of the Finnish gaming industry on mobile operations is no longer true. For instance Max Payne (Remedy), FlatOut and FlatOut II (Bugbear) and Habbo Hotel (Sulake) prove that the front extends to PC and console games as well. This side also shows signs of new implementations in utilising digital distribution.

Mobile game operators are, however, still strongly represented and in the mobile sector in particular the technological lead gained in the late 1990s seems to be important especially as the number of mobile devices increases and, in order to be successful, a single game must be developed for several hundred different handsets both in the European and US markets.

An interesting growing trend is in handheld devices. Both PSP and to a wider extent DS seem to interest new players. It remains to be seen whether it is possible to build a solid business only on these devices.

So what are the game developers doing, Mr KooPee Hiltunen (see photograph) asked himself. Four years ago 75 percent of the game company employees – many former Nokia employees) - were in mobile games, using Finland with 5,3 million inhabitants as a testing ground stimulated by education and Nokia. But it is no longer mobile anymore. Mobile has become complex due to the fragmentation in handsets. Only big firms can handle the porting to this range of devices. Besides mobile gaming did not get the push from N-Gage as expected. The Nokia effect faded away. Mobile is no longer the entry platform; when needed, companies subcontract porting to big companies as they can build porting production streets for the diversity of mobile phones. Big companies of 160 employees are Digital Chocalate, owned by Trip Hawkins, or Mr Goodliving and Universum. The small companies do the concepting, while subcontracting the technical development.

There are many similarities between Finland and the Netherlands. Both countries have a relative small amount of in inhabitants with Finland 5,3 million people and the Netherlands with 17,2 million inhabitants. Both countries have a minority language. Both countries work cost efficient as the standard costs of living are high. Both markets are small and can be exploited as test markets; so companies have to go global immediately. The Finnish gaming industry is reliable as it is not overpromising or underdelivering.

Blog Posting Number: 886

Tags: games, game industry games, game industry

Mindtrek 2007 (4)

Politics and digital media

It is not often that delegates to a digital media conference are addressed by a leader of political party, which disagrees with the present copyright rules, is against DRM technologies and an elimination of blank media tax. In fact in Europe there is only one party with this profile and that is the Pirate Party in Sweden. The keynote address Copyright vs Civil Liberties was given by Rick Falkvinge (see photograph). The Pirate Party was founded in 2006, which was an election year in Sweden. The party came in the political scene with a bang: it entered the top ten parties in Sweden, but it did not get any seats in the constitutional bodies, as it did not have a four percent threshold. All in all the victory was sweet, but not good enough to participate in power dealing immediately.

The party is not a typical political party, which has opinions and convictions about everything. It is a political party based on intellectual property; as such it is unique in the world. The party is the result of a conflict and legal procedures over file sharing. This triggered a reaction with Rick Falkvinge and he founded a political party.

History always repeats itself. What is happening now with digital media is exactly the same as when the printing press arrived 400 years ago. The basic rules for access to knowledge and culture are changing, and the pillars of society are moving to reflect that. Today's politicians are too caught up in everyday squabbles to understand the sheer scale of what's happening right before their eyes. Yet copyright is founded on economic principles; it is commercial property. But with internet this is changing. Formerly theatre was in the public eye and people paid for that and copyright was paid to the author/publisher. But if we cannot download in private, it starts touching the field of civil liberties everywhere. The mail secret principle will go out of the window. Can you imagine that the post office has an opinion about the content of your letter; can you imagine that AT&T has an opinion about your telephone call? Society will have to choose to have privacy or copyright? If they choose privacy, out will go the whistleblowers and in will come the self censorship, which means loosing your identity. The real civil liberties will be touched.

The Pirate party has a policy on copyright, which can be summed up in four points:
- Copyright is commercial: The copyright monopoly must only cover commercial activities. Any noncommercial collection, use, derivation or distribution of culture and knowledge shall be explicitly encouraged. This means that file sharing and sampling are both set free.
- Reduced copyright term: The now commercial copyright monopoly must be drastically shortened, it is indefensible as is. No investors calculate their investments on a 100+ year lifespan of a book or movie. The party suggests five years from the time of publication.
- Ban on DRM technologies: Digital Restrictions Management is effectively corporations writing and arbitrarily enforcing their own copyright laws. The party has a parliament to write such laws, thank you very much.
- Elimination of blank media tax: To top it off, blank media is taxed in Sweden, and the taxes go to the record industry. This tax is indefensible.
Apart from copyright reform, the party is also calling for the complete abolition of the patent system, including software patents, and severely strengthened privacy safeguards. More information about these policies can be found on our web site.

Despite the fact that the party did not get any seats in the constitutional bodies, it is starting to share in the power. Other Swedish political parties are seeking advice from the Pirate Party and the party members are invited in Brussels. The party did not loose any of its ambitions. It wants to run two campaigns: the European Parliament campaign to be held in 2009 and the national parliament campaign to be held in 2010.And in both cases the party aims to capture seats.

