The TrueTalk Blog

Hail Britannia?

Foreign Policy has posted its list of the five worst places to be a kid. Iraq was #1, no surprise there. #2 is Zimbabwe, with 12% of children dying before the age of five. #3 is the quickly failing Democratic Republic of Congo. #4, India, in which 12 million children are engaged in labor instead of education.

#5? Great Britain!

Why? Smoking, drinking and teen pregnancy. Here's FP's assessment of the problems:

Kids in Britain, while far better off than most children in the developing world, are in shockingly bad shape compared with their counterparts in other high-income countries. According to a recent U.N. report, Britain is the worst nation for children among 21 economically advanced countries around the world. The report found that Britain ranks worst in the number of kids who smoke, abuse alcohol and drugs, have unprotected sex, and get pregnant at a young age. It also found that kids in Britain have poor relations with their parents and friends, and that nearly a third have no desire to do anything but unskilled work. What’s more, 3.8 million kids in Britain are living in poverty, despite extensive government antipoverty efforts.

This is the kind of insidious erosion of the social fabric and of social services that has characterized the last decade in many countries, several of them in Western Europe. One day, a proud country wakes up to find its children alienated and at risk for diseases of all kinds.

What FP doesn't point out is the role of this trend on the growth of home-grown British terrorists. What percentage of those 3.8 million children living in poverty are immigrants or first generation children of immigrants? How much of the seething anger that we've seen in the banlieue is similarly rooted?

Civilization is a continuing challenge; never a fait accompli. It is deeply troubling to find one of the greatest nations on earth backsliding in such a fundamental manner.

Not Just Kidding Around

What do you think of when you hear that two fifteen year-olds have created a new video webpage?

Skateboards? Booty shaking? High school hi-jinx? (Don't you just love the word, "hi-jinx"?)

Sure, and, most times, you'd be right.

But, in the case of NotableInterviews.com, you'd be very wrong. (Warning! That site autoplays the latest interview, either video or audio.)

So far, the guys over at Notableinterviews have interviewed brokep (one of the founders of ThePirateBay.org, one of the most notorious torrent sites on the Web), Robert David Hall (a CSI star, I'm told), and Christopher Hitchens, noted intellectual and outspoken atheist.

I'll be very interested to see how this site progresses because the idea of two teenagers setting up a serious interview site intrigues me. As the world continues to change and as media power de-volves to the people formerly known as the audience, experiments like this one are going to become more and more prevalent. Some day, soon I predict, new media producers will fill niche spots for each online generation, which is why Boomers like me and kids like the guys at Notableinterviews keep poking and prodding and trying to learn how to get it right.

Check 'em out.

Meetin' Up in NYC

Wait...how could it be Friday already?

OK. Well...here's this weeks Featured Foto:

OK, I'll admit that's not the most exciting foto I've ever taken/posted. But this is an instance in which looks can be deceiving. The picture is Room 172 in Uris Hall at Columbia University, where last night Yaron Samid convened the fourth (or fifth?...actually, sixth!) meeting of the NY Video 2.0 Group. It was the second meeting I've attended. About 150 intrepid souls braved a frigid NY winter evening to learn about the newest developments in the world of online video.

Now, regular readers know I've been fascinated by  YouTube for months. I've created and posted over 100 videos and formed some great relationships. I've  seen evidence of warmth, humor, generosity, ennui, idiocy, envy, sloth (alright already!) and many, many gratuitous acts of cruelty.  That is to say, modern society is once again taking itself online, this time in video form.

Last night's group heard from five entrepreneurs (one of whom is preneuring inside a monster company). First up, Michael Smolens of dotSUB, a company bringing a Wikipedia-model of collaboration to the process of subtitling online video into roughly 50 languages. Very cool.

Second was Jeff Pulver, founder of  Network2.tv, (after he co-founded Vonage, that is) a  service that enables users to "create your own network" by aggregating video material and watching on anything from a browser to an iPod. With his history, I'd advise not betting against Jeff.

