Another ‘Web 2.0 isn’t what you think it is’ post

By jeremy | February 2, 2022

I really don’t want to add to the web3 debate (not least because I have skin in the game, advising a PR agency that works with DeFi firms), except to make some observations about its predecessor.

I feel on safer ground here because was there, I know what I saw: Web 2.0 wasn’t what most people think it is, or was. It means slightly different things to different people. But here in essence was how it evolved. I don’t claim to have intimate knowledge about how it went down, but I did have enough of a view as a WSJ technology columnist, to know some of the chronology and how some of those involved viewed it.

The key principles of Web 2.0, though never stated) were share; make things easy to use; encourage democratisation (of information, of participation, of feedback loops).

The key elements that made this possible were:

tagging — make things easier to find and share (del.icio.us, for example, or Flickr);
RSS — build protocols that make it easy for information to come to you (think blogs, but also think podcasts, early twitter. Also torrents, P2P)
blogging tools — WordPress, blogger and Typepad, for example, that made it easy to create content that also makes it easy for people to share and comment on;
wikis — make it easy for people to contribute knowledge, irrespective of background (Wikipedia the best known);

Some would disagree with this, but that is the problem with calling it Web 2.0. People weren’t sitting around saying ‘let’s build Web 2.0!’ They were just building stuff that was good; but gradually a sort of consensus emerged that welcomed tools and ideas that felt in line with the zeitgeist. And that zeitgeist, especially after the bursting of the dot com bubble in 2001, was: let’s not get hung up on producing dot.com companies or showing a bit of leg to VCs; let’s instead share what we can and figure it out as we go along. It’s noticeable that none of the above companies or organisations I mention above made a ton of money. In fact the likes of RSS and Wikipedia were built on standards that remain open source to this day.

Of course there were a lot of other things going on at the time, which all seemed important somehow, but which were not directly associated with Web 2.0: Hardware, like mobile phones, Palm Pilots and Treos; iPods. Communication standards: GPRS, 3G, Bluetooth, WiFi.

The important thing here is that we think of Web 2.0 also as Google, Apple, Amazon etc. But for most people they weren’t. Google was to some extent part of things because they built an awesome search engine that, importantly, had a very clean interface, didn’t cost anything, and worked far better than anything that had come before it. But that was generally regarded as a piece of plumbing, and Web 2.0 wasn’t interested in plumbing. The web was already there. What we wanted to do was to put information on top of it, to make that available to as many people as possible, and where possible to not demand payment for it. (And no, we didn’t call it user-generated content.)

Yes, they were idealistic times. Not many people at the heart of this movement were building things with monetisation in mind. Joshua Schachter built del.icio.us while an analyst at Morgan Stanley in 2003; it was one of the, if not the, first services which allowed users to add whatever tags they wanted — in this case to bookmarks. It’s hard to express just how transformational this felt: we were allowed to add words to something online that were helpful to us being able to find that bookmark again, irrespective of any formal system. Del.icio.us allowed us to do something else, too: to share those bookmarks with others, and to search other people’s bookmarks via tags.

It sounds underwhelming now, but back then it was something else. It democratised online services in a way that hadn’t been done before, by building a system that was implicitly recognising the value of individuals’ contributions. It wasn’t trying to be hierarchical — like, say, Yahoo!, which forced every site into some form of Dewey Decimal-like classification system. Tagging was inherently democratic and, as important, trusting of users’ ability and responsibility to help others. (For the best analysis of tagging, indeed anything about this period, read the legendary David Weinberger.)

Wikipedia had a similar mentality, built on the absurd (at the time) premise that if you give people the right tools, they can organise themselves into an institution that creates and curates content on a global scale. For the time (and still now, if you think about it) this was an outrageous, counterintuitive idea that seemed doomed to fail. But it didn’t; the one that did fail was an earlier model that relied on academics to contribute to those areas in which they were specialists. Only when the doors were flung open, and anybody could chip in, was something created.

This is the lesson of Web 2.0 writ large. For me Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the prodigal son of Web 2.0; a standard, carved messily around competing versions, where any site creating content could automatically assemble and deliver that content to any device that wants it. No passwords, no signups, no abuse of privacy. This was huge: it suddenly allowed everyone — whether you were The New York Times or Joe Bloggs’s Blog on Bogs — to deliver content to interested parties in the same format, to be read in the same application (an RSS reader). Podcasts, and, although I can’t prove this, Twitter also used RSS to deliver content. Indeed, the whole way we ‘subscribe’ to things — think of following a group on Facebook or a person or list on Twitter — is rooted in the principles of RSS. In some ways RSS was a victim of its own success, because it was a powerful delivery mechanism, but had privacy baked in — users were never required to submit their personal information, saving them spam, for example. So the ideas of RSS were adopted by Social Media, but without the bits that put the controls in the hands of the user.

And then there were the blogging tools themselves. Yes, blogging predated the arrival of services like Blogger, Typepad and WordPress. But those tools, appearing from late 1999, helped make it truly democratic, requiring no HTML or FTP skills on the part of the user, and positively encouraging the free exchange of ideas and comments. There was a subsequent explosion in blogging, which in some ways was more instrumental in ending the news media’s business model than Google and Facebook were. We weren’t doing it because we were nudged by some algorithm. We wrote and interacted because we wanted to have conversations, a chance for people to share ideas, in text or voice.

