Philip Gomes

Jeff Jarvis.

So imagine this future without pages and sites, this future that’s all built on process over product. If you’re what used to be a content-creation – if you’re Stephen Fry, post-media – you’re all about insinuating yourself into that stream. If you’re about content curation – formerly known as editing – then you’re all about prioritizing streams for people; that’s how you add value now.

Getting people to come to you so you can tell them what you say they should know while showing them ads they didn’t want from advertisers who bear the cost and risk of the entire experience? That’s just so 2008. Now it’s time to go with the stream.

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More interesting food for thought from Jeff Jarvis on the collaboration economy.

Curley says that “we intend to participate in that stream, in that revenue stream.” But what about the content stream? He needs to participate in what Marissa Mayer calls the hyperpersonal news stream. He has to break out of the idea of sites and portals and go to where the people are. Yet Curley said he’d prevent his customers from redistributing his content through emails or “re-syndication” – from the stream, in short.

The bolding is mine. Increasingly I find this to be true. I'm at the point now where I find the entire idea of a single site or portal to be a constraining thing from a creative point of view.

It's a locked in/up/down thing, forcing the content creators/consumers (now one and the same) into certain behaviours and modes of production that don't - in my opinion - represent the future of media.

It's also a resource thing. I now see sites and portals as heavy things, anchored in a single place, unable to go to where the action is, consuming time and resources in a way that's unnecessary.

Unlike looser social structures which give you real flexibility and the ability to react and reach across a range of platforms.

To, in effect, go where the action is - or be where the action is.

Something is starting to take shape, you can see and feel it. We're about to break free.

Single sites, single [media] organisations and single governments cannot hope to compete against the plurality of millions of producers, creators and consumers speaking to each other, collaborating with each other and sharing with each other.

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The text in the above image was sent to Twitter via the AP's iPhone application which is one of the best apps out there, period. Get it if you have an iPhone.

In fact, I think the AP app points the way forward to a new web world, one where the idea of a conventional news website is starting to look very obsolete. But that's another story.

This sharing action by me and the web multitudes has now become a natural one in terms of content, and I'm happy to see the AP actively encouraging that.

How would you like that content served sir? Now that's customer service!

But it's a puzzling dissonance when you follow the link through to the article itself and read this quote from AP's Tom Curley at the World Media Summit held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. The location is of course also dripping with irony.

We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing. Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.

Curley was not to be outdone, with News Corp's Rupert Murdoch following on and doing his best to label his customers criminals.

The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.

I'm no big media commentator but even I know enough to see that their words don't appear to match their actions. I'm also no Huffington Post or Google, but I and millions of others aggregate and curate content to our own small circles via a variety of web tools.

The thing about this new media environment is that no one gets out alive. You're either in, or you're out. You can't be both simultanously and seek to define the rules of engagement. And you can't go back. Which is of course where Curley and Murdoch want us to go.

Extended reading: Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine has a link rich post on this subject. Read it for greater context.

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I've been thinking along these lines for the past six months. Interesting days ahead.

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It's been fascinating to watch Twitter linkage to the Magda Szubanski story, with most going to today's news item in the entertainment section of the SMH.

Positively, at least the SMH item mentions (but no direct link) Cycling Tips. But how hard was it to include a direct link? Give the brother some love Fairfax.

Still, while the story has been running for several days now and was community driven - real change in how the MSM treats community driven stories and how folks consume and spread news is still a long way from being realised.

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