Next, Mark Siry of NBBC.com. No, that's not me stuttering, it's the name of a new B2B service within NBC, enabling content licensors, distributors and advertisers to "work together more effectively to monetize digital video." I'm all for that!

Then, David Dundas of YouAre.tv, which looks suspiciously like that other video site starting with You, but has actually been around longer. David's focusing his business on the indie filmmaker  and promises revenue sharing with content creators. Once again, a cause close to my heart!

Finally, Aaron Cohen of Bolt.com talked about his site and his vision of a model for the future of online video. Cohen believes that while lots of companies are building widgets to enable them to increase their reach, few are focusing on what he sees as the bigger opportunity, growing page views/second. The latter is certainly a more challenging task, but Cohen believes that's where the gold is in this era he compares with 1849 California. Cohen's talk was the least promotional, most conceptual, of the evening.

All of the talks were interesting, but the most exciting element was looking around the room at the eager, enthusiastic, energetic group of VCs, entrepreneurs, vloggers, artists, geeks and dreamers. This looks like the kind of group that comes together around big ideas.

I'll be back for the Feb. 22 meeting. If you're in the NYC area, I advise you do the same.

Have a great weekend.

Talkin' Out of Both Sides

Karen and I love Battlestar Galactica. It's great drama with well-drawn characters and interesting plots; it poses mature questions and doesn't provide pat answers.

The other day, Virginia Heffernan wrote a piece about BSG in the Times. OK article. One bit jumped out, however:

The recent series, with its unexpected seriousness, first appeared on the SciFi Channel two years ago, having already had its world premiere in Britain. There, Sky One’s confidence in the show, which had begun as an American mini-series in 2003, far outstripped that of SciFi’s parent company, which waited until American fans had downloaded the show from sharing sites like BitTorrent (bittorrent.com) in huge numbers before committing to broadcasting it. Now it appears on Fridays, and the premiere of this third season, on Oct. 6, set ratings records for the SciFi Channel.

Hmm. That's interesting. Who is SciFi Channel's parent company?

Oh, just NBC.

So, here was NBC waiting to see how much BitTorrent activity BSG generated before deciding to greenlight the show for broadcast?

I thought all that BitTorrent stuff was illegal. IP piracy. Actionable.

How can you sue somebody for downloading stuff when the very act of downloading is part of your network's R&D strategy?

Just asking...

Hat tip: Karen at breakfast.

How "New" Becomes "Valid"

Guy Brighton's written a succinct little post over at the excellent PSFK in which he makes stark contrasts between the speed at which new ideas get publicized in blogs and in mainstream media, in this case, the fashion publication, WGSN.

Here's the comment I left on the PSFK post:

PSFK vs WGSN is another great example of the "democratization of expertise" taking place on web 2.0...I read both, but for different reasons. PSFK when I want to find out what's happening right now...WGSN when I want to convince someone that something I told them months ago is really, finally!, starting to "happen."

Unfortunately, there are people who will not believe any ideas  that do not appear in traditional media. 

For them, valid = already widely believed. 

I know the hyper-magnification of all things digital bit us in the butt five years ago, but the methods for triangulating the power, or validity, of new ideas today is far more well-developed than it was then. 

Take podcasting.  A year ago, those of us listening to Adam, Dave Winer, and Dawn and Drew knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was a big deal.  As the months passed, bloggers picked up the trend and vetted it, putting it through the equivalent of the Betty Ford "de-hypification" program, and declared it sound.  Even though momentum built, it wasn't until its adoption by mainstream iTunes months later that podcasting appeared on the media radar screen.

So, by watching sites like PSFK, and IF, its ritzier sibling, we can now get the early, early read on ideas, and follow them through the long tail of the adoption cycle, still long before the WGSNs of the world can take a chance running a feature about them.

For some of us today, valid = on the right trajectory.