Searches for Web 2.0 (blue) vs Social media (red), 2004-2022, courtesy Google Trends

Web 2.0, then, started in 1999 with the first blogs, and was in steady decline by 2007, when VC money was pushing the likes of Social Media to scale in a way Web 2.0 hadn’t. Twitter was the first to the table, globally, as more ‘friendship’ oriented services like Friendster and MySpace, and later Facebook, slugged it out. By 2010 Google was dominant — it bought Blogger, boxed RSS into a corner with its Google Reader (which it subsequently canned), while Yahoo bought del.icio.us). And of course, there was the iPhone, and then the iPad, and by then the idea of mashing tools together to build a democratic (and largely desktop) universe was quietly forgotten as the content became the lure and we became the product.

Social Media is an industry; Web 2.0 was a movement of sorts. The writing was on the wall in 2005 when technical publisher Tim O’Reilly coined the term, which his company then trademarked. That didn’t end well for him.)

So what are the lessons to draw from this for web3? Well, one is to see there are two distinct historical threads: ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘Social Media’. To many of those involved there was a distinct shift from one to the other, and I’m not sure it was one many welcomed (hard though it was to see at the time.) So if web3 is a departure, it’s worth thinking about what it’s a departure from. The other lesson: don’t get too hung up in defining yourself against something: the greatest parts of ‘Web 2.0’ were just things that people came up with that were cool, were welcome, and gave rise to other great ideas. Yes, there were principles, but it’s not as if they were written in stone, or even defined as such. And while there was some discussion of protocols it was really about what material and functionality could be built on the existing infrastructure, which was still a largely static one (the first phones to have certified WiFi didn’t appear until 2004).

I do think there are huge opportunities to think differently about the internet, and I do think there’s a decent discussion going on about web3 that points to something fundamental changing. My only advice would be to not get too hung up about sealing the border between web3 and Web 2.0, because the border is not what most of us think it is — or even a border. And for those of us natives of Web 2.0, I think it’s worth not feeling offended or ok boomer-ed and to follow the discussions and development around web3. We may have more in common than you think.

What lies ahead

By jeremy | January 3, 2022

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What lies ahead?

That’s a dangerous game, in this era, as I suggested in 2020 (The Changes A-coming). But with an eye on the tech future, I thought I’d rummage around in the basement of gadgets, and content, and the mechanisms to both deliver content to gadgets and for the gadgets themselves to be something more, to see what might be around the corner. This is a longish one, for which I apologise.

On the one hand, devices during COVID have been a miserable failure. The Apple Watch was supposed to be our path to a self-measuring future but that has been something of a failure (Doctors say it’s time Apple Watch ticked all the health boxes. A lot of the blame seems to be placed at the feet of doctors, which strikes me as a cop out. If the devices’ success required changing the procedures, and expecting increase in the cognitive workload, of the most time-poor and under-resourced professions on the planet, then I think our breathless excitement at this new era of wellness and health might have been a bit more, well, breathy.

And don’t get me started on how we have failed to use our ubiquitous mobile devices to better manage COVID movements, contact tracing, travel and entry documentation etc. Well, actually, do, as I have already written about it (The Future of Pandemic Preparedness: Digital Health Passports for example). My general feeling is that the people who could have made a difference tended to focus on the wrong things (well the right things, but at the wrong time: decentralised identity, experimental technology etc) where the situation was desperately crying out for something practical that could be realistically deployed within a useful timeframe. I compared the challenge a year ago with that of attempts to deploy an e-passport here. Both pieces were commissioned by Roche Diagnostics but content was not edited or directed in a way I felt changed their intent, so I’m happy to keep my name atop them.

So yes, I don’t think the COVID era will be one to closely associate with leveraging personal technology for the benefit of the greater good. After all, these devices have been entirely designed to deliver a version of privacy that is at odds with one that governing institutions might get away with. Our devices are privacy conscious only insofar as they protect commercial and financial interactions. Apart from that they are specifically designed to ooze other forms of data, from location to apps used, search terms, etc. In fact, for Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, the devices in effect operate on a subsidy model, where the operating system, the device itself (think Kindle, Android devices) and the apps themselves are given away at or below cost because of the high value extracted from the user’s data being sucked out of the device.

For governments this would be a boon, if the user was as disinterested in the implications of this when it comes to government surveillance as she is for commercial surveillance. But COVID has shown us there is no social contract between government and citizen in most democratic states that would allow such information to be (directly) drawn from the device. So there has, so far, been no alignment of interests between companies, individuals and governments to allow our most prized possession to help us get out of this pandemic without lots of gnashing of teeth and wailing.

COVID though, has had an impact on our relationship with these devices. Mobile subscriptions – smartphone and feature phone – grew very little year-on-year in 2020, and in many regions of the world actually shrunk, according to Ericsson data (see above). It’s not surprising, I guess: for many of us, the relationship with our phone has loosened a little under lockdown. Or has it? On one hand, we’ve binge-watched ourselves to numbness, with Netflix, Apple, Amazon and others desperately trying to create enough content to keep us hooked. But on the other hand, a lot of the things that make a mobile device so compelling usually have lost their lustre, now that most of the time we’re stuck at home.

And so has evolution of the mobile device remained static? Well, yes, in a way. Accelerometers, biosensors, cameras, gimbals — all of the machinery that makes our device so smart, are relatively useless when we’re in one place. This is perhaps what makes Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a second life in his metaverse resonate more than it would usually: yes, we are beginning to hate our four walls, painful checks for and restrictions on travel. So even a legless torso and cartoon visage interacting with another might seem, well, worth a punt.

