Blog

Athens.

Tonight I'm at the opening session for WebSci '09, and we're looking forward to a keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on the twentieth anniversary of his invention of the World Wide Web. The conference itself is going to be opened in the presence of none other than the president of Greece, though, so the place is swarming with Greek police (unsurprisingly, given the continuing low-level unrest in the country). In fact, there's a couple of secret service agents coming through right now, earpiece and all. His Excellency himself is running fashionably late.

Time to catch up with a few publications - my recent work is featured in a number of new collections:

Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, collects some of the best papers from the Mobile Media 2007 conference (which I blogged about at the time) in Sydney. Looks like a fabulous collection, and I'm delighted that an article by former QUT Visiting Scholar Liu Cheng and me about SMS news in China has been included. We're looking especially at the experience at Yunnan Daily Press, where Cheng led the roll-out of SMS news functionality, and we're including some staggering statistics about the growth of Internet and mobile use in China as well (I wonder how they'll be affected by the global financial crisis...).

I've spent some time last year (and I hope to do more of it in 2009) talking and writing about the increasing challenge to traditional television which the growing online video sector poses - both in terms of the original content available from the likes of YouTube and Current.tv and in terms of the shared and re-broadcast television content available from Justin.tv and various bittorrent networks.

My argument in that context was that such online services are gradually becoming more convenient than television itself, even where it's enhanced through VCRs, DVRs, TiVos, iPod Videos and other time- and space-shifting devices. Well, as it turns out, younger television audiences at least in the US agree with me. The Wall Street Journal reports that a new study by Solutions Research Group found that

Sydney.
Up next at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Robert Leach, Head of MCn Connect, whose interest is in digital television - and he begins by saying that interactive TV is now here; he finds it impossible to watch TV news without being able to 'press the red button' and get the latest news headlines. (Hmmm... Most Australians appear to use the Internet for this, rather than pay-TV?) Digital TV is changing rapidly. Does this mean the death of TV and TV advertising?

No, says Robert - we are watching as much TV as we ever have done, even though usage of other devices is also growing. Where the major growth area lies is digital video in its various forms. In the digital environment, devices have multiplied, but media are converging; the challenge for marketers and advertisers is to involve and engage audiences in video content. Where the Clinton campaign slogan in 1992 was "it's the economy, stupid", today the slogan for advertisers should be "it's the content, stupid" - if broadcasting or other media forms are declining, this is not the fault of technology, but of the content being broadcast. Great content will continue to attract a mass audience - but that audience may exist across a wide variety of devices from conventional televisions to online and mobile devices, scattered across time and space.

Sydney.
Matt Bruce from Nielsen Online is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; his focus is also on online advertising. There is continuing growth in the number of banners, advertisers, and campaigns online in Australia, as well as in the overall display advertising spend online. As of quarter three, 2008, the big spenders in this field of advertising continue to spend (even the battered finance sector); search advertising is strong and dominated by Google; even spending on Google image search advertising is in itself as strong as advertising on the next closest search engine.