You can view photos from the conference in the albums:
- MindTrek Conference 2007 photos by Kai Ansio MindTrek Conference 2007
- MindTrek Awards Party 2007 Photos by Kai Ansio Tampere Uni. Hypermedia Laboratory 15 yrs Party by Kai Ansio
- MindTrek Conference 2007 day 2 photos by Kai Ansio
If you want to tag and comment the photos and see photos uploaded by the conference, please visit group MindTrek Friends at www.facebook.com.

Blog Posting Number: 885

Tags: copyright

Pirate Party

Mindtrek 2007 (3)

Digital exhibitionism

Mindtrek has as theme: Back to the Future. As a start of the conference a concept video for a hypothetical product, called the Knowledge Navigator, was shown, which Apple Computer produced in 1987. Voice control was predominant in the video as well as an intelligent interface.

But the first presenter Teemu Kurppa did hardly go back in the future. He told about the company Jaiku; the name is a word combination between the Japanese poem form haiku and the Finnish word yukku?). I had not heard of the company yet, but I should have known as Tim O’Reilly said at the occasion of the launch of iPhone the memorable words: I love my iPhone, but bah, no Jaiku. So he was missing Jaiku badly; question is of course whether I would miss it.

I understood that Jaiku is a mobile social network. Or, as the founder of the Jaiku Jyri Engestrom, defines it as an object-oriented sociality. The service is about aggregating the personal textual, photographic and video activities and that of your friends on the web. Jaiku brings together streams of reactions and discussion and indicates locations, current calender data. The service entails web, chat, SMS/MMS, rich mobile content, mobile web and third party applications such as a gateway from and to a Blackberry.

Teemu Kurppa described the service as routing content such as text, photographs and videos or even better mobile story telling with shorter messages. Mobile is involving people in an event.

In the back of my mind a mental tickertape kept telling me Twitter, Twitter. Jaiku is a service like Twitter, but different. Twitter is more a social text service; Jaiku is a router and organiser of social events and mobile interaction.

Jaiku is a start-up which picked up see funding and has now 7 people working worldwide. It is basically burning venture capital money at present. A real business model is not present; it is important to grow as fast as possible internationally. Jaiku users can be found in the USA. There are presently 500 users online all the time with traffic of 20Mb per month.

I talked with some people of the Dutch delegation about the service. Would they use a service like that? What make people tick when they use such a service, which muy business partner Hans calls digital exhibitionism (but he is far over 35 years of age)? I can only see that I am not in the target group. Kids are messaging the whole day and telling what they do. I guess that they like to tell their peer group that they are still alive and kicking. But more companies have their angle in the pond: Yahoo groups, Hyves, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and now Jaiku. A lot of personal information can be gathered through these services. Some kids will be come quite unhappy about letting out personal information. Or they might just end up in a group which takes a direction they do not like. Recently I talked to a girl from Polish descent. She had joined the group I love Polish girls; the group tuned into a prostitutes’ bulletin board.

Blog Posting Number: 884

Tags: social network

Mindtrek 2007 (extra)

Mindtrek always has a fine social agenda. After the conference presntations it started with a reception in honour of the 15th anniversary of the Hypertext Media lab, where Jarmo Vittelli is active. Beside drinks ther was the inevitable professors band; this time without the singing saw












Also at the reception was Sohvo Sirkesalo (above), all dressed up for the award presentation at the gala. The gala was openend by the Mindtrek chairperson Jarmo Vittelli (below left) and and vice chairperson Irina Blomqvist (below right).










The winner of the Mindtrek Award of 2007 was Mindvision Oy. They took home a prize of 20.007 euro. After the awards ceremony the band played on in the seventies nightclub of the Scandic Rosendahl Hotel.

Mindtrek 2007 (2)

Up to Finland

Yesterday was full of suspense. Would the delegates to Mindtrek be in time on the plane to Helsinki and would the bus be in time to bring us to Tampere. In Helsinki it turned out that all the delegates were present. Some delegates had left the day before and spent a day in Helsinki. The bus was late; the driver looked in the wrong arrival hall. But by six o’clock we were on our way to Tampere; a trip of two hours.

During the trip the delegates presented themselves to each other. We have an interesting group of people. There is one entrepreneur and the rest comes from various levels in education.

Mindtrek is being held in hotel Scandic Rosendahl. This hotel is outside Tampere on a ridge near a lake. To the other side you can climb a stairway to a panorama tower; an exercise regularly done by the ice hockey club of Tampere. It is a hotel dating back to the seventies, patterns which still can be seen in the carpet on the floor. The hotel looks like a budget hotel with sauna and a swimming pool.