But I think that vision is dystopian, cynical and not where the interesting stuff is happening.

COVID has been about content, but post-covid will be about devices. COVID was about maximising the amount of immobile content — games, movies etc — but when we do break these chains, even if it’s pandemic->endemic state change, there is likely to be a relatively fast transformation of what we can expect our device to do.

The Eye of the Apple

Hear me out.

Predicting Apple’s next move is a mug’s game, but I’ll give it a shot. Part of my research work has involved looking at submarine internet cables, and there’s always one dog that doesn’t bark: Apple. Meta (declaration of interest: I’ve done some research work for them, indirectly), Google (commercial relationship in another area), Microsoft (ditto) and Amazon are all very busy in this space, essentially moving into owning as much of the delivery infrastructure as possible, matching the proportion of traffic they’re responsible for. Structure here means cable, data centers, hardware. It’s a remarkable shift in these industries that has gone little-noticed.

But even less noticed has been the missing player: Apple. As far as I can work out, Apple has taken no significant stake in any submarine cable venture or player; neither has it built a vast network of data centers. (It does have them, but not in the same number as, say, Google. Google has 23 publicly acknowledged data center locations; Apple has less than half that, and, indeed, stores increasing amounts of its data on Google’s servers (Apple Reportedly Storing Over 8 Million Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers – MacRumors).

But this is undoubtedly changing as it gets more into the content business. Apple has something called Apple Edge Cache where it offers to supply hardware to internet service provider (ISP) partners “to deliver Apple content directly to customers”. I won’t pretend to understand the exact arrangement here, but I think it’s fair to assume it’s a way for Apple to get their content closer to users, reducing latency, and a way for ISPs to demonstrate the quality of their service while probably reducing some of their international bills. Netflix and others offer something similar. Netflix: Open Connect and Akamai’s Network Partnerships.

But I don’t believe this is where Apple sees a road to the future. Indeed, though I do love some of the content on Apple TV+, it feels like a very traditional, backward-looking concept — all chrome logos and shadow, slick but somehow dated. I think the smart money is on converting the mobile phone, the watch, the iPad, the VR headset, into a (virtually) single device that interacts with its surroundings much more effectively, and in the process not only accesses the network but, in a certain way, becomes the network.

The Network is the Device

There are certain elements to this. We saw that Apple was deeply involved in the development of 5G — the first time, I believe, a device manufacturer had that much of a role, though I could be mistaken — and early last year posted job ads seeking research engineers for current and next generation networks (6G isn’t expected to be deployed for another decade, but these are generations of technologies, and like generations they’re more of a period than a date.) But I think this time it’s not going to be about 6G, more than it is about AppleG. More recently the same Bloomberg reporter, Mark Gurman, spotted another hiring spree, this time for wireless-chips (Apple Builds New Team to Bring Wireless Chips In-House).

I would agree, however, with Jonathan Goldberg at Digits to Dollars, who before Christmas picked up the Bloomberg story and ran further with it (What Are They Building in There? | Digits to Dollars). This is about vertical integration, he wrote, but it’s also about a lot more:

Beyond that, Apple has some very ambitious plans for communications and they are looking to drive the industry in their direction. They have set themselves some very interesting objectives, or at least left us with some big mysteries. What are they building in there?

I was intrigued enough to try to follow up some of those clues, exposing my lack of technical knowledge on the way. But thinking of it not from the point of the stack (the inner workings, the supply chain, the network connectivity) but from the user perspective, I think there are a few clues that give us enough to make some reasonable guesses:

Apple has filed patents that focus on communication between devices, that don’t involve connecting to networks. Most prominent are patents related to Apple’s project to build semi- and fully autonomous vehicles. Vehicle-to-everything (VTX) is a core part of the future of autonomous/semi-autonomous vehicles, because it makes no sense for urgent, data-heavy, ultrafast communication between devices (think car and streetlight, or car and bicycle) to go onto a network and then circle back to the other device. (Apple Reveals their work on Project Titan’s Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications System for future Autonomous Vehicles – Patently Apple)

This is sometimes called sidelinking, and is already a part of 5G standards. But for Apple it makes a lot of sense, if you move away from the notion of networks as synonymous with beacons, towers, backhaul, data centers and submarine cables. If your devices are everywhere, be they watch, glasses, computer, car, whatever, then doesn’t it make much more sense to think of them as the network? In the same way Apple moves its content as close to the edge of the network, why not think of Beyond The Edge — all those devices, which you control remotely via your increasingly unified operating system — as the network itself?

Smells and Radar

This requires what we think of as the device to take on some new powers and heft. Part of that is the ability to connect to other devices, but another element is to make it smarter. We have been somewhat groomed to get excited about incremental improvements in the iPhone, but in terms of what new things it can actually do, there’s been very little to cheer about for a decade. It’s been five years since I wrote Nose job: smells are smart sensors’ last frontier and there’s been precious little progress yet on adding smell sensors to consumer devices (I see my old friend and source on all things olfactory Redg Snodgrass has been through three job changes since I wrote the piece, which shows how long ago that is). But smell is a complicated thing, and likely the last thing we’ll see enough commercial imperatives to get it into a consumer device any time soon.

