Small revolution in Spain

The story goes like this:

a) Spain is one of the countries with higher levels of piracy of copyrighted content (link).
b) Spanish Culture minister, Ángeles González-Sinde, is an screenwriter that has a very tight relation with Spanish blogosphere and twittersphere.
c) This week her Ministry introduced a polemic paragraph in a big law project on Sustainable Economy (focused on recovering from the Economic Crisis). The paragraph said that the government could close websites or blogs that infringes intellectual property without any judicial control (link).
d) Bloggers, journalists and users created a Manifesto in Defense of Fundamental Rights in the Internet (link).
e) Legal analyse of the Law propose by lawyer David Bravo (link).
f) After a talking with some of the responsibles of the Manifesto, González-Sinde just says that it was a very interesting meeting. Hours after, Spanish President, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, had to step back and explain that no one in the government will close any webpage and that changes may be made in the law proposal (link).
g) Members of PSOE (party in power in Spain) complained because González-Sinde didn't make clear what consequences the paragraph could have.
h) Spanish newspaper Publico opens friday edition with the image of the keyboards ctrl+z (Zapatero's nickname/brand is ZP) (link).

Today in the news, tomorrow in a Clay Shirky book.

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Adam Sandler Thanksgiving Song

From Saturday Night Live.

A link for those outside USA (and who can't see Hulu)

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Give out the short story, sell the novel

iTunes made it possible to sell small music elements (songs) without needing to buy the whole work -the record-. And it made sense, not only because many people used to buy a CD just because of one or two songs, but because the psychology of the price (hey, is just $,99) and because one song is easily consumed on its own.

Can the same be applied to single articles, tales, a short video and any kind of single multimedia piece? Or the 'small stuff' is condemned to be free int he internet? Bill Wasik, Senior Editor of Harper's Magazine, bets for the latter.

Is easy to see a chapter sample, a small video related to a bigger one or a short comic strip as the -free- hook for a future sell. I also understand that give away excerpts or examples is the better way to promote you as an artist or a content producer.

But does it mean that selling small pieces in the internet will be a mission impossible? I think so. At least if we think about isolated objects that can be consumed in less than 10 minutes. Compilations will be the only way for short pieces to get to the market.

So, why someone will pay $,99 for a song and not the same for a videoclip or $,1 for a newspaper article? Because the users are used to pay $,99 for a good quality mp3, but always have seen videos or read articles for free. The only way this habit could be changed is with such a great user experience that would become a value in itself.

When Wasik talks about the non profit business model for newspapers I guess that he's also thinking about this: how difficult is to make the users pay for what always was for free.

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US Airways Flight 1549 3D Reconstruction

Kas Osterbuhr, an engineer at K3 Resources who specializes in the visual presentation of complex data, goes one step further while showing how the the US Airways Flight 1549 crashed over the Hudson River. It reconstructs the flight using vast amounts of material, including radar information showing the position of the geese that led to the Airbus A320 losing power. The result is an incredible series of videos. This was the main one. Here are all of them.

The whole story, in Wired.

[Via Xocas]

Hulu's doubts may be others' chances

I love to see 30 Rock in Hulu. In fact is the only way I can do it, as I'm in my wonderful Web Strategies for Storytelling class when it's aired. The video and audio quality is good, the ads are few and not too horrible -great moment to check the mail- and if you want more you can access to any other episode in just two clicks. It works for me, and I don't really care if it works for Hulu's owners.

So I fully understand Quincy Smith's and Laura Martin's points: Why did they (Disney, GE and NewsCorp) decided to do it so well and so easy if they were not sure about how to make money of it?

Now it would be pretty hard to tell the users "hey, we've changed our minds and a) we're not going to put as much content online or b) we are going to charge you for what now is free". You need to be very careful with that kind of moves.

The strength of Hulu comes from the fact that some of the biggest players had agreed to act together. That way they get more than decent prices for the ads -$50 CPM is just amazing. The basic CPM for regular banners in a web site without special campaigns is just $1- and an offer big enough for the users to stay hours in the site. Others like Turner's Adult Swim or CBS' Social Room are too small or more experimental, and have less reach than Hulu.

All that said, if Hulu decides to charge for the films and episodes, not only would be the time for other smaller and free players to get new users, but also the time for more open and social-media like options. I'm thinking about Boxee, an open software media center that aggregates the most interesting free video content online and that even enables Torrent downloads from all kind of platforms. This application has been awarded at the CES as Best product in the 'Maximum tech' category and will turn from alpha to beta in a month. The more good quality video content that applications as Boxee are able to offer the less impressive and essential Hulu would look like.

