Soon the term ‘Broadcatching’ will move into your lexicon, just like the way ‘narowcasting’ crept in. Even now, it’s the province of the technology folk, who use RSS and Bittorrent, which is a file distribution Peer-to-peer software. The idea is not new.Jon Udell wrote about it last year.

(In case you are not someone who uses RSS, which is an aggregrator of blogs, it’s worth a try. There’s an easy Web-based RSS solution called Bloglines, and others such as Newsgator.)

But to get back to Broadcatching, it is all about timeshifting, and offloading TV content to another device so that you can view it later. One user describes it like this:

Between this and my iPods, I don’t use media anymore, just mass storage.

The reason this is important for communicators, is that distributing content to TV stations, and monitoring broadcasts, will soon have new avenues, as TV (like newspapers and radio before it) quietly becomes a web experience. Already the iPod and other MP3 players are allowing people to take their radio shows and lectures with them. Broadcatching will shake up the entire TV industry and change the way the format their programs, make them available, and even how they blend advertising into them.

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Hard to imagine that Peter Jennings is not going to be around us anymore. In the media world, anchors or ‘talking heads’ are often known for their camera personality, confidence, charm etc. Peter was more than this, to be sure. Unlike the way most anchors move in from a journalism beat to anchor position, Peter (who started life as a correspondent) once gave up the anchor chair for a foreign correspondent’s job, just to get a better grasp at journalism.

Among his many legacies, he left us communicators with the message that we should never stop learning. Colleagues have described him as a curious fellow, interested in any subject on earth. He also had a tremendous respect for his audience. On Wednesday night, on ABC’s special feature on his life, a colleague recounted how no one could ever tell him that ‘the audience would not be interested in this.’ He made sure his program (which interestingly is still branded as ‘World News Tonight With Peter Jennings’) made people interested in the topics his team covered.

See: Jenning’s interviews here, and full coverage here.

On a personal note, I used to tell this story how, in the eighties, long before I had any inclination that I would move over to the U.S., I used to ride my bicycle to the American Center in Colombo, every Sunday afternoon, to catch a week’s worth of ‘ABC News With Peter Jennings.’ To me Peter was everything that America stood for, and what journalism ought to be. Only much later did I learn that he was not even a U.S. citizen –until very recently.

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More stories from London show that even the mainstream media is turning to blogs to check the pulse of things. One news report tonight on the local ABC station had nothing but pics from camera phones, technically called MoBlogs. For the unfiltered shots of the area, check LondonBloggers, and LondonUnderground.

One blogger caught this fella with his guitar, close to one of the affected spots.

And, of course, there are plenty of images (linked to flikr) like the one below, of the massive Olympic bid that London won the day before.

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What could a terrorist gain by killing civilians? Nothing, unless, they assume publicity is an end in itself.
It will be a long day for all those office workers and children who have been asked to stay where they are.

Interesting twist to the use of mobile phones. BT is seeing a surge in the use of fixed line phones, as mobile phone networks are jammed.
Check the blogs from the London underground. One blogger on that blog network is keeping her chin up:

"Well as we’ve won, let’s just be thankful than this didn’t happen on the day that the Olympic inspectors were in town.."

Thanks to these citizen journalists we get live reports. This picture, for instance, of Bus number 59, near Russell Square station.

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Just interviewed Suranga Chandratillake, the co-founder of Blinkx, the new search engine I am testing out. Amazing story. You could look at it from so many angles: the death of text-based search, managing information overload, or even from the perspective of what-is-this-guy-thinking (treading on the toes of the 800-pound gorillas, Google, Yahoo and MSN!)

But that still won’t be getting to the crux of what Blinkx is all about. (You’ll have to wait for my article on this.) I am a big believer in customization, and can see this search company as taking information management down that path. Marketers will love what’s coming, because they have declared very clearly that the mass media model is broken. (Remember P&G’s Jim Stengel’s warning shot to the televison-is-everything crowd?)

People spend gobs of money to ‘advertise’ on a search engine, swallowing up every keyword, but that cannot be the only way. Being satisfied with that is like saying plonking down $1.5 million on a Super Bowl ad is smart targeting! Speaking of targeting, heck, even medicine is aggressively pursuing the path of ‘targeted’ drugs. Seriously! Check the latest Newsweek special issue that talks about ‘treatments designed not for massive conquest but for narowly targeted strikes..’ But I digress.

How targeted can a search engine be? I put this hypothetical question to Suranga: What if I was searching for a particular song, used in a BBC television report on the 3rd of July, covering the Live8 concert in Moscow. Can his search engine do that? Potentially, yes, he replied. For now, it is the only engine that exhaustively searches audio (podcasts, for instance) and video. And it’s going to get phenomenally better, he promises.

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In the future, ads will pop up in our cereal bowls. Our dreams will be interrupted by commercials. But we’ll still look to magazines when we don’t want to be found.

The above is actualy copy from an ad for magazines by the Magazine Marketing Coalition. The campaign (magazine.org) features some intriguing facts. Check out too, the ‘covers of the future’ that magazines could be featuring (like the one on the left.)

Stories such as the ‘see-through SUV’ for an automotive mag, and ‘What your man’s POD says about him’ for Cosmo etc would be still in the print medium, they say. As a big fan of magazines, I don’t see them going away; back in 1998 I argued with one publisher that having an online version would not erode the reader base!   