In the afternoon I had received an SMS from the cook of the hotel with the two menus:
M1: Lightly smoked salmon and creamed mushroom;
M2: Very fresh elk stake (hunting season started in the weekend) with dark mushroom sauce and chateau potatoes.
Drinks: 2 beer or wine.
After dinner: coffee and tea.
By 20:30h we had checked in and were ready for dinner. Cai (see picture below; Cai left)) spoke a word of welcome, also on behalf of his colleague Sohvi Sirkesalo (see photograph; in the middle). After dinner the delegates were welcomed to the afterparty of the Open Mind conference.
The first day of the trip went well with a little glitch of the bus driver.

Tomorrow morning the conference will start. A trainload of people will come from Helsinki and bebussd from th railway station to the hotel. At ten o'clock the conference will be openend by Jarmo Vitelli, the director of the Hypermedia Lab. We will start with three key-note speakers: Mark Ollila (Nokia), Jyri Engeström (Jaiku), Zak Greant (FOO associates) will speak on ”The age of literate machines – a visionary look at open source”

Blog Posting Number 883

Tags:

Mindtrek 2007 (1)

Mindtrek 2007

In my posting of yesterday I referred to my next trip. After Salzburg I will fly to Finland, where I will attend the annual conference Mindtrek. In fact, as business partner of Hans Sleurink of the news and information service Media Update I will accompany a delegation of Dutch educationalists to the conference.

In 2005 Hans and I organised a trip for educationalists and business people to Tampere. It was a great success as there were almost forty people in the delegation, thanks to a European grant for regional business development. This time the delegation is smaller as we do not have a grant; besides it is a week after PICNIC 07 in Amsterdam.

Today we travel to Tampere via Helsinki. There we will have a coach waiting for us to bring us to Tampere. We purposely did not fly on from Helsinki to Tampere, not for ecological reasons, but for social reasons. In a bus it is easier for people to introduce themselves and get to know each other. Once we have arrived at the Scandic Rosendahl Hotel just outside Tampere, where the Mindtrek Conference will be held, we will continue the introduction during the welcome dinner and bring in the Finnish hosts. My friend Cai has been appointed the chaperone of the Dutch delegation, but more Finnish friends will join us at the dinner.

The Mindtrek program looks very attractive. On Wednesday and Thursday they have interesting key-note speakers such as Mark Ollila of Nokia on games, Zak Greant on literate machines and Rick Falkvinge on copyright and society. After the key-note speeches the audience will break up for different tracks: Social Media, Open Source Business & Innovation, Games as Services, Ubimedia, Government, eGovernment – Virtually Yours. I guess that the ubimedia (love the term) and games and services will be the favourite tracks. On Thursday morning there will be a special session for the Dutch delegation. The subject will be mobile gaming; a state of art of the Finnish game industry will be presented, the state of art of mobile gaming and how Finnish multimedia school departments teach the subject. On Friday morning there will a session in the Tampere School of Art and Media. Cai will tell about the Finnish University system of colleges and university and will show the delegates the premises of TAMK, his school.

The delegates will have access to all social events. So they will be present at the Mindtrek award party, but also at the Tampere City reception. Besides there will be an interactive movie session Cause & Effect by Chris Hales; I am sure that this will be great entertainment.

Of course the question will be asked why we organise such a trip to Finland. Besides the effect that everything that comes from far tastes better, I had learned Mindtrek to be a very guiding conference in a country which has always been in the forefront of digital media and these days of course in the forefront of mobile media. The conference will now be held for the eleventh time. And to adstruct my position I would like to refer you to an overview of ten years Finnish digital media, written by my friend Tommi Pelkonen, who is these days working for Satama in the Netherlands.

By Friday night we will return to the Netherlands.

Blog Posting Number: 883

Tags: digital media

Digital paper seminar in Paris

Last night upon my return from Salzburg (the flight was okay; thank you) and before my flight to Tampere (Finland tomorrow, I found a message, in French, in my mailbox from Bruno Rives of Tebaldo. In the mail he announced the seventh edition of the Tebaldo Round table this time on Electronic Paper for communications, strategies and risks, to be held in Paris on 26 October, 2007.

This sounds interesting. After the introduction of two e-reader versions for the French financial newspaper Les Echos, it is interesting to see that a seminar with a wider scope than only Les Echos is devoted to the subject. During the seminar a presentation will be given about the place of the novel on an e-reader by an editor of the publishing house Flammarion. Bruno Rives himself will present the State of art and take the case of Les Echos to talk about economic models. Another speaker will talk about the place of the e-readers for the press projects and editors. A representative of Ganaxa will talk about the announced project in Japan and China. There will also be an introduction to the architectures, preparation and continuous production.

There will be more presentations on the use and experimentations in this field for the press, editors and libraries. There will be a presentation of the GeR2 e-reader of Ganaxa, digital paper as a large sheet, the development of digital paper and colours and the flexible digital paper from Samsung, Polymer Vision, Fujitsu and E-Ink.

It really looks like a very interesting seminar. But it is in France (I will have to travel again), it is in French (read French, but speak a little tourist French) and it will take two days of travelling. Yet I am very tempted to go.