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Hiking in the snow

Mount Rainier FIUTS hiking evening from seretuaccidente on Vimeo.

Good storytelling makes the audience fill in the blanks

Both oral and writing storytelling have a quality that has really worked for them: part of the story always happen/is produced in the imagination of the audience. You can make a very detailed description of a dress or the view from a window, but each one pictures something different in their mind. The person who is reading or listening usually adds not only sensory aspects to the narration, but also personal memories to the narration. So she or he is never passive, always interacts in any way with the story itself.

For visual representational media things can be different, as some times the storytelling tries to give all the information to the audience. I'm thinking about video content, which usually drives the audience through all the details of the story, making the spectator passive. But a photo, drawing or painting can also tell a whole story by itself. Those cases usually ask for a talented storyteller and an audience ready to fill in the blanks.

What about web storytelling?
The Internet makes it possible to combine different formats in the same piece. This comes to be not only an advantage, but also a danger, as we can confuse the viewers with format changes or fall into aesthetic temptations.

A good web narrative should do two things: provide space for the reader to 'fill' some information and engage the user asking for his or her interaction at some points.

The web storyteller need to be sure that each part of the story is told using the format that makes more sense from the own story point of view.

For me a perfect marriage for web storytelling could come from the mix of video and flash infographics, where the infography in itself is the container and video provides framed stories inside the whole story.

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An astronaut, e-postman or maybe online communicator

This post is about where do I see myself in the near future. A kind of What do you want to do when you grow up? where grow up means 'after leaving the Master of Communication in Digital Media'.

Want to start saying that for me the best plan is always Plan B. When I research one city before going on holiday is just to feel that I will have things to do in case I don't feel safe or confident enough to improvise, which is my first option. And I feel this post is something similar: I guess I still don't know what will be the perfect place for me, maybe it doesn't even exist, but will try to picture myself in the future with what I know now.

My background is online information, ranging from regular writing to product management. And my reasons to be in this Master are to learn a different information culture, see from the inside what's going on in the USA and, more specifically, learn new ways to tell stories and to provide information.

So I want to be...
In the next years I see myself trying to create new storytelling formats for the Internet and figuring out which way the users want the information to be delivered in an overcrowded and multi source world. I feel that we need to come out with some 100% internet journalistic genre, other than links and tweets.

If I have to think about just one position that already exists and I would love to have it would be at The New York Times Research and Development Lab. This is a place where they try to display the NYT content in ways that could be more convenient for mobile devices or could break the notion that an online newspaper is "just the same" in another platform. They also try to create formats that doesn't need to resemble a printed media and would be internet native.

And if I find a different way to tell stories and communicate I will be happy. Don't need to make money for this or to become famous. For me Internet is a place where people gets and gives things from and for others, and I'd love to make my contribution something else than posts, comments and photos.

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The history of internet

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

This is a german animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

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NYT video section: doing as always but in a different way

The New York Times was one of the very first print newspapers in producing specific video content for the web version. In 2005 they started to create their own videos, ranging from breaking news to in depth reports. Most of the content were created by NYT staff, including interviews conducted by some of their better known journalists.

My feeling as an user is that they've always tried to meet the quality and excellence of their written stuff. Although it took some time to adapt their style to an audience used to shorter pieces than the ones they use to deliver at first, now their archive (http://video.nytimes.com/) is really a video world in itself. A place for both the casual user and the one that thinks that looking for something interesting at Youtube is a loss of time.

Text and video are complementary
The company has made a great work trying to make video and text sites compatible and complementary. Just to put an example, anyone interested in business information sure will have time to spend at their video section, that offers both interviews, analysis and help discovering innovator ideas.

Two of the most popular columnists of the printed version, David Pogue and Mark Bittman, have their own spaces in the video site, where they show (each on in his own style) that an information video doesn't need to be a simple visual translation of a text and create formats that are not just well fitted for the internet, but make their videos perfect for watching with a mobile device as a video podcasts.

Since 2007 The New York Times is one of Brightcove's investors and uses their software to manage most part of their site.

For the last two years, the video section of The New York Times has also tried to create or use formats that would set apart, both from the content and the formal points of view. That way they came out with Blogginheads (a deal with http://bloggingheads.tv/ in order to showcase all kind of debates), or the Screen Tests, where popular actors talk in a minimal and intimate way.

Finally I guess that creating content in a similar way that a magazine does (entertaining, somewhat timeless, not mandatory tight to the breaking news) they have create a pure internet experience, where any of the videos can be considered a piece in its own or just a part of something else.