HOWEVER, there is evidence that if print doesn’t pull up its socks, the portals are going to make a killing. Case in point, the BBC. Yes that BBC! For all it’s problems over the years (I know, I went through a BBC radio training in1988) ‘aunty’ as it is affectionately called, has been ahead of the curve in marketing its services to the 24/7/365 news-hungry world. They are also currently running a podcasting experiment for BBC radio.

The Economist magazine had a story (Ha! see what I mean) a couple of weeks back on how the ‘lumbering giant’  is partly responsible for sliding newspaper readership in Britain. BBC has a whopping 525 Web sites, and BBC news has 7.8 million unique visitors –a week!

So against all this, it is wonderful to see the renewed interest in publishing, here in the US, and definitely in Asia. Tim O’Reilly the founder and brains behind several ventures around O’Reilly Media, recently introduced a magazine that he calls the "Martha Stewart magazine for geeks." It’s called "Make." Actually MAKE is a ‘mook’ or what the publisher calles a hybrid between a magazine and a book. There’s a companion Zine, too.

So is print here to stay? The Magazine Marketing Coalition has these numbers. The popularity of TV viewing fell from 25% to 21% from 1995 to 2005. In the same period, the popularity of magazines jumped from 28% to 35%. Customers have spoken: To mangle the Fox network’s words: you report, we decide!

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You’ve probably heard of the Wiki-torial saga and LA Times? The world is barely getting to know the value of a ‘wiki,’ when one experiment in the mainstream media gets all the attention it doesn’t need.

This is about the LA Times allowing readers to write their own editorial. It began last Friday. According to the paper:

Nearly 1,000 users registered to participate in the rewriting of Friday’s lead editorial. Called "War and Consequences," the piece argued for the U.S. to set goals for training Iraqis to replace U.S. troops in Iraq and for the firing of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld if those goals were not met.

Pornographic images began to appear on the wiki by Saturday, and the ‘experimental wikitorial’ was taken down –temporarily, it seems.

Open source journalism, is an idea whose time has come. But has it? Or has it come too fast? See Jeff Jarvis’s –brillliant, as usual– observations here.

“You don’t build a town without cops. You don’t build a community site — a town online — without a clean-up crew, either.”

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Just completed an article on Podcasting, a topic I brought up a few weeks back. The more you look at the model of podcasting, it seems like the broadcast model will soon have its furniture rearanged. And I don’t just mean the electronic media. A good chunk of advertising and direct marketing is still based on the one-to-many technique.

I tend to speak too much perhaps, on variable-data printing as the future of all customized communications. Speak to Steve England, designer, and print guru at R&R Images. In a recent conversation I had with him about how smart database marketing can be, he spoke of how there are companies that can show you more than demographics of the customer base you are trying to reach.

I bring this up because an aticle in Point magazine (a pub of Advertising Age) this week, features Jeff Bezos, the smart marketer who built his business, Amazon.com, on database marketing. Amazon ‘knows’ so much about it’s shoppers, it’s almost creepy. But on the other hand, isn’t it maddening when you get mail from a company who still addresses you as "current resident, " or when you have to write out your basic personal information at a doctor’s office that you have been going to for the past 5 years? They’re supposed to ‘know’ you better than that!

As a Marcom person, it apalls me that companies are still so ignorant about their customers. I got a phone call from JVC over the weekend offering to extend a warranty on a camcorder I bought 2 years ago. Great! They ‘remembered’ me –but only to sell something to me. Where were they all those 430-something days? Besides, I don’t even own the camera anymore. On the other hand, I could walk into Wells Fargo bank, and they know me and my family. I don’t get much direct mail from them. I get ‘direct’ attention, and that –eye contact, a few sentences– sure beats the broadcast model, anyday!

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Remember when media providers feared to charge for content online? The only business model for digital content seemed to be the free download (and to entice visitors to pay for add-ons.) If they spent a few seconds reading the ads, that would be terrific! The Wall Street Journal was one of the first to go against that model, but as we see now, the strong online news brands hold their brand assets close to their chest.

The New York Times is now moving that way, so that you have to be a paid subscriber to TimeSelect to read their columnists.

But in a move that shows that the media is still experimenting with content distribution, LA Times has opened up a pay-as-you-go section, and the Christian Science Monitor may follow suit –according to this story from Editor & Publisher.

My prediction is that it won’t be long before bogs that enjoy a growing brand reputation –thanks to word-of-mouth, and syndication—get into the act of having paid and unpaid content. Already Social Networking sites such as Linked In and Fiendster have made some moves into selling paid-for areas, paving the way for the pay-as-you-go model in other digital businesses.

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Seth Godin, the mind behind ‘Permission Marketing,’ always challenges you to rethink accepted ways of doing business. Last summer, Seth challenged a few people to start a project that ended up as ChangeThis.com the place to read ‘manifestos’ on culture, technology and politics.

This summer, Seth has a secret project –which he won’t exactly reveal– with a bounty. Thet’s right, the ‘bounty’ is a $1000 reward for anyone who refers someone to his site, and gets hired. Meaning, if you go to his secret project site, and get hired and tell him you saw my post, I get the bounty. But the best part is the folks who work on the summer project get paid $4,000 each.

Who should apply? According to his site, those  who are ‘Slightly unbalanced but remarkable.’  More specifically, someone with:

User interface design
Online graphic design
RSS, CSS and structured HTML
Wide knowledge of what’s interesting and new online.

Check it out!

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