Well, since I wasn’t working for anyone else I decided to work on myself. Unemployment is an enforced existential and physical diet. After awhile I realized I’d been walking around with my pants around my ankles. I had no Me to employ. Pulling up my pants helped. After that I started finding what was me, really me; still on going, but there came a point in which the ‘finding’ of me became truly personal. (I know this sounds 70s, but personal catharsis is typically fairly incoherent stuff, simply because it is so basically, unwaxed floor of self personal.
Remaking me around me came next and that’s what’s going on, that’s what I’m getting and the getting is deadly serious (getting mortality wipes many filthy lenses clean). My life is, who I am and how I connect and make things in this world is, The Get. Hence, the new thread in this blog.

Starting points are always reflexive – exactly the idea. I started this Network Search at this point, the morning after a meeting for a startup in which I saw myself at work with people who knew much more about things I do. David Colter was there, with Michael Wood leading the effort. The meeting went well, but it was clear that Hospitality International was not going to be funded, but that both Michael and David soon would be. David Colter is one of the best and brightest of the IP-delivered content world and Michael one of the country’s leading user device designers. That the two of them were sitting with me in a cramped office trying to build the future on the back of our savings was a little too poignant. The next morning I went down to the ocean in search of something to paint and took this picture. Somehow – between university and that meeting I came up with the idea for Network Search. I also, at the same time, realized that my life was drifting and that I needed to connect – rather, reconnect – with people I considered to be important to me. Hence, in the process of building a project that attempts to rebuild higher education in the cloud, I began the process of looking up old friends. Little did I know that in most cases, painting and writing would provide the many the leverage for reconnection and that, in many cases I was too late.

When I began the research that provides the background for Network Search, I understood the intractable nature of institutional higher education. I had seen it at work in other projects in higher ed. So I designed the project to both involve and ‘ work around’ those institutions. Every school needs its secret sauce, its just that most of that sauce is just – sauce. So interest is coming from media technologists (like me, only employed) and I thank them up front for their support.

Business Intelligence programs such as IBM’s COGNOS 10 have the ability to direct multi-platform ad campaigns, but the sector isn’t buying, literally. A good portion of the problem is the messy state of the incoming data and the notion that data partnerships would have to be established to share data across IPTV, CABLE, Radio, Wireless, Online, etc. For content owners who are establishing multi-platform verticals (Fox, Comcast, etc.) it should be an easier task, but it lacks sex appeal and requires considerable shoe leather.

But think about it. How much ROI would there be in the ability to run orchestrated, dynamically targeted multi-platform ad campaigns? There are a few Asian companies (one based in California) utilizing targeted advertising now – locally and nationally. Most of the domestic Cable MSO ran significant targeted (behavioral) pilots in 2009. The usability of consumer data – from all platforms, including STBs – exists. Companies such as Bluekai trade in personal data as a commodity. There are methodologies that protect privacy and permit efficient, large-scale targeting. ‘Meaningful’ data connects with the consumer in ways that give ads greater profitability and consumers less extraneous mulch to work through in avails and as they move from device to device. It is time for the business of entertainment to work across all platforms and content types to harness the power and reach of analytics.

It is also time for Congress to address the imposition of uneven and often arbitrary regulation that stands in the way of sensible data use and real consumer control. Online video, the Networks, Channels and the rest of the Web all live in different regulatory and business realities – for networks increasingly capable of varieties of ‘personalization’ – those realities can be harmonized for the public good and greater profit. Its time for the industry to sit down and iron out data standards and do the hard work of developing data that can provide real coherent ad and content performance without consumer ‘invasion’. Such a process would also inevitably address security and the data misuse that permits identity theft. Digital content distribution, and the power of data that holds such promise, utilizes a foundational infrastructure that demands attention.

The wild west of consumer data – in all digital forms – needs a sheriff and a town ready to back him/her up.

At this conference, tropical tech depressions roll across the ocean and find themselves thrown up on continental beaches like technicolor coconuts, eventually taken to the public table. (In the US, we just get the depressions named for French movies, like Jules, Gigi and Katrina). France is the IPTV Big Break)  of the planet (the booth girls on the RAI Beach were Dutch, but they looked French), the British BBC rides the wild surf of Convergence and everyone watches OTT and Social Media, because those waves are invisible (virtual) waves and all there is to watch is girls on the beach laughing at YouTube bits and texting away. But who says an intangible is not surfable?

I’m from the US, where the waves today are flat and empty and the beach is congested with people in faded Nordstrom suits looking for work. I sold stuff on eBay to pay the ticket and friends are putting me up. My skill set is listening, problem-solving, placing tech and content partners together – creating, then making boards to ride waves. I’ll tell you  about what I find on the beach.

Let’s meet at IBC – and watch this space. Surf’s up on the Amster!

This construct (I admit, it’s an awful word, I’ll work on finding something else…) will tie contextual information to individuals and groups in the way that James Joyce is tied to his novel Ulysses and that novel to world literature.  In the universe of the evolving web these are multi directional (one-one, one to many, and many to more) and non hierarchical.

How to picture this? Think of all of Ulysses, including Joyce’s notes, visuals and reference materials, art, the geography of Dublin – all of it – in a multidimensional bubble around him with which other bubbles can connect and merge.

Social Media, the Web, Media and Search are all in their infancy. They are baby rattles. What they become will resemble a fuller human experience of our minds and our lives. Technology is a projection of what we are and how we identify, share and create meaning. This blog is about how that happens.