Before that a natural function for the device to have is radar. This is a technology that’s already 90 years old, but its use case for mobile devices has, until recently, not been visible enough to merit the miniaturisation process. That changed last year, with chipmakers like Celeno incorporating Doppler Radar with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth into its Denali chip. It’s perhaps not a surprise that Celeno is based in Israel. Apple Israel just happens to be looking for an engineer to focus on this very technology, among other things (Wireless Machine Learning Algorithms Engineer for sensing and localization – Jobs at Apple).

But what would you use radar for? It’s Apple, so I’m guessing it’s all about the user. The job ad mentions the successful applicant “will be part of an extraordinary group that pioneers various wireless technologies for localization purposes and for wireless sensing applications. You will work with different RF solutions, such as WiFi / Bluetooth / RADAR systems, to provide outstanding user experience for Apple users.” This is about sensing. The radar would enable our devices to do two things they’re not very good at the moment:

sensing where we are to a high degree of accuracy. Currently this is done by GPS, when outdoors and not hidden by trees, and by triangulation, via cell-phone towers or by Wi-Fi signals. Bluetooth offers a little more granularity, but these all involve signals interacting with signals. What if our devices could bounce signals off everything, and build a virtual map of our location, even inside a cupboard, and respond appropriately? What if our device could detect movement, posture, alignment, movement of a limb, or even breathing? The Celeno press release explores this a little: “[T]he added radar function enables presence location and even posture recognition for supporting additional useful applications in buildings and homes, including human monitoring, elderly care and fall detection.”
combined with Wi-Fi, whose packets it would leverage, the radar would give the device the ability, at least according to Celeno, “to “see” through walls without requiring line of sight and/or dependence on light conditions. In addition, the technology does not depend on any Wi-Fi clients, wearables of any kind and does not invade privacy.”

I’m always wary of use-cases that are associated with health-care, because so few of these things end up being used, and in reality there’s not a whole lot of money in that line of product. More likely, I think is that we see functions like radar, and LiDAR (which is already in the upper-end iPhones) being used to make our devices smarter and more aware, both of their surroundings, and of each other. Apple has done more than any other company to make our devices talk to each other better, but I still feel that features like AirDrop, frankly, suck.

A Conscious Instrument

But this is not just about sharing photos and stuff over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. This is about devices becoming ‘conscious’ of much more around them, and leveraging that to make themselves smarter and more useful. I think this is where Apple is going. They don’t care about 6G except insofar as it doesn’t dent their own plans. In their world there would be no carrier, no Wi-Fi sign-on, no SIM card, e- or otherwise. Instead the device would know exactly what the context is and optimise itself automatically. If it was a game, it would map the environment and build a peer network to bring whatever data and content was necessary from the edge to the AR-VR device(s). If it was a movie showing it would scour the walls for the best projection screen, download the data and share it among the devices so everyone could hear the soundtrack in their own preferred language.

That is just the obvious stuff. Apple is always conspicuous by its absence, so it’s interesting to see what they’re supposedly ‘late’ to. Bendable phones? Samsung and others have gotten big into this, but follow the trajectory of the technology and it’s clear it’s an old technology that is more akin to lipstick and pigs than it is to the bleeding edge. Apple is kind of getting into VR, but slowly, and probably wisely. I’m no fan-boy — I think they’ve made numerous errors, and I think they abuse their users that may come back to haunt them — but there’s no arguing they play for the long term. So I think the fact that they’re not getting into the infrastructure side of things as others suggests to me that they see the value, as they always have, in the provision of mind-blowing experience, something everyone on the planet seems to be willing to pay premium price for.

And that means, as it always has, stretching the definition of a device. And I think that means adding, one by one, the sensors and communications technology that enable the device to more intimately understand the user, their mood, their exact position, their habitat, their intent, and everything and everyone they care about. It’s always been about that. And I’d find it difficult to argue with it as a strategy.

Just the facts, ma’am

In Reuters’ case a separate marketing team was set up in 2017, and a service launched called Reuters Plus. In June 2018, the wording of the about page was as follows:

Just the facts
Since 1850 Reuters has provided society with the content it needs to be free, prosperous and informed. Today our content reaches more than one billion people every day and is distributed in 115 countries.
“We must continue to value facts and to recognise that trusted journalism – the kind we are committed to producing – makes a difference.” Stephen Adler, Editor in Chief, Reuters News
With feet on the ground in close to 200 international locations, Reuters is perfectly placed to tell your story to decision makers.

If I was a company looking to get my content on Reuters I might be forgiven for thinking this would be the way to do it. At the time Adler was the most senior practising journalist in Reuters, and the wording suggests strongly that Adler and his team of journalists would be involved in the process of telling the client’s “story to decision makers.”

To be fair, when it was pointed out to Reuters’ management that Adler’s name was being used in this way, the page was removed.

But the way these services are presented now is not a whole lot better. The website is now more deeply fused into the Reuters Agency website (which is the commercial part of Reuters selling content to media etc) and the service can be accessed from a menu alongside Reuters commercial editorial products (i.e., actual journalism).

