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A few days back, Nick Denton of Gawker fame issued a new proclamation to the world which identified 7 key drivers that will define the future of their media brand.

1. The power of the scoop- getting a big story first can change your brand
2. Aggregate or die- you've got to be out there on Twitter and Facebook
3. Demonstrate a rounded personality- more than the gutter
4. The web is a visual medium
5. The growth of video ads- that's where the money is
6. Appointment programing- TV gets tune-in impact
7. Gawker is a branding vehicle- it's a way to sell yourselves to advertisers

Denton concluded..

If the model sounds like TV, that is no accident. There is no future in low-end web advertising, at least not for a media company with any aspirations. We will offer a larger canvas for both our editors and advertisers; and pair their offerings in the way that the web has so far failed and TV has done so well."

It seems amazing that after decades of the internet trying so hard to become a new medium, it's turning into the media that once was its supposed enemy.

The big question here is if all media companies with any aspiration want to be like TV- what do TV companies want to be when they finally grow up?


Posted by Ed Cotton Technology Review has a great article that gets inside the world of 4chan and its founder Christopher Poole to reveal a world where anonymity is prized, anything goes and there is no history. It's a place where the ugly side of the web that many want to censor is free and rampant and is in many ways the alter ego to the corporate web.

Poole is attracting interest from investors, TED conference organizers and Facebook employees who flocked to a recent talk he gave on their campus.

"Visited mostly by young men in their late teens and early 20s, 4chan is loosely organized by topics of interest--music, games, TV, animation (Japanese and otherwise). But nearly half its messages are posted in a single random-topics section known as /b/, and /b/'s anarchy sets the tone for the site in general. It's out of /b/ that swarms of gleeful online troublemakers--trolls, in Internet parlance--occasionally issue forth to prank, hack, harass, and otherwise digitally provoke other online communities and users. From /b/, as well, the Internet at large absorbs a steady stream of catchphrases and sight gags--LOLcats, rickrolling, and other ubiquitous Internet memes that seep up from the endless, dizzying churn of /b/'s vast reservoir of inside jokes. Often intended to shock, shot through with racism, misogyny, and other qualities deliberately chosen from beyond the contemporary pale, the words and images of /b/ have become an online spectacle: "Lunatic, juvenile ... brilliant, ridiculous and alarming," the Guardian newspaper's website once called it. "The id of the Internet,"...."

I guess a trip inside the world of 4chan is a journey that has to be made by any planner serious about understanding the mind of young males today.


Posted by Ed Cotton The BBC has decided the web is now worthy and has made it the subject of a detailed documentary series, The Virtual Revolution, that explores its origins, evolution and examines the implications of the technology for society.

It's a highly ambitious, well-researched and thoughtful look at what 20 years of the web means for humanity. This is the perfect time to take a look back and project forward because we are on the cusp of massive expansion as the developing world comes on board in leaps and bounds.

The series is narrated by Dr. Aleks Krotoski, who aside from studying the implications of the internet for the past 10 years, is also a member of The Guardian's crack team of technology journalists.

The first program in the series examines the idea of the web as the great leveler and leaves no stone unturned in it's quest for answers. Most of the program is filmed in the Bay Area and includes interviews with local luminaries-Stewart Brand, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Keen, Chad Hurley and John Perry Barlow.

The big theme here is one of revolution and counter-revolution which is explained by the adoption of the internet by late 1960s and early 70s Bay Area radicals, fueled by hope from the Summer of Love and looking for a space where their ideals could be realized, a space that turned out to be The Well.

The program concludes that despite all the hippie driven hope for true openness and utopia, the reality today is very different with a handful of new media brands that have taken and co-opted control.

Krotoski finds an interesting contrast from the ideals of 60s radicals to 2010, where there is basically one online store, one social network, one search engine and one online video network.

Despite the potential doomsday scenario of limited control, Krotoski hopeful thesis is that the beauty of the internet is its state of constant flux, which simply put, means those who are in control today, are very likely not to be in control forever.



