About
For the past twenty-five years I have pursued a rackety course through the world of digital information, advising all sorts of publishing and other content companies on how to come to terms with the fundamental shift in the balance of network power. As a publisher starting out in the 1960s I knew that my editorial power to decide and discriminate on behalf of what, in my view, users wanted was unrestricted.
By 1985, armed with the experience of having managed the creation of one of the first online services, I was having doubts. These started to clarify in the mid-1990s. While publishers were still hopefully enunciating “Content is king”, I entertained secret and seditious doubts. The only Kings I could see were users, flexing new powers, demanding more ability to re-use and re-aggregate content – and create solutions that reminded me that we are all publishers, intermediaries and users on the network.
So now we are entering the second decade of the 21st century. If we play the fragile game of numbering phases of web development, we are past Web 2.0, and into Web 3+ – an age of solutions, driven by efforts to emulate workflow and practice in the B2B space, or to recreate advertising revenues as lead generation in consumer services. Activity levels climb higher each year on the network, and within all the publishing forms attached to the network, like eBooks. Some, fearing that advertising will never be a real network driver in the post-Google years, or will always be attached to search, try to turn the clock back (as in the Murdoch paid content movement). Others look forward to the fall of search, or its replacement by semantic enquiry techniques which search meaning, not keywords.
And beyond all this fresh waves are mounting. Out in the bay, 3D will create a breaker to crash onto our shoreline in coming years …and when mobile education/handheld learning really takes hold, much of the educational coastline will be inundated. The world of fiction becomes fascinating as multiple media narratives, serious gaming and other forms make the novel look, well, nineteenth century. Our children already know much of this. It is their parents who are afraid of getting out of their depth …
After 25 years of writing strategies and solutions for stressed participants, I have decided (late in the day, some will say) to invest more in thinking and less in project-based action. Here, at the bottom of my garden, I have a hut (and broadband) and a group of activities that keep me close to the global information and entertainment industries, but give me a bit more scope for thinking. But there is no point in thinking alone: you will find my thoughts here, but they will only be important if you link in your own …
Please drop by my hut and visit this end of the garden …