For more information and the registration form:
http://www.tebaldo.com/seminaires.htm

Blog Posting Number: 882

Tags: digital paper, electronic book, e-readerdigital paper, electronic book, e-book, e-reader

Europrix Top Talent Award Jury 2007 (4)

Before midnight all the decisions were taken and the jurors were tired (see photograph). The nominations and the winners were selected. The spokespersons for the jury were chosen. Ideas for upgrading the categories were discussed. Every year the jury looks at the categories; every the comment is voiced that most categories do not cover exactly a terrain. It is a returning discussion. But basically you need to keep in mind the purpose of the Europrix Top talent Award as a competition for young professionals, who are about to jump into big life. Being a nominee and/or winner will be an extra credit for the big jump.

The jurors took leave bear hugging and promising to be present in Graz for the award ceremony. For the last years the award ceremonies were held in the Arsenal in Vienna. Before that there were several other places for the award ceremony like Tampere (Finland), North of Sweden, Lisbon (Portugal) and Cannes (France). This year the award ceremony will still be in Austria, but now in Graz. For me it will be my first time in Graz and I look forwards to it.

Now also the preparations for the award ceremony can start. The nominated teams will have to be invited. The print catalogue will be prepared, while the internet site and the DVD will be ready soon after the award ceremony. Also the award show will have to be designed. Of course also the audience will have to be put together. Rainer Staindler, the project manager for the Europrix Top Talent Award, and his team will have some intensive weeks ahead.

I am planning to go to Graz for more than the award ceremony only. There is in fact a festival during which there will be an exhibition of projects and installation. This will take place in the weekend of 23 and 24 November. The nominated teams will also have a conference with a key-note speaker of format. Besides they will have to pitch and present their project. Parallel to this a conference for multimedia educationalists takes place. Of course the award ceremony is the climax of the weekend. Once the Top Talent Festival is over, a series of road shows throughout start.

BTW If you are a Facebook member look up the album with photographs of Cai Melaskoski.

Blog Posting Number 881

Tags: digital media competition, broadcast, creative industry

Europrix Top Talent Award Jury 2007 (3)

The weather had really changed today from blustery rain to sunshine. It was great to await the cab to transfer the jury members from the hotel to ICNM HQ. Coffee and tea was awaiting us as well as the sweet left –overs of yesterday. It was a surprise to see the bio diesel car of Stanislav Miler, having returned from Croatia.

But duty called and today we had to fight ourselves through the shortlist of the eight categories, with at least three to five or more entries per category. But the jury members were very wise and efficient in the process. We started with the category Mobile. I had expected a lot of this category for the educational sector. Two years ago micro-learning was a big hype. This time we had two entries from educational projects. One was an application for learning languages like English and German by mobile phone for Chinese students; but the project was not selected as a nomination due to the difficult interface. Another mobile educational project did not make it to the nominations either. The project was concerned with teaching physics. High school students would take pictures of experiments and upload them to the server for class distribution. Students could add their comments to the photographs.

I was very happy to see in the category content tools an innovation in journalism and/or broadcast. Since 1980 BBC has been retyping the scripts of BBC World broadcasts and storing them in the computers of the former host Datasolve. These days broadcast companies chunk up videos of (news) shows, distil a picture out of the video, put the text next to it, whether it is the already typed translation or the speech to text converted type text and put it in a database, including the video. But that is not all. It is gong further these days. The text automatically links to the Wikipedia and the text is sent by e-mail to bloggers and forums. In this way broadcast companies are assuring themselves that they are not misquoted. This type of activity is called micro-chuncking.

By the time we had the first coffee break we were still on schedule but still had six categories to go. I saw a nice interactive installation which could be used for the Dutch SBS program Domino Day. On a table you could draw the patterns to be set up. And I saw a beautiful children’s’ project with interactive graphics. But on the other hand a social statement was made with digital media against the state watching you. In the category of interactive installation there were surprisingly two planetarium entries. One was in the entertainment atmosphere, while the other one was in the field of dance.

But we looked also at a category which had the highest number of entries last year, but had this year a meagre six entries; not much to choose from and the quality left to be desired. The question I ask myself: is this a trend. When the Europrix started in 1998 this category of CD-ROM and DVD was an absolute favourite. Broadband had not arrived yet; so multimedia productions were stored on a disc. But the change from CD-ROM to DVD-ROM was a hefty one. It looks like CD-ROM was more flexible than the DVD. Over against the many beautiful CD-ROM productions like a Ceremony of Innocence and an Anne Frank, a House with a Story, I saw hardly any mentionable production, except for a French product about a standard work on gender.

By seven o’clock we were done and had a beautiful sushi meal. It was a replacement for a meal was planned in the mountains. I have been at the restaurant before and it gives a beautiful sight on the river Salze and Salzburg. But as there were more matters to be treated, this trip was sadly cancelled and the meal replaced by sushi. One of the reasons was also the departure of many a juror by Sunday morning. Just to give you an example, flying from Salzburg to Amsterdam in the afternoon would have cost the organisation 200 euro more.

