The publishing industry had the luxury of sitting back and watching everything that happened to the music industry and they learned almost nothing. They had 10 years to watch record stores vanish, the rise and fall of Napster, the felling of empires (hello, Mr. Bronfman!), downloading, the rise of the indie artist, the uptick in touring, everything, all of it happened to a comparable industry a decade earlier and the publishing industry…dithered. They watched what happened to Hollywood and the video industry and they…dithered. A collective Nero playing the violin.

12 February 12 Permalink

There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site.

[…]

 Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.

[…]

But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.

24 January 38 Permalink

(via What is Media Ecology? (A Short Answer) « A Great Becoming…)

I agree that it is important to acknowledge and understand a total perspective in the communications/media world in terms of a Media Ecology. It provide us with a standpoint from where we can analyze the activities and decisions of companies like Twitter, Google, Amazon and even more important Nokia and Sony Ericsson (click on the image to read more). But from my perspective this is a too narrow perspective for the future. The expression Media Ecology might work as a metaphor in the current market situation, but it is important to see that we are heading to even more convergence and turbulence. I think the word Business Ecology is more close to what we need to use to frame what is happening across industries in the future market situation. A Media Ecology is either a too small concept which can exist within a Business Ecology or just one dimension of a Business Ecology.

18 March 1 Permalink