Michael Zimbalist, head of R&D at The New York Times Company, speaks about the opportunities arising from 2D Barcodes and the Semantic Web for The Times.
Well Michael, you do not need to point any longer to Japan, in Germany and especially Switzerland we are ahead as well.
An abundance of information can create a scarcity of context
An abundance of choice can create a scarcity of advice
An abundance of content can create a scarcity of time
An abundance of people competing for your attention can create a scarcity of reputational ways to choose among them.
In the old model, distribution bottlenecks made most of those choices for us--we could only watch what was on and buy what was on the shelf. Now, in a Long Tail world, everything gets out there--choice is abundant. This creates an opportunity for new and better filters to navigate that choice (Chapter 7 of my book!), which I would argue describes the examples below.
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
[...] This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
U.S. should stop calling slow DSL ‘broadband’
I recently spoke at a conference on Web video held at the Finnish embassy in Washington, and sponsored by Beet.TV. In this excerpt, I spoke about several obstacles to the web’s emergence as a replacement for standard TV, including the very slow bandwidth that is marketed as “broadband” in the United States.
In essence, three fundamental shifts are piling on top of each other.
Advertising is migrating to digital media because it is far more effective in targeting and reaching relevant audiences than most traditional media.
Aggregate advertising spend in the US is likely to experience a cyclical downturn as the economy softens
People are confronting a proliferation of sources competing for their attention and becoming less receptive to advertising messages, even when they are very well targeted
[...] The likely evolution of Internet advertising
The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply: The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customers.
[...] On the other hand, if entrepreneurs want to build enduring businesses that will change the world, resist the temptation to become too dependent on advertising. It’s OK to offer many products and services for free (in fact, that will be essential for success) but just be sure you understand your role in a broader ecosystem where someone (even if it is not directly you) is making a ton of money with platforms and services that people will pay for. In particular, look for ecosystems with platforms and services that generate increasing value as the number of participants expands.
A huge part of the generational change is a change in expectations of transparency, informality, and sources of authority. So when Devin says that Google isn't terribly useful for professional uses like financial research, I think he misses just how much authority bloggers are getting as reliable news sources, and how people are using tools like iGoogle to pull together targeted RSS data feeds. Raw Google results may be less useful than Reuters-filtered results, but how about community or expert-curated Google results? Just as Reuters' customers are adding value to the Reuters data stream, they are capable of adding value to the Google data stream. And there are increasingly powerful tools for managing that stream.
Today I was really curious who won - Obama or Hillary - and it took me some time before being before a computer. This is the scenario where I use my cellphone to get to the results quickly.
This is also an experiment. I am interested to find out how much times these QR Codes will be scanned during the next weeks. And which one of these media companies will get most scanned.
And as a media company with a mobile site I would definitely include the QR Code in the newspaper (on the frontpage), in all my ads and on the website. I would use different codes for frontpage/ads/website to find out what works best.
There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.
How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.
In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.
Google believes that technology can revolutionize traditional print advertising and make it even more useful for readers. This fits with our commitment to making advertising as useful as possible for the end user.
[...]
Why would newspaper ads include 2D barcodes?
For advertisers, using 2D barcodes in newspaper ads can be an effective and flexible way to engage with potential customers. The benefit to readers is an easier, quicker way to get more information about businesses that interest them.
How can I add 2D barcodes to my print ads?
If you're an advertiser who is interested in using 2D barcodes in a Google Print Ads campaign, please contact your Google representative.
Selected 2D barcode decoding software
You can find decoding software and lists of supported devices by visiting sites like these:
