I'm sitting here in Exhibit Hall 1 waiting for the keynote to begin. I will be liveblogging/paraphrasing what is discussed (please excuse the inevitable typos).
Bio from the SXSW Booklet: Valerie Casey works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services to transforming organizational processes and behaviors....She is the founder and executive director of Designers Accord.
Liveblogging starts: 2:05: Introduction begins...
2:07: Delighted to be here.....despite the fact the interactive community has been absent in conversation about sustainability...the commuinty will take the greatest leadership role moving forward...
Narrative I find that a lot of the interaction designers are fixated on narrative and story telling ....you can take any story from film/literature/politics...and plot them on the axis of good fortune/ill fortune and time from beginnign to end
03:11: You can take any story from test to John Grishm, or Jennife Anniston...
Shows three different graphs.
Things you see in the news all the time - heart wrenchign pictures: child sitting in ewaste dumps
gives stats about these stories...horrific
Shows image of baby albatross, taken on midway where albatross mate...the finding of these babies...nothing has been done to them....the mothers were flyign out around the ocean to find food for their babies, and they mistook pieces of plastic for food and fed them to their children...grotesque...perverse to think about the effect we're having on bio diversity...
political corruption....
Why does a salad cost more than a big mac (slide)
it's because the usda - the food triangle supports one version of a recomendatino and the government does somthing entirely different...millions of dollrs through lobbyists going to meat and dairy....out of control agricultural indsutry...
Bizarre corruption between health and politics...
Burn pits in Iraq/Afghanistan....set up by gov. contractors like haliburton.. 02:28: Shows picture of Haiti devastation - scientists linking natural disasters with climate change...
Talks about more political corruption....snowballing effect of sustainability
What are we supposed to do with all of that? "It turns out you don't have to kill yourself."
Designers Accord to respond to doom and gloom...
bringing the creative community together, we can look at sustainability ...bring optimism...there's no one of us that can make real change by ourselves.we have to depend on collective wisdom.
personal accountability to colletive accountability.
Share my stories about not only my successes. industry ishellbent on successes....talk also about failurs nd compromises...thats what collective action is about.
Not just a digital network....we have town hall meetings....i want the ability to ask questions...
Each week in case studies in fast company - tell the story of sustainaiblity...not about a checklist its about a constant struggle...
try to educate product/interaction/communiation designers, and architects...
School by Design initiative (open source)
try to think about taking sustainabilit out of ghetttoized....
639 design firm adopters, 33 educational adopters, 32 corporate adopters, 100 countries, six continents, all design disciplines
despite fact that media still talks about sustainabiliy in very green terms...
the truth is that the converstions become much more complex and interesting.... someties miss the point.
even if you're in the interactive community...
02:26: We have to recognize that there's a consequence for everything we do.
I believe its the interactive community thats going to lead this movement next. thinking about systems problems
A system is more than the sum of its parts.
02:30: We cannot just focus on one part...it has to do with environmental, cultural, economic, etc.
Feedback delays plus bounded rationality equals design traps
Bounded rationality - i can only make decisions based on the knowledge right in front of me. barely looks at other groups or teams.. a design trap is when you design for the symptom rather than the problem - looks at dell studio hybrid. - I am a supporter of what dell is trying to do, but it's a classic case. misses the point that we should not be designing another desktop computer...when will we stop thinking that less bad is good.
There is no such thing as a side effect.
Sometimes we arbitrarilly design what we're resposnible for...global taco shed - students went to a taco truck and decided that each one of them would be responsible for tracing origin of ingredients..all for one taco had traveled over sixty four thousand miles....there's this underlying movement that says local is better. global is bad....but what these students did is also discover that salt and cheese were local, avocados were from chile...they combatted the idea of the polarity between global and local by looking at embodied energy in each ingredient. they learned a lot when comparing them.
02:36 Creating the right measurement of success
The Gross National Product
U.S. indicator of prosperity - but that indicator has nothing to do with health and wll being and relationships. out of sync...all sorts of inconsistencies 02:40 Selecting the correct lever for change
IN systems thinkng - people identify the wrong thing to change when theyr'e trying to change something.
mythology is all about lone inventor and silver bullet - they don't really exist....we continue that mythology and we need to change the rhetoric we use...
Talks about Naked Pizza...
02:44 The priority is to use the scale of concept to tackle people on their own turf...
what is the lever we use? the counter-intuitive one ?
Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior...
She says she'll tweet references for all the stuff she's talking about....probably a good idea to check those out if you're interested....(to understand her points better)
02:47 No difference between a structure and the behavior that comes from it. when a new president comes in and you have all these hopes for change, and nothign really changes...its because the structure hasn't really changed
02:48: Talks about HUB...
02:49 Issue - attention cycle : degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action
Rising of public awareness about a problem...when the public starts to get greata attention around an issue, there's actually a point where the degree of product action is inversely correlated...
When you get a couple of hundred thousand people interested in a topic it has a tranquilzing effect...people think i don't need to do anything because there's already so many people doing it...
people believe someone else is looking after it.
A system is a collection of elements and interconnections that ar e highly organized to achieve an overall goal or purpose if you change the purpose of a system you can effect change.... the interactive community is the one to do it we are architects and product designers and communicators all wrapped into one. How can we change the narrative? What would happe if your purpose was oriented toward cultural sustainability instead of commerce?