The page itself states the following. I’ve italicised the areas where two separate elements are conflated — real Reuters journalism and content created for and paid for by a client:

The world listens to Reuters. That’s why when we tell stories for our partners – with a steadfast commitment to excellence, accuracy, and relevance – we create impact and provoke powerful responses.
Reuters content studio builds campaign content that helps you to connect with your audiences in meaningful and hyper-targeted ways. From full-service content creation to editorial event sponsorships, coupled with our unique content distribution capabilities, we tell your stories in a way that audiences have relied on for 170 years.
Elevate your campaigns with Reuters quality: Covering everything from written articles, videography, broadcast content, photography and events, our multifaceted approach to content creation is rooted in award-winning expertise and a commitment to the heritage of storytelling.
We combine inventive content creation with the science of data-driven strategy to make your stories work seamlessly across our premium platforms and social media channels and engage the right audiences.
Benefit from the power of Reuters: Reuters has always stood for trust and integrity, and we remain the world’s preferred source for news and insights across evolving platforms, channels, and media.
Our unrivaled insights into the big picture – globally and regionally – and the finest details across every industry and agenda, ensure that every story we tell is accurate, up to date, and sought after by audiences worldwide.
That’s why when Reuters tells your story, you can be sure that it will reach the right calibre of audience and provoke the response you need.

In fact, I felt that the lines between Reuters Plus (now called a “content studio”) and the journalism part of Reuters were even more blurry. Not one sentence in the above blurb is designed to clarify that the content being produced by Reuters Plus is entirely separate to Reuters’ journalistic content. Even the terms get blurred: The word ‘partners’ was used to describe customers both of editorial content (journalism) and sponsored content (not journalism as journalists know it). It has also added other services to the mix that further blur the lines. Under a page called ‘sponsorship’ other services are offered, including event sponsorship and ‘editorial franchises’. (Sponsored content has also now been quietly renamed “sponsored articles”. )

Trust me, I’m a journalist, sort of

In short, I noticed no attempt to disabuse the customer of any belief that they were in essence paying for a Reuters journalist to write a positive story about their company/institution/government and pushed to all Reuters’ media customers and channels alongside Reuters’ real journalism.

And this is in essence the bait-and-switch taking place. I’m not suggesting Reuters is the sole culprit here; nearly every major mainstream media platform does this, but as a consultant my interest lies primarily with the client, and I feel there’s a lack of understanding (some say a wilful lack of understanding) of what is really happening here.

Trust me: no Reuters journalist, editor, writer, reporter, whatever, will be involved in helping you find a compelling angle for your content. The writing will likely be farmed out to a freelancer, or an in-house writer (here’s a recent ad from Reuters Plus for a ‘custom content writer’; notice the requirement does not prioritise journalistic experience as much as branded content: Candidates should have Have 5+ years experience in branded content writing or journalism. The kicker: one of the perks of the job, the ad proclaims, is the chance to

Work alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and a team who provide unmatched, award-winning coverage of the world’s most important stories

If working alongside means (possibly) being in the same building, then I guess that is a perk. In my experience there is zero contact between the marketing teams involved in the production of sponsored content and the (real) editorial teams in Reuters, or elsewhere. And that’s how it should be: journalists should not be aware of any commercial or other relationships between the company they work for and the companies, governments and individuals they write about. Implying there is only damages the editorial function.

Journalism for most of these traditional platforms (WSJ, NYT, BBC, AP, Reuters etc) is not particularly lucrative, and it was probably inevitable that they would have to rent out their most valuable asset — their masthead — to generate some cash. The problem is this: most of it is done without the knowledge or approval of the journalists working for that masthead, and things go wrong when they do. Reuters has gone through quite a few about-turns when journalists get wind of these rentals, like this one, in 2014. Understandable: at best these rent-outs undermine journalism because it not only dilutes the brand, but encourages companies to think, “I don’t need to talk to the journalists who ask difficult questions; I can just buy some space and say what I want.”

And that’s the rub. Companies have allowed themselves to be misled into thinking this content they’re paying for is

a) going to appear alongside the platform’s own content, and to be largely indistinguishable from it and

b) somehow their content will be as widely read as the platform’s own content.

Neither is likely to be true. If you’re relying on a marketing team and a content-writer to come up with something as snazzy as a piece of real journalism, you’re overestimating interest in your product/company and underestimating the effort put into real journalism.

Reality and Obscurity

So my advice — and once again, I’m declaring an interest in trying to rethink content produced by companies and institutions, so of course I would say this — is to think hard before committing funds to sponsored content in channels like these. There are some which work hard to deliver quality content, but never at any point in my experience as a consultant has the process come close to matching the rigour and effort involved in real newsrooms to ensure the content is really, really good, and is compelling enough to stand alongside original journalism.

Because that’s what is being sold here: the notion that your content will be as compelling as the rest of the content on the platform, because it’s gone through similar processes which will ensure it’s as widely read — and trusted — as that other content.

The reality is that in most instances this is simply not the case.

So what’s the answer? I’ll go into some case studies of alternatives in future columns, but for now, here’s a checklist when you’re considering commissioning sponsored content:

go in with a clear idea of what you’re really getting for your money. Don’t think in terms of trying to promote some grand vision or new product line; think in terms of what might be of interest to a reader: What would capture their attention, and provide real, original insight?
demand to have handling your content someone who is experienced in real journalism, and encourage them to speak their mind. Let them guide you in determining angles, because their instinct about what people want to read will be your biggest asset;
demand to know who will be writing the content, and demand that person be an experienced (real) journalist;
keep the channels free of any input from marketing or other spin. Resist the urge to add specific product mentions or jargon; Don’t tweak the text just for the sake of it; respect the writer’s knowledge about what works and what doesn’t;
be proud of what you’ve done, but done be under any illusions that this somehow replaces being open to real journalists who want to talk to you. Sponsored content is not an alternative to a well-staffed and experienced PR function; if it’s good, the content should spark greater interest among journalists in what you have to say.

