trendpreneur

While I attempt to scrounge up time to work on a longer post about journalism, these galleries of abandoned places caught my eye.

Firstly, I now want to go and visit every one of these places (except perhaps the ones that will kill me).

Secondly, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels to the Internet. How many corners of the Internet are there that are equally forlorn, unvisited, unloved; existing only as a memory in someone’s mind (and impossible to trace once you remember it)? This is even more apparent in proper-like virtual worlds, such as Second Life, flawed though it may be; you can fly around for hours without seeing a soul, just prims and textures and buildings and imaginations unleashed, that people have wandered away from and forgotten.

Games, too; for hours on end, even months and months, you inhabit this other place only to wander off the moment you finish the game / unlock the secrets / get a girlfriend. All it takes to go back is to execute some software, and you’re right back where you started – load a savegame and everything’s as it was. MMOs change with more volatility than this, of course – while I may have considered World of Warcraft practically a second home at one point, I log in these days and am frankly bewildered by the place. It’s changed, and so have I. Not only is the ’space’ I inhabited in the world abandoned, so’s my identity.

So: How can we find fantastic abandoned virtual spaces, and how can we record them? How do you record an experience? Video and images are the best we can do with real spaces, but when the entire experience is digital — but it isn’t, is it? There are more factors than just pixels at stake, especially with these other worlds. And you definitely need to account for the observer changing as well as the observed.

Silicon Valley-based seed fund and incubator Y-Combinator have started nudging smart people without ideas in the direction of a few pet ideas they’re keen to fund. While I think on one level this is a great idea, I also can see a few problems: people abandoning existing half-formed ideas to pursue something they think has greater chance of being funded, people shoehorning themselves into topics off-kilter with their actual instincts and skills, and people trying to game the system by applying with a ‘request for startups’ idea but turning it into something else once funded.

Fortunately, the guys behind YC are pretty smart, and have almost certainly thought of more ways this could go wrong than I have. On the “great idea” level it is definitely a good way to 1. learn how the guys with the money and experience actually think, and 2. encourage people to focus on something worthwhile — though, as the HN comments say, if you don’t already have a few ideas of your own then are you really the right sort of person to be jumping into the startup world?

However, above all, these ideas get people thinking. The HN comments are already raging, the TC commenters are partly missing the point and partly supportive, and I expect to see plenty more discussion on the topic as more ideas to be funded emerge.

As to the RFS1 itself – ‘the future of journalism’ – it’s interesting to see people who are already getting it, and others who are already shooting far off the mark. At the moment, journalism’s trying to marry the need to make money with processes and a business model that stem back to the printing press, evolving over the years but still firmly rooted in a concept that people nowadays have trouble dealing with — paying for stuff.

It’s actually quite interesting to think how we’re innovating in this space – almost accidentally. FestBuzz is competing with several types of journalism, online and off; some of our ideas for later down the line marry different types of media, new and old, with data-mining and magic to do cool stuff. The thing about FestBuzz in particular is we found a way to make money off something that’s free to consumers without using advertising as our main source of income. I can’t help but think that some of the lessons we’re learning about how to bridge the print and online industries, how to deal with information producers and consumers, how to make information free to all in a way they want to consume it… all of that fits right in with this idea of reinventing journalism as something that might actually make money rather than die out.

But enough about us. There are plenty of other business models and ideas floating around to kickstart any thoughts you might be having on reinventing journalism starting with the need to make money, not the assumption that people will pay:

Pro-blogging.
Obviously a subject dear to my heart, this ticks the box of ‘paying people to write content’ which is something most journalists like to hear, but on the other hand: reduced barrier to entry, low pay rates, constant small trickle of content is more rewarding than occasional big articles (so the concept of a feature/column is somewhat worn away) – yet big flashy content is needed to attract viewers through viral means (digg etc). Less of a focus on daily news and current affairs, partly due to reduced access and budgets to cover them.

Citizen journalism.
A poncy term for “people on Twitter are on the scene of breaking news first”. People submit their news/pictures to a central site, news agencies pay a subscription fee, extra for exclusivity, some of which goes back to the citizen journalists cited/used in a story. Reduces costs for news organisations to have people on the ground in key locations, democratises news, allowing bloggers and online-only organisations to cover breaking news too, but still somewhat reliant on current business models.

