Program scripts from week of March 18, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Crowdsourced Creation
One of the coolest things that the Internet allows us to do is called crowdsourcing. If you’re not familiar with the term it is a way of getting services provided or tasks accomplished by calling on a large group of people. The idea is an old one really. It’s called “Many hands make light work”. Crowdsourcing has been used by all kinds of groups to do all kinds of things.
Here are just a few examples - movies have been made, translations done, the Department of Defense has done some research using crowdsourcing, satellite photo review searching for lost people, creating texts that are accessible to the visually impaired, creating maps, creating an encyclopedia, environmental monitoring. Heck you can even fund a new album for your band by crowdsourcing the finances!
But of all those projects (and several of them are really cool) I think THE coolest one was the project that crowdsourced the design of a sports car. A company called Local Motors wanted to see if they could use the Internet community to design a race car more efficiently and less expensively than the old school way. What they got took only 18 months and three million dollars to develop the Rally Fighter, an eight cylinder, 430 horsepower racing machine. Cost? $99,900. There is one other small catch. You have to build the car yourself. Included in the price is a six day stay at the factory, all the instructions you can use (including wikis and videos) plus the assistance of the Local Motors expert staff. Pretty amazing really.
The old school way requires a large design team and layers of corporate bureaucracy. Sometimes that creates great cars. Most of the time it just generates pretty good ones. And Local Motors isn’t done. They have a design process underway for a military vehicle for the folks at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm (and ironically the origin of the World Wide Web) plus they have community challenges out there for the creation of a new pizza delivery vehicle for Domino’s (which explains part of their current ad campaign) and the best design for a driving shoe as requested by Nike.
Imagine hopping into your crowdsource designed car, opening your crowdsource created map to plan your trip while you listen to a crowdsource financed album from your favorite band.
The mind boggles.
The March of Time
If there is one entity in the TV world that stands pretty much unchallenged right now it’s the network that has adopted the title of “World Wide Leader in Sports”, ESPN. Yes there are other sports networks out there, most of them focused on specific sport, a few of them trying to be more all encompassing but the reality is that second place in this particular race is so distant that first place can barely be glimpsed.
Now I’m a big sports fan and I watch more than my share of ESPN. At the same time I’ve recently become more and more annoyed with the sports network. Maybe it’s just because it’s my least favorite sports month of the year. March. When most of the sporting media world in the U.S. seem to forget that there’s anything other than basketball going on right now. Between the avalanche known as March Madness and ESPN’s over emphasis on the NBA trying to find any other sports on the “World Leader” can be problematic.
And yes I said over emphasis on the NBA. Now I know that this will bring on the howls of the hoops fandom world. They would have you believe that pro hoops is on the verge of becoming the second most popular team sport in America behind only the NFL. Everybody loves the NBA. What would you add in? Football is off season, Baseball is only spring training and it’s not like the NHL is a major sport. But there’s a problem with that argument.
It’s the assumption that the NBA is more popular than it really is. Take a look at the attendance statistics for the 2011-12 seasons. Baseball and football are way out in first and second place. It’s baseball for overall attendance and football for per game attendance. But when you take a look at the hockey versus basketball numbers it’s very interesting. Because the NHL actually draws a little better.
So why the imbalance in coverage on ESPN? That’s easy. They have a basketball contract but no hockey contract. That may be the opening some new competition needs. And both NBCSports and the deep pockets of Rupert Murdoch and FoxSport Network are coming. FoxSports is quite upfront that they are gunning for ESPN.
Maybe we’ll end up with just another “World Wide Leader in Sports We Have Contracts With” but at the moment I think I’d take that happily. Next On Tonight
It has become something of a tradition here on The View From the Phlipside to note the passing of folks that I believe deserve a final salute but who may not get it. Today we’ll alter that just a bit by offering a salute to a lesser known but sorely to be missed computer application. Farewell to Google Reader.
Google Reader is (for a few weeks more) an RSS aggregator. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s an old online application but a potentially useful one. Think of it as a simple subscription system that allows you to sign up to follow your favorite web sites. An aggregator is the application that handles all those subscriptions.
Now there are three groups of people on the subject of Google pulling the plug on Reader July 1. People like me for whom Reader is a part of our daily lives. We are not happy. There are people who think, for various reasons, that Reader needs to die. And then there’s everybody else. Who mostly don’t care.
Here’s the reality - RSS has been around for a long time but not a lot of people use it. And the number has been falling especially the last couple years. So there is a reasonable argument for Google’s decision.
What’s really stood out for me has been some of the arguments made by the “Reader should die” camp. This is includes Dave Winer who is actually one of the guys who helped create RSS. What jumped out at me was this quote “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.”
And that’s the rub isn’t it? We’ve become accustomed to getting cool stuff and services on the Internet for free. The problem is that free is a tough business model to make work.
But here’s the challenge I’d offer in return. When cable took on “free TV” (which wasn’t really free of course but a different topic for a different day) conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be done. So why is pay TV virtually universal these days? Because they offered something over the air TV couldn’t.
Just dumping free services doesn’t guarantee that we’ll move to fee based services unless there’s an improvement in our experience. In the end you can take away our Reader but you can’t make us pay.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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