Vertical histories

By jeremy | September 8, 2021

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How we shoot and watch video is changing, and with it the way we engage with the world

The two iconic images of the fall of Kabul involve a C-17 taking off from Hamid Karzai Airport. It’s as searing as the helicopter perched atop an apartment complex in Saigon, a stream of Vietnamese climbing the ladder to the roof in the hope of getting aboard:

Hubert Van Es / United Press International, the roof of 22 Gia Long Street, Saigon, April 29 1975

In Kabul, 46 years later, we have something similar, but now the photographer is not a UPI photographer called Hubert Van Es, back at the office developing film:

If you looked north from the office balcony, toward the cathedral, about four blocks from us, on the corner of Tu Do and Gia Long, you could see a building called the Pittman Apartments, where we knew the C.I.A. station chief and many of his officers lived. Several weeks earlier the roof of the elevator shaft had been reinforced with steel plate so that it would be able to take the weight of a helicopter. A makeshift wooden ladder now ran from the lower roof to the top of the shaft. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, while I was working in the darkroom, I suddenly heard Bert Okuley shout, “Van Es, get out here, there’s a chopper on that roof!”
I grabbed my camera and the longest lens left in the office — it was only 300 millimeters, but it would have to do — and dashed to the balcony. Looking at the Pittman Apartments, I could see 20 or 30 people on the roof, climbing the ladder to an Air America Huey helicopter. At the top of the ladder stood an American in civilian clothes, pulling people up and shoving them inside.
After shooting about 10 frames, I went back to the darkroom to process the film and get a print ready for the regular 5 p.m. transmission to Tokyo from Saigon’s telegraph office. In those days, pictures were transmitted via radio signals, which at the receiving end were translated back into an image. A 5-inch-by-7-inch black-and-white print with a short caption took 12 minutes to send.

It’s beautifully framed, the chopper and the building, with its tiny shack on the roof, the empty space in the upper right of the screen, the eyes drawn up the rising tide of humanity towards the diplomat in his shirt sleeves, either reaching to help or reaching to hold back, we are unsure. We want to know what will happen — will they all make it? (No, Hubert says, this was the only chopper to land on this roof; those not able to get aboard waited for hours in vain.)

In the chaos that was Kabul Airport, 2021, it was ordinary Afghans shooting video, sometimes shortly before their own death, and that made the experience much more visceral. Part of the reason, I believe, is because the videos, like most mobile videos shot nowadays, were shot in vertical (‘portrait’) mode. (I don’t mean to demean the trauma of that situation, and what is still taking place in Afghanistan. I hope I can show that the format of such videos have helped shock us out of our torpor and, hopefully, made us empathise more with the many who either failed in their bids to leave, or died doing so.)

I was watching the key day unfold in real time on Twitter, so many of the videos lacked context, made me feel nauseous at the tragedy unfolding, and the inevitable deaths that would result. All of these moments were shot in portrait mode (I’m not going to be able to cite the sources of these videos, I’m afraid, but if anyone knows who to credit please let me know).

This first video was of young men chasing, and some clinging, to a C-17 as it gathered speed on the runway. One video, extraordinarily, was shot by one of the young men:

From another angle, back on the runway, shot by someone who didn’t make it or didn’t try, we look at the airplane gaining height:

Then another video, minutes later, shot from possibly the airport perimeter, shows the C-17 rising into blue sky, apparently an image of safety, of rescue:

Until we look closer, and realise that there are one, two specks falling from the airplane, and we realise they are the young men we had seen moments before.

For me these are the images that I will never forget, not least because they were shot by participants in the tragedy, a fumbled few seconds of footage, human beings drawn to document what they saw and what they were going through.

Then there’s the other iconic image, one perhaps more akin to Hubert’s Saigon picture: The distance shot of a C-17 making the necessarily steep climb out of Kabul:

A U.S military aircraft takes off from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)

This image is in some ways more memorable, more iconic. But I noticed that The New Yorker’s João Fazenda had chosen to recreate the image in a more vertical format, emphasising the incline of the plane, and what it had left behind:

João Fazenda, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine

I dwell on this because I’ve been exploring why most of us now so readily embrace vertically shot video, which, let’s face it, is lousy to watch except on a phone. But this isn’t 2012 anymore, when a faux public service video begging people not to record video in vertical format went viral. Since then we’ve, if not embraced the format, at least got used to it.

In fact, there’s an interesting body of academic and artistic work exploring the rise of vertical. Vertical Cinema as a genre had its own first premiere back in 2013 and has since had festivals and showings most years since. National Geographic released the final episode of its “One Strange Rock” documentary in 2018 in vertical format for Instagram (NatGeo has 183 million followers on Instagram and releases regular vertical versions of its programs.)

The literature points to the somewhat narrow way we look at what is an acceptable format. The reason we are used to landscape/horizontal/postbox views is because, back in 1930 the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science got together to create a standardised horizontal frame for showing in cinemas. The only ratios under consideration were 4:3, 4:5 and 4:6, and they rebuffed an argument put forward by Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian film-maker, to consider a square so as not to ignore the cinematic and creative potential of height as well as width. Instead they were more interested in making money, and a flatter, wider format suited the cinemas, theatres and dance halls of the day, where movies would be shown. So they agreed to keep the 4:3 format that most silent films had adopted. ¹

There were two significant outcomes from this: the first was that henceforth the only discussion about extending the format was about width — think CinemaScope and Panavision in the 1950s — reemphasising the dominance of horizontalism. The second was that televisions would follow suit, adopting the same proportions so they could faithfully present movies when they were shown on TV.