By the end of the day Stanislav came to ask Cai and me for interviews. Of the jury we are old hands, veterans in new media. Cai has been involved in the Europrix from the second year onwards, while I have been involved from the start. It has given us both a large European network.

Blog Posting Number: 880

Tags: digital media competition, broadcast, creative industry

Europrix Top Talent Award Jury 2007 (2)

The trip to Salzburg yesterday was awful. I had a transfer in Frankfurt. But the plane for Frankfurt arrived late due to the bad weather. Of course I missed the connecting flight from Frankfurt o Salzburg and had to spend the afternoon in the airport; part of it attempting to get through a security check of more than twenty minutes (and they never caught a terrorist despite all those measures; this while you are not checked on liquids and gel in Croatia, Bahrain and Dubai). It gives people a secure feeling and politicians an idea that they are doing something for a secure society.

But arriving in Salzburg was like being greeted in a in a big sauna. There was a group of Europrix veterans (first five years) and veterans of the Europrix Top Talent Award (of the last five years). I had met my friend Cai and Martin Casey of Arekibo in Ireland, the winner of the first students’ award at Frankfurt airport. In the same plane was in fact the first spokesperson for the Europrix jury, Peter Kabel, who is these days a venture capitalist. But at the restaurant more young veterans were waiting: Irena from Slovenia, Jozef from Hungary, Karin from Salzburg, Frank from Graz and Ted from Paris. And there were some new faces. And this morning there was another surprise with the overnight arrival of Silvia –Adriana Ticau, a former Romanian state secretary, minister as well as senator and these days Member of the European parliament; in politics time flies (see photograph). Silvia was part of the Wold Summit Grand Jury team in Dubai in 2003.

This morning the work started in earnest. Happily enough the entries for the Europrix Top Talent Award had been previewed, so that the workload had been reduced to 125 entries for some 13 jurors. Of those 125 entries there were nine Dutch entries, which is not bad; the record still stands at 23. Today all the jurors had at least seen four out of the eight categories with roughly 30 entries each. And I enjoyed the old jury labour of viewing, thinking and evaluating; either grading them high or low. By the end of the day the shortlist was put together, which usually leads to some heavy discussions, in which jurors attempt to convince their fellow jurors of their views. Tomorrow it is decision time for the 24 award nominees, the eight category winners and the one overall winner. At the end of the day the jurors soaked up some sunrays, after two days of bad weather (see photograph).

The day was ended with a dinner under the castle, not in the centre of Salzburg. It was an enjoyable meal with an exchange about the policy on the creative industries in the respective countries and about the role of the public broadcast companies in digital media. So far governments in the UK and the Netherlands have sponsored the public broadcast companies heavily in creating portals, theme portals and international radio stations all over internet. They are quite a force in the national arena of internet, but they hardly play at an equal level with commercial companies like commercial broadcast stations like RTL and SBS or commercial internet companies. And they are not really innovative; as I have said before: they are riding the waves trying to keep up with every upcoming fad and are repressively tolerant towards user generated content, as long as their name remains immaculate.

Blog Posting Number 879

Tags: digital media competition, broadcast, creative industry

Europrix Top Talent Award Jury 2007 (1)

Today I fly to Salzburg for the grand jury of the Europrix Top Talent Award. This time around, it is jubilee as the Europrix Top Talent Award is being held for the tenth time; it is a diamond TTA. The Europrix Top Talent Award is a digital media competition, which gives young professionals and top students up to 30 years the chance to be promoted and exposed on the European stage. The competition benefits those who want to know how good their university coursework, freelance work or hobby-projects really are in comparison with their colleagues from other European countries. The Top Talent Awards will be awarded to the top projects; projects which are well-received by the jury will be awarded a Quality Seal in recognition of their good work – a certificate to make good impression on future employers.

The Europrix Top Talent Awards started as part of the Europrix competition in 1998. At the occasion of the Austrian presidency, a multimedia competition for companies and institutions was developed, including a parallel competition for students. The Europrix competition including the students’ competition, was financed by the European Commission and the Austrian government. After the second year the European Commission withdrew as one of the convenors of the Europrix, thus missing out on being involved in the latest developments in digital media and stimulating competition with the USA and Austral/Asia. After five years the Europrix competition for companies and institutes was terminated, but the students’ competition was broadened to the Europrix Top Talent Award for young professionals and top students up to 30 years. Now the Diamond Grand Jury will convene and deliberate about the 2007 winners. From November 23 to 24 the awards will be presented at a festival in Graz (Austria); the winners will be invited for this festival.