Subscription based news access.
Either online or via Kindle/mobile/iPhone, a centralised news gateway that you pay for (possibly freemium). Challenge: Convincing people to pay, and working out where the money goes. Multiple approaches here: personalised aggregation, collaborative news filtering, topic-specific news streams; access to ‘professional’ articles consolidated into one place; cross-media integration with paper headlines, multimedia, known brands; cross-platform access i.e. RSS on steroids, including filtered twitter, facebook, etc, streams.

Would you pay for an iPhone version of HN tailored to your own preferences (no articles on Erlang for me, please!)? Would you pay for a paper, virtual or physical, that consolidated the best of the day’s current affairs as voted by other people – the Times’ political commentary with the Guardian’s media coverage, the FT’s straight-faced finance with a little bit of Daily Mail celebrity-spotting sprinkled in for tea breaks? Would you pay to consume RSS as you do today but with the ability to collaboratively view it, chatting with other readers? The problem is to most of these the answer is never going to be an immediate ‘yes!’. Maybe you’d get a hit from sales of the iPhone app or other one-off costs, but many things along these lines have been tried and have failed admirably.

Topic-specific physical news.
Instead of paying £x for a paper which you don’t read half of, pay £x/2 for two halves of a different paper and build your own. Again, fairly linked to current models, but a sort of physical hybrid of the stuff above with the need (or desire) to consume a dead-tree version.

The final point for today (I could go on all afternoon, but there’s work to be done!) is on how to think about this stuff.

The above are all ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while, in one form or another – and you can tell where my recent thoughts have been focused. But if you’re set on reinventing an industry, you don’t start from an idea or an application, you start from the industry itself. How does journalism work? How do journalists and news providers make money? What do people consume? What do they pay for (note, they may not be paying in money, but in clicks, in eyeballs, in time..)? What other data can you get about the way people consume news and media, and the way it’s delivered to them? Where are the weaknesses in the value chain? Why does the business model look the way it does? (Hint, it’s in pg’s post.)

Then think about how people of 2010 (not that far away any more) might consume news. What’s different? What happens if the news organisations go out of business, or go online-only? Are their current sources of income viable long-term? Short-term? What other ways can they make money? What do they own and what can they sell? How do journalists get paid? How else can they get paid? Who else can write news? Who else can deliver news? Does ‘news’ mean what’s happening now, or anything that someone somewhere finds current and interesting? How do news organisations gain and retain credibility? How do companies and celebrities rely on the news machine to make money and gain fame? How do paparrazzi and news photographers fit in? What would the world look like if there was only one video news channel in each country? What levels of competition and collaboration are necessary to keep ‘good’ reporting alive? What can someone with a BBC badge do that someone with a ‘my-blog.co.uk’ business card can’t? Why?

So many questions. Have a cup of tea and a think. And in, ooh, about two or three months, maybe, I’ll write more about my personal view on these things and how what I’m doing at the moment fits into the picture.

News about us is slowly spreading around the Intertubes;

• 4iP invests in FestBuzz (TechCrunch)
• 4iP invests in FestBuzz (4iP)
• 4iP invests in .. you guessed it (Paid Content)
• .. and it made HN too!

Also, like, totally check out our FestBuzz blog, for some reason it’s not getting much traffic (I need to promote it more on the Festbuzz.com homepage, for one) and there’s some awesome reviews starting to get posted on there by my citizen journo elite squad.

Well, this is somewhat amazing. A tip off the Internet works!

Lifehacker recently picked up a story I’d read some months ago, but not really thought too deeply about, planning as I am to remain in this timezone for the immediate future. The story? How to reset your body clock by not eating for 16 hours.

We all know the theory about getting up early. Set your alarm for an early time every day. Get up without fail. Immediately do some exercise or take a shower to get the blood flowing. Even if you go to bed stupidly late, still get up at the same time. But somehow, it’s never quite worked for me. My early-morning willpower just can’t overcome the miasma of “I went to bed at 6am after a late night’s hacking and I can reprogram my alarm while entirely asleep”.

