NOTES FROM THE MEDIA REVOLUTION

How Apple is letting down storytellers

If you are a geek chances are that you can’t say iPad without saying the word Flash in the same sentence these days. While most people just see a beautiful gadget, tech developers, designers and content producers see another wasted opportunity to distribute some of their beautiful an important online storytelling projects. Why? Because Apple has decided to ban the use of the Adobe Flash technology on iPad and iPhone. This past week Apple even announced new terms that prevents people from converting things build in Flash (and other technologies) to apps that can run on the iPad/iPhone. 

There are a bunch of different theories as to why Apple is opposed to Flash, and Apple themselves has had blurry and deviating explanations. I think the most plausible explanation is that they want to protect their App store eco-system (with Flash people could build cool apps that would not have to be offered through the app store). 

I am actually quite ok with Apples closed-eco-system-approach that forces us all into using Apple, as long as it means that they turn out amazing products and innovative technology that makes life better for all of us.  But in this case it is just the opposite. They are severely restricting creativity, and building a dam to prevent great storytelling from flowing out into the world. Apple and Steve Jobs, the company and the man that empowered generations of video and photo entusiasts on with great software and gave wings to Pixars amazing animation, are now putting business tactics before creativity and storytelling.

I don’t really care that much about technology…well, not really true, I am a total tech freak. But in principle I don’t care if it is Flash, Silverlight, Cocoa, HTML 5 or some other technology I am using, as long as it let’s me do powerful interactive documentaries that moves people. And the indisputable fact is, that Flash is just the only good alternative for this at the moment. Until Apple provides a viable alternative that let’s you create and distribute audio-visual storytelling with the ease of Flash, they are just providing an annoying barrier for the digital storytellers of the world. 

Some pretty good posts about the Apple/Flash topic:

http://advice.cio.com/tom_kaneshige/10032/apple_an_evil_empire_in_the_making

http://mashable.com/2010/04/10/steve-jobs-adobe/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

Studio in Your Pocket (Take 1)

drewvigal:

HT to @koci for the link to “New iPhone Photo App: ShowCase - Create a slideshow in the palm of your hand.” A couple of weeks ago, @zlwise told me about Monle, which, btw, is being used by American Public Media. Both apps look impressive. This is “Take 1” as it warrants a longer post in a couple of days.

Time to kill the foreign reporter

I woke up this morning in Copenhagen to the merry news of Obama’s health bill finally being passed. Throughout the morning I have been following how Danish media is covering this by interviewing “experts on USA” and foreign correspondents. It got me thinking how obsolete the idea of a foreign reporter seems in the age of online media.

The idea that someone is posted in a foreign country, and reporting home to the rest of us who has no access to the local events in this far away region worked great twenty years ago. But now all I need to do is to turn on my PC or iPhone, and Twitter, Facebook, Globalvoices.com, Nytimes.com and a bunch of other news sources will let me know what is going on in the streets from Kabul to Washington DC on a much more detailed and well documented level that any foreign reporter could do. I could even turn on the good old TV and get CNN and BCC from satellite most anywhere on the globe. And I am not really that interested in the national or local “angle” of things anymore. Yes, I am born in Denmark, but does it make sense for me to have a correspondent give me the danish perspective on Obamas bill? Most of the time I would much rather have the global perspective.

Granted, I might be a bit different than the average news consumer in the western world. I am a more extensive traveler, and more wired than a lot of people. But at the same time, I am probably a core user of international news, and I am a first mover (in the area of media consumption and technology) which means my behavior will be main stream in a few years.

I am not saying we should kill the idea of a correspondent or foreign reporter all together. But I think it would make sense to rethink the methods and the way we use the resources. Sending out an average reporter to tell us what we already know from online media makes little sense. But to have a real expert give us perspective and interpret local media, bloggers and all the other streams of information coming out of different regions would give me value as a news consumer. And instead of interviewing someone from the University of Copenhagen about Obama’s health plan, why not get a professor from Stanford, Columbia or some other US University on Skype in Denmark? To shoot an email, or call on skype or phone across the world is as easy as calling next door these days. 

So cut off 90% of the journalists we currently send around the world, use local bloggers and other sources instead, and bring in interviews through Skype and other channels. And the money saved could be used to send out some real, top notch experts as our correspondents, and to use more time to cover things in depth. 

My old book still lives

My publisher decided not to reprint my book “Den Digitale Fortæller” (The Digital Storyteller), and so according to danish law all the rights fall back to the author. There are still a bunch of scandinavian schools that uses it, so I decided to put it online for free download under Creative Commons license. The book is about the new digital storytelling language and has a bunch of quite hands-on tips of how to best use video, photo, audio, text, interactivity and all the other digital ingredients to create strong stories. Unfortunately it is only in danish, and it is from 2001 so a lot of the cases and general thoughts have become a bit dated. You can get it here for 1.59 USD (which just covers the cost of hosting it with Lulu.com): http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-digital-storyteller-%28danish%29/8509209

Multimedia in Moscow

I just returned from Moscow where I participated in the opening of a great multimedia show called Projections of Reality http://projectionsofreality.org/en/. The show organized by Objective Reality Foundation assembles one of the largest collections of documentary based multimedia under one roof and it is the best bid for a doing an exhibition of “multimedia” that I have come across so far (it is really a mix of multi-channel video installations, web-based projects, and interactive documentary films). The organizers build closed off “booths” for each individual project with screens and speakers, and in some cases the viewers had access to keyboard and mouse to control what was on the screen in front of them. The exhibition presents 22 artists including Tim Hetherington, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Erika Larsen, Alex Majoli, Alec Soth, Ilkka Uimonen and Karen Mirzoyan, pieces produced by Magnum In Motion and the New York Times’ multimedia department, as well as a number of powerful projects by young photographers from Russia and the CIS.

Another interesting part of this show is that it has been linked together with lectures, and online workshops to help young talented photographers in the region get a voice and to link the new media world with mainstream media. I have done an online master class for 15 students the past two months, and I must say it has worked really well. At the venue in Moscow I finally got a chance to meet my students face-to-face for the first time, and it was really special to feel that you know the work and professional thoughts of someone before you actually meet them in person. I also did a talk at the venue one evening and I think about 150 people showed up. I was really impressed and amazed with the kind of interest and enthusiasm that is gathered around interactive storytelling in Russia. To me it shows that it is not longer something a few of us is doing small experiments with in our own little labs.

In addition to the lecture I also did a two day Masterclass for a group of radio journalists, organized by the Foundation for Independent Radio Broadcasting (FNR): http://www.fnr.ru/eng/index.shtml. I was equally inspired by this event, which really proved to me that we now have the tools to easily do pretty good multimedia without big resources. The second day my students did a series of small 3 minute slidecasts on the topic “Me against the city”. It was pretty impressive what they put together in a few hours having had only a few days of training. You can see the result (In Russian) here: http://www.podst.ru/blogs/1417/