It is interesting to look back at the 10 years of competition. The first award went to Martin Casey for his production Broken Tongue. Martin Casey became a successful entrepreneur. Last FM was the winner of 2002 and is now a successful music site. A social project in 2004 was Non-violence. And these were the overall winners. But in the category winners there were several social projects, innovative projects and mobile projects. Many of the people in the project teams have made a successful career after winning a category or overall award. But also many of the students’ jury members have made an interesting career. A guy like the Frenchmen Damien Marchi worked in the team of cross media productions like Loft (French version of Big Brother) and Cult.

By Sunday morning there should be white smoke in Salzburg for the overall and category winners.

Blog Posting Number: 879

Tags: digital media competition, broadcast, creative industry

Internet long tail of television programs

Last week Thursday, I was present at a mini-seminar of Nedstat. This Dutch webstats analysis company holds regularly mini-seminars to promoter their products. Charming about their method is that they add value to their company presentations. In this mini-seminar the company had invited the SKO, the Dutch radio and television stats research bureau. SKO charts the stats of radio and television programs for consumers and for advertisers. The statistical operation is executed by GfK and TV Times. So far SKO has kept itself busy with radio and television programs, but not with the internet counterparts.

But SKO now moves beyond traditional radio and television programs and will include internet video. This type of video has been growing in the Netherlands since 1999, but really picked up after 2005. In 2003 the company Financial TV started to present movies on internet, preceded by advertisements. In 2005 the company changed its name into Zoom.tv, which works throughout Europe these days. The video offers now is growing fast, partly because of set top boxes and through internet. Public broadcast as well as commercial broadcast stations like RTL and SBS in the Netherlands have popular play back programs such as Program missed.

SKO has now decided to measure radio and television programs as well as internet programs. In this way advertisers can get the real picture about the viewing of a program. Due to internet a program has received a second lease of life. The number of viewers on internet might not be many, but the program can be watched for a long time after the braodcast. An example of a video of program was shown (see photograph). The internet viewing shows a red long tail.

The combination of radio and television program stats and internet pose problems with business models: subscription; ad supported; content ownership; customer ownership.

SKO wants to make the usage of video on television and internet transparent:
- online live and parallel;
- online live only;
- program missed;
- micro-chunking: partitioning a program;
- micro-chunking of material not shown on television;
- theme channels.
SKO will have daily and monthly reports of the public broadcast companies and of the commercial company RTL by the end of October. After that time other broadcast stations can participate.

During the presentation a dummy of the stats was shown. The internet dummy stats were very low in comparison with the television program. This immediately solicited comments from providers which have video fragments on line. Bas Broekhuizen of de Volkskrant was very happy about these dummy stats as his stats were much better.

Blog Posting Number: 878

Tags video, television video, television, web analytics

iLiad the 2nd edition

The iLiad has undergone a redesign. The backside has been ruggedised, the casing inside has been improved, the battery power has been extended, the travel hub has been made smaller and a sleeve case is now provided.

The backside of edition 1 was not stable, as the top corners were were lower than the bottom corner. When in use and put on a table, the tablet was unstable. Inside the casing has improved so that the tablet cracks less easily. (I cracked my iLiad -see photograph- early in the race and paid 250 euro to get it repaired; there must have been more people who did this). The battery power has improved with 20 percent. The power consumption is offcially not mentioned in hours, but in page turns. Yet if you would measure it in hours the battery would last up to 15 hours, but do not forget that loading will take three hours. The travel hub has also been redesigned. The hub is a horrible device for connecting the electriocity lead and a computer lead. As the iLiad is too thin to handle a computer jacket the travel hub has been redesigned. Making it smaller and lighter is an improvement and certainly for travelling. When ordering an iLiad a sleeve is now provided to protect the screen.

iRex Technologies has improved the iLiad on weak points like the backside and the cracking. The designers did not touch some of the usability points like the Wifi knob and the hidden on/off knob. Without any problem and extra costs the on/off knob could have been made more clear with just a small half circle above the on/off knob (see photograph). Repositioning the Wifi knob, which is mistaken for the on/off knob by anyone whom I offer the e-reader for inspection, will require redesign and technical changes. Perhaps these are suggestions for the iLiad 3rd edition.

With the appearance of the second edition of the iLiad, its manufacturer iRex Technologies, announced, that it has secured a first round of € 6million of venture capital. The syndicated investment round was led by Main Capital Partners. The new financing round will be used for acceleration of the company's business, R&D and the development of the next generation product. Existing shareholders ABN AMRO Capital and management have also contributed to the round. Global sales of the iLiad has doubled over the first year.

The company has mainly focused on dedicated B2B markets as aviation, education and professional business segments and is now on a breakthrough path to the consumer market. Not only with E-books (amongst others under Amazon.com's Mobipocket format) but also in providing news. Last week, Les Echos, the largest business newspaper publisher in France, announced it has started publishing its newspaper on the iRex iLiad e-reader as a bundled service. This makes Les Echos (which is negotiating a trasfer from Pearson to the French company LHMV) the world’s first ever newspaper to publish its content on e-paper, be it on two digital paper e-readers, iLiad and STAReBook (see photograph). Later this year, some major Dutch newspapers are expected to go live on e-paper. Several major international newspapers are preparing to have the iLiad on trial.