So it’s not surprising we should be used to the format. And there are ergonomic arguments to be made for landscape mode too; we tend to see horizontally, using our peripheral vision which extends to the sides (what is called far peripheral), less to the top and bottom.² But there are also lots of ways that we don’t think in landscape mode: we read most books in portrait mode, we often take photos of people in portrait mode (hence its, er, name) and some of us are known for tilting our monitors to better write and edit the documents we create that run top to bottom.

But there are other arguments why the vertical revolution has some staying power — and potential. One is simply practical: People hold their phones vertically 94% of the time. As long ago as 2016 90% of iOS apps were fixed in the vertical position. And that was all before TikTok. Now everyone, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube, offer a vertical mode of recording and watching videos.

What I didn’t find in the literature was much about how the vertical mode has shaped us and the way we use video. Rafe Clayton suggests that this is a ‘moving image revolution’ which is clawing back control of content from the likes of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. I don’t quite buy that. Yes, this is a user-content generated shift, but that doesn’t mean the format and medium are not, or won’t be, co-opted — as can be seen by the development of ads and content by those self-same corporate types.

But I do think something is changing, and has changed. It’s not altogether desirable, but it’s definitely noteworthy. For one thing, the vertical format has changed the nature of the relationship with our devices. When the camera is on us, the relationship is altered. When we tilt the device to record ourselves in horizontal mode, it is a deliberate act of creating something for publication, broadcast; it has a self-reporting feel to it. When we keep the device in its normal position, we are adopting a more natural pose, less obviously self-conscious; more, I would argue, confessional. We are looking at ourselves (it takes a deliberate effort to look into the camera to hold the ‘audience’s’ gaze rather than look at ourselves) so we are, effectively, looking at ourselves in a mirror, and therefore everything we do after that — speaking, singing, dancing — we are at once doing for us: dancing as if there’s no-one else around, as it were. But we also know that the video is likely to be watched by someone else. So we have found an odd place for ourselves, like the tape-recordings of old that we’d make, diary entries that are self-conscious about who may see/read them, but also, inevitably, opening up.

The clearest example that springs to mind is Jennair Gerardot, the protagonist of the excellent podcast Bad Band Thing by Barbara Schroeder. Barbara explores some of the selfie videos that Jennair made ahead of the murder-suicide that is the subject of the series, when Jennair confesses her darkest thoughts and anger — we hear but of course don’t see some of the videos, but Barbara describes Jennair as looking intently at the camera, often crying and distraught, at other times practical, even as she tries to find a way to take her own life. All of this is hidden, for the most part, from her husband, as she plans her revenge with outward calm. This intimacy with the device, as if it were a friend, pet or priest who listens silently and sympathetically, suggests a deeper relationship with the camera and our phone than we may thus far have acknowledged.

Certainly there’s no shortage of selfie narcissism on display via this medium. People like joeybtoonz catalogues this on his Youtube channel, which has more than a half million subscribers, and you can’t help but look at some of his subjects and think they could do with some psychological help. But I think that’s too glib a conclusion to draw. We wouldn’t have considered writing a diary, or recording our days into a tape recorder as necessarily narcissistic. And while the visual aspect has definitely made us extremely self-conscious about how we look, to the detriment of other aspects of our lives, the portrait-mode self-video has also allowed us to communicate more intimately with those we want to communicate with, framing us and excluding the extraneous.

Where once we would record our self-videos in landscape to emphasise where we are, now many of us tighten the focus by keeping the device upright, pulling ourselves closer to the camera and breaking down the barrier between us and the viewer. Of course that also shuts us out from those around us, but there are two sides to everything. I think what we’re really seeing is what Neal Gabler has called the “mediated self”. The idea was conjured up in 1998, before the iPhone and indeed camera phones, but the idea is that we increasingly feel things don’t happen unless we record them. As Kathleen Ryan explains in applying Gabler’s idea to vertical video, we video in portrait mode because we derive pleasure from shooting video, and the device feels more comfortable vertically, more natural. “Horizontal shooting minimizes the seductive experience.” (The use of selfie-sticks, of course, is a thesis in itself.)

Go back to those days in Kabul and to the other side of the device. While it is sometimes frustrating to watch something in vertical mode, because we lack context, it also somehow and sometimes works better, pulling us into the immediacy and intimacy of the situation, where the screen is layered rather than sliced up. Here are some other examples from that week, showing the chaos around one of the gates, where those trying to get access to the airport were crammed between wall, open sewer and road (and where a suicide bomber struck). All are screen grabs from videos either circulating online or from the excellent Australian ABC documentary on the fall of Kabul:

Somehow the vertical frame makes these videos much more affecting, as if you yourself are there, just a few inches away. And each shot, by bringing the foreground so close, and adding the background, frames the scene in a way that a horizontal shot might not — or which our eyes, used to such framing, might feel less associated with. We are forced to focus on the subject, to feel their predicament. This is how Gabriel Menotti puts it:

Even in amateur videos, the portrait orientation never seems to result from the sheer negligence of the filmmaker. On the contrary, it conveys their effort to achieve the best visual composition possible given the recording situation. As the definitive fulfillment of handheld camerawork, the vertical video expresses not a disembodied, all-seeing eye, able to conform the world to the frame, but rather expresses the embodied filmmaker, placed within the same world that is being recorded, precariously handling the camera. Thus tailored for the depicted scene, the use of the vertical format is not wrong in itself.³

I can’t disagree with that. Even in such dreadful moments — possibly because of such dreadful moments — the phone becomes a device of record, shot in vertical mode because that’s the natural way to hold the device, and because after all, the shots are ultimately all of people — friends, family, a crowd, a shoe, a woman screaming behind a gate, a Talib firing into the air, a mother clutching her baby and crouching to avoid gunfire. Between them and us are only inches. We are there with them. And above us all, only sky.

