It has been 7 years since I've attended an Internet
Conference. I can't remember the name of the last one but it was at the exact same
location: The Hudson Theater of the Millenium Hotel. The same room in which I won my first international award in 2003. The exact same hotel I stayed in on my first visit in New York in 1996. Everything was converging for today's moment!
I'm a professional athlete whom has quit the sport. Grown a belly. But decided to jump back on the field. Does Internet have
changed since the post-dotcom fall in 2000? Yes, really.
Some of the trends have evolved and passed the critical mass
stage. Which makes them applicable today: Ecommerce, Advertorial, Mobile integration, Communitic. They were only concepts then. They are now a reality.
But something new is
Social Media. The fact that Internet is today a mass media makes it actually social. And it opens up new possibilities hard to imagine at the time. Sure 15 years ago we knew
that the Internet would help people to connect and exchange. Pierre Levy in his
book “Collective Intelligence” (1996) had envisioned accurately our society’s
mutation to digital.
But even with Levy’s predictions in mind, I didn’t envision
that in a cocktail party, each conversation would be interrupted 3 times by people
receiving/sending Tweets. I had never envisioned that the conference speakers
would speak in front of a crowd heads down. Faces lit up. Laptops on knees or
Smartphone in hands. Obviously people are experiencing something intense.
I will talk more about Social Media in further posts.
One thing that brought me intellectual pleasure was finally
to hear a word “granularity” to describe a concept that I could never named for
all these years: The fact that content need to be broken into parts. It is necessary to do so in order to be able to rearrange it in different order. To implement pieces in more than one context. To network each piece of content in many networks and make it available for search engines. That makes it easier to reuse, integrate and interconnect. A little bit like Lego blocks.
In 1998, I felt innovative to recommend to Cirque du Soleil
to implement their content within a variety of micro-sites rather than to implement everything under one large umbrella site. They never did. I felt it was necessary to better integrate the Web, rather than to wait for traffic. In the late 1990's the principle was to provide relevant content where traffic already existed.
That approach has reach a completely different
level today. Particularly with Twitter. It's not anymore about putting content online; making your message available. It's about using tools to use users content at your advantage; to get them in; to build a network and to leverage it. Your small Tweets may seem insignificant. But when you process them at a society level they mean more than anything else all together. Some go as far as predicting the end of websites (we shouldn't agree).
Granularity has now brought us to a simple Tweet: 140 characters.
Evan Sandhaus, semantic technologist in R&D operations at the New York Times, used the term “granularity” as a necessary direction to
go to serve the different audiences, the different platforms, the acceleration of content segmentation and to facilitate content search.
But granularity has two main challenges.
The first one was brought by Paul Sundue, director of
production working on R&D projects at DDB New York. It’s the fact that in
English language, each word has an average of 3 meanings. Which complexify the search
engines tasks.
The second one is to develop a new business model. Where
advertising isn’t attached to parcels of content. Or that it is generated
automatically - Which leads us maybe to the next decade.