Blog Posting Number: 877

Tags: digital paper, e-book, e-reader

The academic library to become a publisher?

Besides the scholarly book publishing presentation at the Leiden University conference Publishing in the Digital Age, Leiden university librarian Kurt Belder gave his view on academic publishing and specifically scientific journal publishing. A lot has changed in this area with regard to the role of the university and the impact on academic libraries.

The role of the university in Research and Development is changing fast, certainly in Europe. R&D expenditures are on the rise. And there are more publications, especially in Europe. There is more research being done than ever. European scientists are now more than before subjugated to the publish or peril regime. Scientific articles are on the increase with 3 percent. And in the meantime the market grows in Asia, especially in China and India.

The scientific journal publishing market is getting smaller as publishers are merging; Wiley bought Blackwell. Also private equity is stepping in; Kluwer Academic and Springer could merge through these types of companies. The return on investment is high; Elsevier Science requires 22,5 percent and Wiley 21 percent. The journal market is dominated by four large companies: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Taylor & Francis. In total there are 35.000 scientific journals, of which 21.000 are e-titles with backfiles, which function as a longtail for the publisher. Scientific journals which are not digitised have problems; if a title is not digitised, it does not exist.

All these indicators do not spell much good for the academic libraries. After some years of just making noise, the library world now looks into new opportunities like Open Access, for example. Basic idea behind it that the publication costs are for the producer and not for the consumer; several research funding institutes also fund the publication in one of the 2.200 Open Access magazines. The Open Access journals have in the meantime gained faster recognition than traditional publications. Also the articles in these journals are supposedly quoted more than articles in traditional journals.

One would think that the production costs of Open Access journals would be cheaper. In principle the costs remain the same, except that in the case of Open Access the producer or sponsor pays for the costs, while for paid journals the subscribers, i.e. the academic libraries, pay.

Besides Open Access publications, there are other initiatives like SPARC, an international alliance of academic and research libraries stimulating the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries. Also repositories are built up. Scientific Commons contains now 1.6 million publications. Leiden University Repositorium has stored 10.000 documents.

A new tyrend in scientific publishing is the attachment to a print or digital publication of scientific data in corpora for later research. The question is here, whether the data are going to be maintained by the university or by the publisher in his closed data silo.

In the ensuing discussion in which two publishers, respectively Brill and Elsevier partook, the scientific publishers understood that the universities were in for a hard time in order to keep up their research and to get it published; academic libraries are under pressure and getting less money. But they advised Kurt Belder (left on the photograph) as a representative of the academic libraries not to turn into a scholarly publisher in order to save money. IMHO that would be a bad decision by the university libraries. Earlier experiments like the EU funded project Figaro did not work; university libraries in cooperation with a neutral party like SPARC could work. But the idea should not be that university libraries transfer people from the library to a publishing unit, just for the sake of it.

Blog Posting Number: 876

Tags: academic publishing, scholarly publishing, open access, repositories

Second lease of life for scholarly book publishing

Last week I was present at the presentation Academic Publishing in the Digital Age by John Thompson at the conference Publishing in the Digital Age, organised by the Faculty of Arts of Leiden University. John is a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge. He wrote amongst others Books in the Digital Age in 2005 and is currently working on the changing structure of the book publishing industry and the making of bestsellers.

In his presentation he focussed on the impact of the digital revolution on academic publishing. He distinguishes three streams in academic publishing:
a. Scholarly publishing mainly by university presses such as Blackwell and Sage;
b. College text book publishing for higher education;
c. Scientific journal publishing by for example Elsevier Science.
In his presentation he was mainly concerned with scholarly publishing and was wondering whether we are witnessing the kind of fundamental transformation in the scholarly book publishing industry as we have seen in other sectors of the creative industries. Digitisation is having an impact on:
a. operating systems;
b. management and manipulation of content, basically the workflow;
c. sales and marketing;
d. content delivery.
Digitisation has been a quiet, but profound revolution in book publishing and especially scholarly book publishing. The workflow became less labour intensive; marketing of scholarly book found more channels and content could be delivered electronically, ready for fast distribution.

The basic question for scholarly publishing has been: are books going to be replaced? Following the technological view, books will eventually be replaced by e-Books (file and/or e-reader) as the technology is there and it will happen regardless the market and the price. But this technological view does not seem to be valid in scholarly publishing (at least not for the time being).

John moved beyond this technological speculation by developing an analysis of the impact of the digital revolution on publishing. He developed a contextual approach to the impact which is based on an institutional account of the evolution of publishing fields and a systematic analysis of the relations between technologies, markets and forms of content. This shows that some forms of content lend themselves more readily to online dissemination than others and that, while claims about the death of the book have been greatly exaggerated, it is nevertheless the case that the digital revolution is profoundly transforming the book publishing industry today. It is not so much a revolution in the product as well as in the process.