Posted by Ed Cotton Kevin Kelly's take on the next phase of web development that involves data sharing from the Web 2.0 Conference.

He takes us through what might happen in the next 6,500 days of the web.

Some highlights.

1. Not be anything like the web

2. Be a single machine- everything is connect to the same thing.We have one large machine with the web as its OS

3. The web will own every bit that's produced- if it's not part of the web, it will not count

4. Everything in our lives will be on this "machine"

5. The machine has and will have a global sense- see latest financial crisis

6. Move to the cloud

7. Be all about sharing- what can we do? what will the limits be?

8. Always be on- never off

9. Extreme dependence on this "machine" because it makes us smarter. Being off will feel like an amputation!

10. Lead us to continue to question- "Who are we?"

11. We will need to believe in the impossible

Click To Play

Posted by Ed Cotton Data from Akamai shows that Obama become the new number 1 new story in internet traffic volume since records began (2005).

Obama beat out a mix of celebrity deaths and sporting events to claim the number one spot.




Posted by Ed Cotton Mozilla, the folks behind Firefox are at the forefront of 2.0 marketing. They rely on their community to build and market their products and have done some amazing things by taping into their base. Here's a short interview with Paul Kim, VP Marketing, Mozilla Corporation, who explains more.

1. Briefly describe your position?

I'm the VP of marketing for Mozilla Corp.

We work as part of a global open source project to make Firefox.

Mostly, I try to stay out of the way of an inspired team of marketers working in partnership with a worldwide community to spread the word about Firefox.

2. What, in your opinion, has changed for brands in the 2.0 world?

The poles that immediately jumped to mind for me are "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" and "Line Rider".

Classic branding reached a kind of apex in 1971 with the Coca-Cola "Hilltop" ad -

"Hilltop" rolls up multiple strands of an era that is receding for brands: concentration of audience and attention, advertising as entertainment, and implicit upleveling of professionalism over word of mouth.

I can't think of a better counter and illustration of the structural changes 2.0 has introduced than "Line Rider". A Flash-based physics experiment spreads through the global network to spawn a subnet of participant generated content, a commercial enterprise, and a 2.0 brand sui generis.

- 25K Line Rider videos

The core of 2.0 is continuous, realtime and actionable feedback loops.

As the pre-2.0 lag between idea and response shrinks, we'll see the rise of unpredictable, resonant brands that validate themselves not through multi-million dollar traditional campaigns, but through the trackable, grassroots support of individual humans, enstatiated on the web.

3. What have been Mozilla’s most interesting marketing efforts and why do you think they worked?

There is a line from the launch of Firefox to today that rests on co-opting traditional marketing models and opening them up to participation by our community.

The three campaigns that come to mind:

New York Times Ad. 10,000 Mozilla community members donate over $250,000 in a week to fund New York Times ad to launch Firefox 1.0


Firefox Flicks. A contest to deliver community generated 30-second ads for Firefox (inspired in part by MoveOn's Bush in 30 Seconds contest and Butler Shine's Converse UGC campaign). Over 250 submissions; tens of millions of views on video nets.

Download Day. Rallied the Mozilla community to drive awareness for the launch of Firefox 3 with a campaign to set a new Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a single day. Exceeded our goal of 5M downloads with a final tally of 8M. Campaign lived on the web, was global, and provided a satisfying mechanism for individual participation in a collective effort.

4. How can old school brands become more 2.0?

Listen, share, adapt, be open and give back.

At the edges, reimagine your business down to its DNA (for much, much
more on this topic, read Umair Haque at http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/

5. How do expect the economy to impact people’s relationship to brands?

My hope is that the current economic environment, as fleeting as it may be, reinforces the need for sustainable living.

How this filter influences brand relationships isn't clear to me yet.

I'm optimistic about a rebalancing in the relationship and interaction between human and brand(s) in the years still to come.





Posted by Ed Cotton