There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere recently that we are risking an attention crash with all the demands and pressures of an always-on social media world.
“By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed. Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.”
He’s right. What balance I once had has now been ruined with my new found love for Twitter.
Clay Shirky, NYU professior and author of the new book “Here Comes Everybody” offers another perspective. In this presentation from last month’s Web 2.0 conference, Clay makes the case that Americans actually have a tremendous “cognitive surplus” from hours of TV viewing that can be applied to participation activities online.
To illustrate the scale of this surplus, Clay estimates that the entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. That my sound staggering until you realize that Americans spend about that much time every weekend just watching TV ads. According to Clay, the 200 billion hours that Americans spend watching television each year represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects. That is per year.
Nobody is implying that behavior will shift that dramatically, but just a 1% shift of American’s time from TV to participation online would amount to 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
So while the social media savvy may feel over saturated with information, we have to remember that a majority of the population still haven’t joined the party.
In this week’s episode of Market Edge on WebmasterRadio.fm, Larry Weber interviews Akamai CEO Paul Sagan about the evolution of rich media content on the web.
In this interview, Paul describes the dramatic shift in consumer behavior from TV viewing to computer browsing. But with so much of today’s market dollars still dedicated toward TV a tectonic pressure is building that will soon cause a huge change in the business model of television in the next couple years.
Enjoy the interview and feel free to add your comments on this issues here.
Web Content Technology
Akamai CEO Paul Sagan profiles his companys work in web content technology developed so that end users can easily access web content with the help of thousands of servers , plus he discuss the evolution of delivering rich media content
I vividly remember a day back in 1997 sitting in front of my computer coding the GUI for a Web-based corporate research portal. It annoyed me that I had to find a way to package so much information into a 640 x 480 parcel of techno-real-estate. And as I longed for more square footage, I could taste my dreams as bigger and bigger monitors propelled me into a world of designing for an 800 x 600 screen resolution. I was in pixel heaven – and then came the Mobile Web.
11 years later, with a good 30-40 percent of my online time spent via my Motorola Q and iPod Touch mobile devices, I’ve got a persistent “déjà vu” feeling that takes me back to the “old days” of the Web.
HTML Emails: The corner has finally turned on being able to send out graphically-formatted HTML emails as a standard. It’s not easy to consume HTML formatted emails on my Q – at times it’s nearly impossible and I lose out on that particular communication.
Heavy Graphics/Formatting: Broadband internet access finally beat out turtle slow dialup and websites became a rich-media experience. These same websites are usually a mess on a mobile browser.
Screen Resolution: Forget 640 x 480 pixels – a good Mobile GUI has to fit on a fraction of that real-estate.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a HUGE fan of portable content – I just find it fascinating that as mobile technology continues to evolve, we are finding ourselves solving problems that we thought we already solved.
While I’m sure I’ll continue to get a sense of déjà vu, I’m glad we now have a collective set of lessons learned which means only good things for our mobile web user experiences.
I caught an episode of “Access Hollywood” the other night. One of their feature stories was the re-launch of their companion website www.accesshollywood.com – Who cares, right? Well, Access Hollywood does…and BIG time (and they should). While I was intrigued by the length and depth of airtime given to this story, it was host Billy Bush’s voiceover commentary that grabbed my attention. In it, he described how central and integrated Access Hollywood’s website has become (in a very short time) to the distribution of entertainment news & media. What used to be a second thought to the on-air broadcast is now a rush to post content online.
And then while watching CNN’s coverage of the New Hampshire primary results, I literally had a “holy crap” moment: Suddenly my “viewer experience” became a seamless “user experience” because of the way CNN converged its online and on-air media.
The highly watched cable news network managed to pull this off in a number of ways:
Purposeful Crossovers: The on-air broadcast of the results maintained a persistent running tally of votes framed around the visual commentary – if a viewer was watching CNN in HD, they’d get access to additional data points along both sides of the frame. Throughout the broadcast, host Wolf Blitzer would lead viewers to reference their laptops and check out CNNpolitics.com in order to drill down and hone into more granular real-time specifics. While lots of broadcast programs lead people to the web, it was the effortless, integrated, “live”, and complementary nature of the use of their website that grabbed me.
Embedded Content: At certain points throughout the broadcast, CNN would feature segments from the various campaign’s live video feeds and direct viewers to CNNpolitics.com to tune into any of the candidate’s specific coverage for further viewing and analysis. Since the on-air broadcast only gave samplings of each campaign event, viewers were easily able to target their preferred candidate online and augment the on-air content. Although CNNpolitics.com was referenced constantly throughout the broadcast, it wasn’t disruptive – it felt right.
Integrated Look & Feel: CNNpolitics.com was a natural creative extension of CNN’s “Election Center” set design and broadcast graphics. The two mediums visually became like one. Viewers who frequently turned their attention from being an online user to an on-air viewer felt a single, integrated experience.
The fundamental shift in the way in which we consume and interact with media has now tipped the scale from the after thought of “supporting Web information” to primary online content. We’ll be seeing many more examples of this in 2008 as TV continues to become an inefficient content consumption technology.