After 15 years of studying scholarly publishing, John concludes:
1. There is no obvious solution to scholarly book publishing. The digital revolution is no magical bullet;
2. Attempts to put scholarly books online are mainly economically driven. But so far the revenues have been only a trickle and not a regular stream. End-users do not want to have content served this way;
3. If there is a market for electronic delivery, this will be the academic libraries and not the market of individuals; besides the economic model is uncertain;
4. The added value of scholarly books online lies in their incorporation into a corpus, searchability and focus.

The conclusion is that the digital revolution is giving the printed book a new lease of life.
From my own experience in book publishing I would say that the digital revolution in scholarly book publishing has come in the work flow process by digitising, using make-up languages like SGML, Latex and XML as database technologies to create a corpus.

Blog Posting Number: 875

Tags: academic publishing, scholarly publishing

National Progress Report EU eGovernment

A National Progress Report on eGovernment in the EU27+, was presented at the Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Lisbon. The meeting attended by 22 eGovernment Ministers reviewed progress made on implementing eGovernment Services since the launch of the European Commission’s i2010 initiative for Growth and Jobs (2005), the Manchester Ministerial Declaration (2005) and the i2010 eGovernment Action Plan agreed by Council in June 2006.

Most EU Member States policies and implementation actions are now in place and aligned with the goals of the Action Plan. Services are becoming more effective nationally and more interoperable at European level; delivering higher quality, saving billions of euros through efficiency gains, and increasing transparency and accountability of administrations.

The National Progress Report revealed impressive progress in transforming public administrations, thereby boosting economic growth by placing citizens and businesses at the centre of government services. Member States have developed and agreed roadmaps for mutual recognition and authentication of electronic identities, for cross-border eProcurement and for inclusive eGovernment. Equally important is the effort to reduce administrative burdens for both citizens and businesses, the increasing level of eParticipation activity, and the willingness of public administrations to share good practices.

The achievements of Member States has been further confirmed by an independent survey "The user challenge: Benchmarking the supply of online public services" undertaken and published for the Commission by Capgemini.

While progress has been impressive, work needs to continue. Stock will be taken again at the next Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Stockholm in 2009, during the Swedish Presidency.

Blog Posting Number: 874

Tags: eGovernment

Depopulation of the media

In the span of one week, I attended two sessions by Marc Deuze, young professor journalism at Indiana University and Leiden University. He has recently published the book Media Work. The book is based on 600 interviews among creative people working in the media such as journalism (print, radio and television) and advertising. It is a book about instability and destabilisation in the media, mixing perspectives on media production with those on media audiences and their activities.

The promo blurb says: The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.
Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and independence. Digital media supercharge these dilemmas, as industries merge and media converge, as audiences become co-creators of content online.
The media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. This book is a critical primer on how media workers manage to survive, and is essential reading for anyone considering a career in the media, or who wishes to understand how the media are made.

Mark Deuze is not optimistic about the labour perspectives in media today. He signals in fact a depopulation of the media. Most of the media have lost the people formally fondly known as the audience (quote by Tom Rosen). They hardly know what they should do with internet. The only thing that they are concerned about is the reliability of their name. Besides the labour conditions of the media personnel are winding down. Workers under the 30 years do not have regular contracts; so they start doing projects.

Deuze goes back in history and points to the game world, where this pattern started. After that this labour ethos was visible in the advertisement world. Now the journalists take their turn. News is no longer coming from one source and can be picked up from the printed newspaper, radio and television and internet. Internet has made a commodity of news. News is becoming increasingly isomorphic, while news is becoming more and more inter-institutional between TV, radio, print and internet. Media work will yield unfinished products and leave the finishing to people and participants. If a company wants its product to stick, the media companies will have to work with talent.

The promo blurb says that the media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. I guess that you can differ on this observation. The media industries have not been real pioneers of the digital age, but scared protectors of their revenue resources, i.e. the advertisement revenues. And presently the media companies are not really innovative. They either buy start-up companies like News Corp did with MySpace or copy a user generated content trend like YouTube. IMHO, media companies ride the waves, have a repressively tolerant attitude towards user generated content and are very scared about loosing their reputation and independence.

Blog Posting Number: 873

Tags: journalism, media

Flash: City of Amerdam EC eGovernment Award

Yesterday the winners of the European eGovernment Awards were announced at the EU Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Lisbon (Portugal). The City of Amsterdam from The Netherlands picked up one of the awards, celebrating Europe’s most innovative public services in the first category For Better public services for growth and jobs.

The project: Horeca1

Description: One-stop-shop for Hotel Restaurant Café licences" submitted by the Economic Development Department, City of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Evaluation: Horeca1 helps entrepreneurs and SMEs to easily find out which governmental documents they have to obtain for the seven local licences required in the City, by answering questions on-line and filling out a single form.