Media Futures, Part 1/5: AUTOMATA
Self Operating Machines
The most exciting new Internet companies are focused on lead generation, behavioral targeting, co-registration paths (aka coreg) and domain name brokerage.
I seem to stumble every day across some new firm propping itself up on the shoulders of Google, Yahoo! or others to take advantage of a current wrinkle in an otherwise perfectly efficient landscape. The fact is, however, that these wrinkles never seem to disappear. These advertising mechanisms emerged alongside of the pure media companies, starting with Doubleclick back in 1996, and followed by other advertising networks such as Flycast, Overture and Advertising.com, each firm iterating on the prior model to gain some head room from the imminent internal advertising service offerings of the pure media companies.
Although these advertising technologies have focused on targeting the behavior of consumers, they have also tended to ignore the role of consumers in the production process of the media that they consume. This is why these networks tend to dynamically balloon in terms of sales growth. They capitalize on a behavioral blindspot, where the supply of inventory versus the demands of advertising value are disjointed. As consumers become smart about these artificial mechanisms (banners, keywords, freeipods) their effectiveness drops and they look to get acquired by larger media entities.
The elusive goal of internet media (and the advertising that drives its value) has been to keep up with changing consumer preferences as the technologies of communication continue to evolve. The adoption of a new means of using the Internet (whether it be ecommerce, webmail, search engines, or shortly blog readers) creates enormous economic value for the donors incredibly quickly.
The latest shift in online consumption has been the institutionalization of amateur publishing tools. The unique attribute of RSS is how simply it enables individual publishers of data to connect with individual subscribers to such data. RSS tools like typepad, flickr, adsense and del.icio.us have made it easy for individuals to syndicate their preferences, memories and desires. RSS tracking tools like feedburner make it easy for individuals to track who is paying attention. At the site you are on, I am streaming my Flickr photos, am recommending books as an Amazon associate and am promoting a Google ad-sense ad.
Not unlike dial-up authentication protocols (remember the classic AOL logon "hand-shake"), the interaction between RSS feeds and their readers is a structured negotiation: do you, John Q. Public, agree to take the whole feed, nothing but the feed, until you delete it? I do. Click.
When you aggregate all of these individual reading and writing agents, it looks more like a landscape of cellular automata than a tradition publishing model. This would seem to be the essence of social media (props to my wife and guide Tina Sharkey for coining this years ago and registering the domain) and social computing, two memes that seem to be growing in influence. When individual decisions such as applying certain tags to pages or photos achieve a broad social consensus, then it as if these tags begin to self replicate which is the essence of automatic behavior.
There is a good word to describe this, which comes out of physics, namely Excitable Media. as per Wikipedia:
Cellular automata provide a simple model to aid the understanding of excitable media. Each cell of the automaton is made to represent some section of the medium (for example, a patch of trees in a forest, or stress in heart tissue). Each cell can be in one of the three following states:
Quiescent or excitable — the cell is unexcited, and can be excited. In the forest fire example, this corresponds to the trees being unburnt.
Excited — the cell is excited. The trees are on fire.
Refractory — the cell has recently been excited and has not yet been through the refractory period. A patch of land where the trees have burnt and the vegetation has yet to regrow.
The concept of cellular automata is useful as a metaphor for next generation Internet content, which is similarly dynamic, member-generated, and excitable. In the next post, I will focus on algorithms, as they transform the automatic social media into business rules and procedures.
I’ve posted some longer comments on this series of posts at:
http://gotads.blogspot.com
Basically, I think the Ad Market is a lot further behind Wall Street in using metrics. It’s not nearly as efficient a market.
Read Seth on Media Futures….
It’s worth a looksee. Lots of good stuff. I particularly like this part: Now transpose people for web pages, and you see how the race for the next great search algorithm has less to do with organizing static HTML content than with coordinating the con…
Media Flows
If Information Flow can
be likened to a river,
then lately I’ve only had time to occasionally splash water on my face as r…
Various Google Links
Google updates toolbar PageRank. Google opens up maps and local services in the UK. Fantomaster reviews Michael Martinez’s article about Google SEO. Google partners with Accuweather as testing partner for local search results and local ads. Q&A from th…
Assorted Links…
Honest / funny look at why Adobe purchased MacroMedia. Yahoo! Concept Networks patent. Nacho reviews the Yahoo! purchase of TeRespondo. O’Reilly launches a new blog. Opera 8 launches. DoubleClick creates 10 year report about online advertising.
Rocket Science
One of the beautiful (and scary) things about the web is how many incredibly smart people you run into out there, and Seth Goldstein of Majestic Research is razor-sharp.
from http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation :
What happens to the Macromedia brand?
Adobe recognizes the strong equity of the Macromedia brand. That said, it makes great business sense for a company the size of the combined company to align behind a single corporate brand. Over time, Macromedia products will transition to the Adobe brand. Adobe expects to keep and continue investing in key Macromedia product brands.
The Macromedia brand is dead.
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it’s true and it’s pitty
September Randoms
Some items of interest from this month: Keith, Matt, Nick, and Brian just launched BlueFlavor tonight. Head on over and check out their new shop. Andy, Richard, and Jeremy just launched ClearLeft last week. Very check-out-worthy as well. I just won …
Media Futures
For the tech-geeks that want some interesting background reading: This is a very interesting and well written article on media futures for webdesign, -layout, advertisement and -content. Make sure you see all 5 articles.
…
Seth Goldstein on Media Futures
Seth Goldstein launchesa five part series on media futures by adopting a metaphor for social medai: cellular automata. These are the game-of-life simulations that complexity theorists have used to represent the emergent order that arises from seemingly…
Media Futures de Seth Goldstein
Voic une série de billet de Seth Goldstein [en] sous le thème :
MEDIA FUTURES
Part 1/5: AUTOMATA [en]
Part 2/5: ALGORITHM [en]
Part 3/5: API [en]
Part 4/5: ALCHEMY [en]
Part 5/5: ARBITRAGE : I. Etymology [en]
Part 5/5: ARBITRAGE : II. …
Re: AttentionTrust / Root.Vault
Oh yeah, and you may also want to check out what Seth Goldstein and Greg Yard…
If you’re privacy-rich, you’re probably cache-poor in the attention market
Remember permission? Well, that is so last-century! Now, a related concept that’s gaining some traction is that of attention marketing. From what I’ve been reading about it on Corante and elsewhere, it has potentially scary ethics considerations. “Perm…
Ebooks helped me a lot when I was learning about making money with affiliate or adsense kind of websites. I knew I was so new I didn’t want to embarras myself on a forum or get told I’m a “noob”. So I went to a site that turned out to be a internet marketing blog that had everything I needed in one place, ebooks, software and web services. Now I am at least making some money instead of being hopelessly lost among a ton of different content.