Clayton, Rafe. “The Context of Vertical Filmmaking Literature.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, January 21, 2021, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2021.1874853. ↩
See Ryan, Kathleen M. “Vertical Video: Rupturing the Aesthetic Paradigm.” Visual Communication 17, no. 2 (May 2018): 245–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357217736660. ↩
Menotti, Gabriel. “Proporção ‘Errada’ de Tela.,” no. 35 (n.d.): 20. ↩

beware the theatre of digital first

By jeremy | July 14, 2021

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Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow (an naxi, Flickr, public domain)

I’m a big fan of digital challengers to old technopolies — I’ve moved everything I can from big telco to MVNOs, big bank to neobank, cable TV to Netflix and its ilk, from big taxi to ride hailing. But there are plenty of challenges.

One of them is this, highlighted by Chris Skinner on his blog. He argues, rightly, that you need to build from a position of trust when it comes to banking. This is particularly acute because you’re talking about things like money. Yes, the old banks have been great at creating what we might call ‘trust theatre’ — big imposing granite pillars, people walking around in uniform, familiar logos everywhere, not a hipster in sight. And we know how quickly those granite pillars can seem like a bad joke. But at the end of the day we know they’re regulated, that there is at least some process behind the facade, and that our money is as safe there as anywhere else.

Wise, Revolut and others have charged in, and done very well by offering services we really should have seen a decade or more ago from our digital banks. With Revolut, for example, I can give my daughter a debit card and see what she’s spending, what she’s spending it on, and generally give her a better sense of what money is than I had at her age. And it works well.

But of course, I’m not going to put any real money in my Revolut or Wise account, not yet, anyway, because they have not won my trust. And that is a hard thing to do. It’s not that I trust Big Bank, anymore, but I trust the regulators enough to feel that that is a good enough brake on Big Bank from stealing more of my money than they do already with hidden charges. (Bitter? Moi?) And yes, Revolut and Wise are regulated too. But it hasn’t been tested. And the lesson we’ve learned from any startup with an app and money is that we’re still in the dark ages, where nothing is written in stone (or granite).

Some of us are still shaken by the demise of bike-sharing companies, one of which disappeared overnight with most of our deposits. If a firm like that can make $10 million disappear overnight, then couldn’t financial startups do the same thing? Probably not, but for many of us, one digital wallet in an app is the same as another, in terms of security, whether it’s a fly-by-night bike company or a Fintech company. Sad, but true.

So Chris is right in saying we need to start with trust first when it comes to digital finance companies. But it also applies to other kinds of digital first companies too. I have moved all my mobile phone accounts over to virtual operators (MVNOs, mobile virtual network operators, which are basically companies which buy capacity from a real telco, and then package it up under their brand.) I am tired of traditional telcos, and 24 month-plans, so for me anything is better than the old guard, especially ones that involve easy onboarding. but I can see problems, and smell a lot more.

For one thing, the urge is always to add more customers, and to try to slice and dice services until you get a compelling mix. By definition, then, you’re focusing more on new customers than traditional ones, and while that’s fine, you need to be sure that by adding new customers and services you’re not making things worse off — comparatively speaking — for existing customers. In my case, I was initially OK with having three separate accounts and to install separate apps on all devices (and move a SIM card for my mobile wifi dongle to a phone so I could install and maintain that account) but I did so because I was told that soon they would have family accounts, and that all this could be done under one roof. When that did happen, it turned out it only worked for new accounts (more or less) and so not only didn’t benefit me, but also disadvantaged me as an existing customer.

And that’s the thing. When you prioritise the new customer, you’ll inevitably lose some of your existing customers. That easy onboarding is also easy off boarding, and so I’m off to the next MVNO as soon as I can. Coupled with this is the other ‘theatre’, which is customer service. Customer Service Theatre is when it’s easy to talk via chat with a company, but where you’ll always get someone calls Brad, who is clearly copying and pasting template responses, where he’s totally focused on making me happier etc, but where there’s no substance behind it. Either Brad hasn’t been briefed, since he works 1,000+ km away, or is outsourced entirely, or he just lacks the authority to make decisions beyond the most basic. If you mistake that for customer service focused not on happiness but on fixing something that is broken, then you know you’ll have problems. Not in year 1, necessarily, but by year 3 or 4.

And so here’s the thing. Netflix is easy come, easy go. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, doesn’t require much customer support — I’ve not used it once in 6 or 7 years. But anything involving something more specialised, such as money, or internet access, or food, or any kind of specific item you’re purchasing, then you need to win over trust. And that means, depending on what you’re selling, having proper customer service with experienced handlers with access to engineers, and the ability to make decisions, and you need to keep a laser eye on your existing customers and to ensure that the quality and breadth of your service evolves to meet their evolving expectations. Don’t assume their goodwill is something that will last.

If I had to boil it all down, I’d say: If anything you’re doing smacks of Theatre, then fix it. Or those people who arrived first may leave first. Noisily.