What if social media was actually about social impact?
The interactive community is the connecting tissue...
At SXSW, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan of the newly launched Dynamo Player talked about different routes online video producers can take to try and make a buck. While the discussion ultimately led up to the duo's demo of its new product, it was not above representing some different options fairly. The two talked about some of the pros and cons of advertising, such as:
Pros
- Fosters dramatic growth (financed first forty years of TV and last 15 years of Internet content)
- Blip.tv and YouTube define a stable market
- Reliable high quality programs...
Cons
- High value advertising demands high value programming (production). Costs a lot up front - higher costs to return
- Content can be unreliable, too hot to handle, or simply unappealing to advertisers. Short films, docs, r-rated or controversial content can't get high value CPM.
- Advertisers can't depend on a certain number of viewers
- Random advertising can damage brand while paying little to nothing
- Must have very, very large audience
- Can put a plane crash next to an ad for Delta or something to this effect
So the question is, will people pay for video online? They talked about how a lot of people are already doing just that through services like iTunes, which the pair say "changed the marketplace."
When deciding whether you want to ask people to pay for your content, you should ask yourself the following questions, according to Millis and Cohlan:
- What content do you pay for now?
- Have you ever quit halfway through a payment or subscription process arrangement?
- How often do you click away because of pre-roll ads?
- Are you willing to download software?
"Asking your audience to pay for your content is about eliminating these 'why bother' factors," they say.
Then ask yourself:
- How do you want to sell your content?
- Does it need to happen now or are you willing to wait for approval?
- How much do you need to charge, and how soon do you need to get paid?
- How much info do you want to ask your viewers for?
- How technically savvy are you?
- How important is image quality?
- Do you want your viewers to go to your site to watch or somewhere else?
- Do you want to be able to embed your video?
- Do you want to allow your viewers to share?
- What kind of content do you have - serial, one off, short format, feature length?
- How much publicity do you want/need?
"Ask these questions before you commit to a solution," they say.
One option is what they refer to as the Ze Frank model. This is a show that used drop.io to package shows that are otherwise free, and sell them together, so viewers can take them and easily watch them on their iPods.
Another option is to work with a partner like re:frame or NewVideo, which will work with you on getting stuff into iTunes or Hulu.
Then there are sites like MyContent.com and IndieFlix. With MyContent.com, you get choices like free streaming, rental streaming, and selling through the site as a paid download. They are your partner, and they only pay you after costs are covered. They have a revenue share deal. MyContent.com will take 35% after costs, and they charge a small monthly processing fee, according to the Dynamo guys.
With Indieflix, you can upload content through them, and sell it as a DVD or make it available as a paid stream, but they're fairly selective about their content.
Another option they discussed was Amazon's Create Space. Advantages of this, they say, are that Amazon's a leader in cloud computing - they can store and serve content more efficiently, and at a lower cost, they are a well-recognized brand, and they're connected to a lot of TVs and living rooms. They'll list films on IMDB for you, and stream stuff to the XBox. However, they take 50% of royalties, and you can only suggest a price for your video.
Then there are YouTube rentals, a system Google introduced not too long ago, at Sundance. They let content creators set the price and viewing window, and they have the obvious huge advantage of social media for promotion. It doesn't hurt that YouTube is also the second largest search engine, behind Google itself.
YouTube lets you use Google Checkout, which is easy enough, and content streams quickly. You need to use an AdSense account, and as you may know, Google is not up front about how much revenue sharing they do, although it's supposed to be "the majority".
You can read about Dynamo's own option here.
Rob Millis and Will Cohlan, the pair beyond the web show Political Lunch, gave a presentation at SXSW called "Beyond Advertising: Can Online Video Finally Pay?" The discussion led to the unveiling of a tool for online video monetization called Dynamo Player.
The goal (short-term at least) of the tool is to simplify the process of uploading a video to the web, making it portable, and quickly getting viewers to pay for it.
WebProNews pulled Millis and Cohlan aside after the presentation to discuss Dynamo Player a little bit more:
Dynamo's slogan is "Powering independence." This concept comes from the idea that the product lets content producers have more control than with other options. Users can set their price, upload the video, and publish it anywhere on the web, and start making money immediately. Each time a viewer pays to watch your video, the money is deposited directly into your account.
For payments, the Dynamo player uses PayPal. Viewers are asked to pay, when they press play, right from the player. Of course, you'll have to provide content that people actually want to pay for, and Millis and Cohlan made a fair case as to why paid online video content will likely become more accepted by users (with sites like iTunes already paving the way).
Dynamo is not about competing with a site like YouTube, as far as offering a destination for users to go and watch online video (at least at this point), although they did say a future option could be to present featured videos on their site. Dynamo is geared more at the producers themselves, to put their videos wherever they choose.
Content producers who want to give it a spin can send an email to the guys at beta@dynamoplayer.com, and let them know.
Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers. Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.
According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein's remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous. He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites. That's an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."
Klein then explained, "The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . . Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news. We don't want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . . So I'm far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."
That's an interesting take on the power of social networks. It implies - at the very least - that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on. An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.
On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks' users can easily - even unwittingly - make or break major corporations.
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