Traffic Is Heavy

Internet traffic that is. eMarketer provides these data.

The latest statistics released by the Pew Institute illustrates that the internet has not just reached critical mass with the youngest among us, but with older Americans too. And still growing.

No matter ones age, using the internet today is almost unavoidable. So it makes sense that 27% of those over 75 are on line.

Nielsen Online contributed these stats:

Is there any other medium that averages such high daily use levels? Between home and work use of the internet, for many people, is the epicenter of people lives. I can't think of any other tool, appliance, or entertainment device that commands such use.

Stats like this should be a strong reminder to everyone in radio just how important your digital strategy is. It needs to be deeper than a home page and a stream--rich content that enables interactivity, entertains, and informs is a must.

Are we there yet? I would say yes and no depending on the station or company one is talking about. Where does your station stand?

50 Years Ago This Year: The Birth of the INTERNET

This is a fascinating, detailed, and a great read (and listen).

Thought I would share this story from Vanity Fair.

An Oral History of the Internet

How the Web Was Won

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

by Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb July 2008

This year marks the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment. In 1958 the United States government set up a special unit, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (arpa), to help jump-start new efforts in science and technology. This was the agency that would nurture the Internet.

This year also marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mosaic, the first widely used browser, which brought the Internet into the hands of ordinary people.

Email...We Don't Need Stinkin' Email!

Or the internet for that matter. According to a recent telephone survey conducted by Parks Associates and reported in PC World Magazine one fifth, 21%, of the US population has never used email. Some 20 million households in the US do not have internet access, and 1 in 3 heads of household have never used a computer to create a document.
To quote Robin from the old Batman TV show, "holy digital divide Batman!" As one might expect age and education play a role in these data. Half of the "no email" respondents were over 65 and 56% never got beyond high school.

While these numbers might seem surprising to those of us on-line consider in 2006 that 29% or 31 million households were without the internet claiming low perceived value. So in just 2 short years the divide has narrowed by 11 million households. The survey also found that over the next 12 months an additional 1.4 million households plan to bring the internet into their homes.

It's safe to assume there will always be some without connectivity of some sort--or interest; but it's also safe to assume that "the internet" in whatever form it takes in the future will be ubiquitous in the lives of most Americans.

"Don't Focus On The Product...

Focus on the experience you want to create, and build a system that gets you there".

Those words were said not with radio in mind, but with hard goods. As illustrated in this (goofy) picture:

Of course, our product is the experience...except if we are talking about HD radio and then it's about the hardware and not so much about the experience.

What was supposed to always be about the experience (whatever the intended experience was supposed to be) somewhere along the way the word experience was replaced by appliance. The appliance for music, news, sports, weather, traffic, etc. Like most appliances, after a while a new and improved appliance comes along replacing the old one. In this case that would be broadband and the internet.

Let's be honest. Radio was NEVER about the experience; programming was created in order to sell RADIOS. Now, as it turned out the experience was pretty good and it all worked out.

Today, as good as a lot of radio programming is, it's lost its luster as new more flexible platforms have come to market--especially with younger audiences.

What are we to do?

Focus on the user experience. How can we leverage our deep market penetration and our deployment of new platforms (broadband and internet) into a more competitive medium for today and into the future?

We need to think beyond "the morning show" and "10-in-a-row" and be open to and TRY new ideas (many of which will probably fail). "Focus on the experience you want to create, and build a system that gets you there".

And that brings me to the source of the quote: Peter Merholz who is the President of Adaptive Path a company that helps create products that deliver great experiences. Impressive group! Mr. Merholz put together an excellent presentation on the user experience and you can watch and listen to it right here:

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The Internet Is A Copy Machine...

And central to much of radio's problems.

I discovered the blog of Kevin Kelly-The Technium and wanted to share some of his words with you. Who is Kevin Kelly?

"Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. "

These three sentences illustrate radios problems--particularly MUSIC RADIO:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

I think this makes a great deal of sense.

He goes on to say:

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

How much of this type of content is on our air or websites?

Here are the eight keywords he refers to:

*Immediacy
*Personalization
*Interpretation
*Authenticity
*Accessibility
*Embodiment
*Patronage
*Findability

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.

In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I've seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.

He closes his essay with the following:

There is still a lot to learn. A lot to figure out.

Let me close this post by saying: there is still a lot to learn. A lot to figure out. I tried to pluck out some of the key points from his article and present the gist of his message for these time-crushed times. The eight keywords have full text and explanation in the article. I urge you to click here and read the entire piece-time well spent.

I would love your feedback on this and everything I write in this space-agree or disagree. All opinions are welcome. Thanks for the dialog.

Vote In The New Poll

Right above this post is a new poll asking what you think will be the greatest challenge to the radio industry in 2008. Please take a moment and vote. There are many challenges ahead, but I am optimistic there will be good things happening as well.

I would like to see this blog grow to be an interactive forum for all of us to share ideas. With that in mind--I put the ball in your court: What do you think is in-store for the new year? Click the comment link below and join in!

For the time being, and I hope for the long term, I would like to keep this space unmoderated. So please keep things respectful.