Something clicked when I read the Lifehacker piece, though. Maybe my recent cycle of work-late, bed-late, get-up-later, work-later, bed-later wasn’t due to lack of willpower in the morning, but due to my internal body clock drifting as a result of what I ate. Coincidentally I’d been keeping a food diary at the same time as a protracted fortnight of late working nights, and there it was, writ large in the data: I got up late when I’d eaten late.

OK, that’s clearly not the only factor. Perhaps the late night activity of my brain due to work was causing the drift, perhaps it’s a result of the numbing effects of BBC iPlayer programmes on teenage mothers, perhaps it was the weather. But this was something I could test.

Step one. Set a golden rule not to eat after 8pm. This was derived from the 16-hour idea, with supporting anecdotal evidence that a 12-hour fast was sufficient for some people. 8pm means getting up (and eating) at 8am. That’s four or five hours earlier than my drifted body clock was managing; my internal ‘alarm’ was set to a solid 12:15 for several months.

Step two. Obey golden rule. Simple enough; nothing but water after eight.

Step three. Set alarm, wake up, and (to ruin the scientific nature of this experiment) schedule meetings at 9am to force the issue.

Step four. Observe results.

It really is incredible. After about three days of not eating beyond 8pm I was getting up early just fine, and feeling way more alert too. I then pushed the rule a bit, working late and eating late, and tested to see when I would naturally wake up – 10am. That’s a reset of over two hours! I’m entirely sure that if I keep this up for another week or so, I’ll have a circadian rhythm in line with my actual timezone for the first time in years.

Way to go bodyhacking!

I realised a few days ago (but have only just got around to blogging, thanks to a new vow to spend time doing ‘important but not urgent‘ stuff every day) that one of the reasons I love living in Edinburgh at this time of year is to do with Cambridge.

No, really. Even beyond the “it’s-not-Cambridge” aspect!

I adore May Balls. Where else can you happily spend a month’s food budget on a ticket, dress up in a poncy overpriced down with a dapper chap in a tux on your arm, and party for nine glorious hours of decadence? It’s like a kid’s realisation of the ideal grown-up party — even better than the ideal wedding, since there’s none of that legally-binding nonsense, and not that many people end up crying.

(For the uninitiated, a May Ball is a formal end-of-year party, typically held in June; elsewhere in the year they’re called Snow or Spring Balls).

The best thing about the May Ball ‘experience’, for me, was during my second year when I was part of the Ball Committee. We basically spent over a year planning and executing our event — and there are quite a few parallels to startup life to be drawn, but those anecdotes can wait. Things went wrong (the Fun Lovin’ Criminals turned up but refused to play; my role on the committee was publicist. Uh oh.) and things went well.

To get to my somewhat circuitous point, what I loved seeing every year, as I lived in College, was the transformation that happened every May Week. (Again, in June.) The beautiful old buildings featured in so many postcards and tours suddenly got reborn, with lighting and decoration, with sets and furniture, with marquees and fairgrounds and walking performers.

Every year, the set design guys came up with something new, and every year it was amazing to watch the beauty of old, time-worn stone peep out from the dazzling lights. It was like living in a set, especially when I practically lived inside the Ball area in my third year. And yet, on the night — despite having watched everything go up, despite knowing exactly what was going to happen, despite having planned the damn thing for a year — it was like a brand new place. Totally magical.

Living in Edinburgh during July and August is like that, only more so. Venues pop out of nowhere. Inflatable cows appear in a square you usually see full of skateboarders. Parks and courtyards become pubs and stages. The Royal Mile goes from hosting a throng of tourists to… a bigger throng of tourists. Hell, even my street starts sporting some snazzy new flowerboxes!

Yes, the influx of people is annoying to my ‘local’ eyes. Yes, it’s a pain having to elbow through people to get to work, having to queue for five times as long as usual everywhere, having to beat off flyerers with a glare. But for me, only a resident for eighteen months, I can almost let it all go and just focus on the magic. Almost.