Community choice

When it comes to Personalize Media, there may be nothing better than community bloggers.

There have been some wonderful experiments by media companies in the U.S., connecting readers to local bloggers, or using an old term, user generated content.

One example that may lead the pack, is the Denver Post’s Your Hub that first established 19 community websites soliciting and receiving nearly 90 percent of its content from local bloggers and local people and local companies in an around Denver.

Then the Post spun off weekly, zoned, print sections using that material and five years later the “experiment” is profitable and sustainable and valuable and valued by the communities it serves.

Most recently The Sacramento Bee established Sacramento Connect. (Visit /www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/20100720_with_sacramento_connect_the_bee_taps_the_power_of_partnerships)

Growing virally, the network of local bloggers seems to be adding some valuable content to the newspaper’s daily report.

As far as readers go, many people would like to hone their daily information diet to include local content. Bloggers, especially when made available through a well-known, trusted brand like the local newspaper, can offer those special reports.

Maybe now

Ever since I first logged on to a computer, I’ve been learning what's available and what I like and don't like on the web. And yet I’m STILL spending most of my time today searching, searching, searching.

After all the time I’ve spent on the web, why doesn’t the web understand me better. Who took the ME out of Media?

How come on the web so many sites organize things according to what they think I would want? And then guess when I would want it. And How. And for what reason.

Let’s say you’re a guy who follows artificial intelligence and global politics and modern architecture and the American West. And your Blackberry.

Or you’re a gal who follows book publishing and gardening and calorie watching and family and Dobermans and the American South. And your Mac Pro.

How does one site reconcile all this?

And let’s say tomorrow you’re that same guy who suddenly discovers AroundtheWorldNews from Syntops. And you want to add that to your new I-Pad but not to your website.

Or you’re that woman who suddenly discovers Shopping.com. And you want that delivered your Mac every morning, but not to you mobile phone.

Ever since the web came along 15 years ago, people have been entertained, and frustrated.

Why do I have to keep sitting in front of a computer or staring at a mobile phone? Why can’t MEdia be everywhere. At least everywhere I am. On my shower curtain. On the ceiling in my room. On the tablecloth at the dining table. On the wall in my office.

Maybe now it can. Plan to attend the Personalize Media Conference. Visit http://www.personalizenews.com

The promise

Personalization. It's what the web has always promised. Back in the stone age, when there was only the little Mac and the big DOS IBM, we began to think about personalizing our experience, even if it was only a chat group . . . or user group as we called ourselves then.

And every year the reality gets bigger. Now we’ve got Faebook and Twitter and Stumbleupon and you name it. We even have a term for that kind of personalization: social media.

But personalization has many new forms.

Now you can personalize your newspaper. There are two German companies that mix and match newspaper pages. Their software could be applied to magazines and books.

So imagine a professor choosing excerpts from multiple books to make his own creation. And his students picking their individual covers.

You can personalize your advertising with PrecisionAds. Let’s say you are a jeweler and want to reach only those people within 5 miles of your storefront who are over 50 and make more than $100,000 a year. Easy with PrecisionAds.

You can personalize your mobile phone. Let’s say you see an article in a newspaper or magazine and you want to read that story later. If it has the Primiro logo you can text the story to your phone.

You can personalize your website. ICurrent.com asks you your preferences to begin with and then watches you use the site to determine what future stories to give you.

You can personalize what comes out of your home printer, if it’s an internet ready Hewlett Packard device. Just touch the screen and print your Fandango tickets or your Mapquest directions.

In fact, you can personalize any printing. CGX Publishing, a global company, is testing all the new, web-fed variable data printers to get the best one to be able to personalize books and magazines and newspapers and brochures and event programs.

Imagine if you showed up at the theater and the program had your name and the location of your seat on the cover.

Or you ordered your tickets for a blacktie fundraiser online and the program you get when you arrived has your name, the sponsor of the table where you are sitting and the amount of your donation. And the names of the other people at the table – and what they do.

Personalization. You can’t get enough.

The four c's

The internet should be more a part of our physical world.

In other words, there is no reason why digits can't be liberated from computers. Why can't I see information from the virtual world projected into my walk-around world. That's the spirit of sixth sense technology that is very much a part of the Personalize MEdia movement.

We don't want to be the slaves of computers. We want to be the partners of computers and invite them into the physical world we still spend the majority of our time in.

On top of that, we want the reception of all that metadata to be on our terms: when we want it.

Maybe I want the Boston Red Sox box scores on my shower curtain, but I want the world the Afghanistan war headlines on the wall of my room. And may be I want my emails beside my plate at the breakfast table.

Maybe I want my calendar/schedule on the refrigerator door.

And we want to choose that content carefully. Maybe only one special curated story about the latest cancer research news every day -- on my ceiling above my bed.

Choice of stories; choice of advertising; choice of platform; choice of time of delivery. (People say they worry about living in a bubble; but one of our daily choices could be "mainstream" news.)

Choice, choice, choice, choice. The four c's.

The new T.E

There may be a new Thomas Edison, and he's a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who has invented something called the LuminAR.

This robotic camera, light bulb, internet computer can screw into your table lamp and project the virtual image of a computer screen on any surface to which you can interact with touch screen accuracy.

This is another version of sixth sense technology -- pushing the virtual world into the real world and making our real world more interesting.

Watch: http://labcast.media.mit.edu/?p=129

Embed virtuality or improve data?

I wonder if there are not two divergent approaches to the future of the internet.

There's the sixth sense approach, which says the world for the last 15 years has been creating a virtual reality that reflects physical reality, and needs to reverse and begin to build a physical reality that reflects the virtual world.

Here is a youtube video on that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg

And the semantical approach that believes the problem is data itself. We move data beautifully, but the data is so poor the results are underwhelming. We need to take data to the level of information and even eventually knowledge and, don't feint, perhaps, vision. Here is a great youtube explanation of that point of view.

http://www.iiea.com/events/semantic-web-from-web-20-to-web-30?gclid=CPmny9_E8qICFSA5gwodhlE9kw

Why not solve for both?