Ganglog

I'm on the Gillmor Gang right now (we record on Fridays), where Mike Homer and Susan Mernit are guests. (The show will be available for podcast later.)
Mike is running the Open Media Network, which just launched. It distributes through Kontiki, which is kind of a supplier-controlled BitTorrent. Mike founded Kontiki. Now he's a customer of the service.

We're talking now about funding models for the "experience" we call public broadcasting. I'm gathering from Mike that viewer and listener support — the customer role many of us value playing, and which helps sustain our local public stations — accounts for a shrinking percentage of what the sources (NPR, PBS) require to produce high quality programming. Excuse me, content. So the new model is: watch this ad, and if you don't like it, pay us not to show it to you.

I think that's what Mike just said.

I just suggested that maybe the problem is that public broadcasting has become so expensive on the production side that they've unavoidably looked to the commercial model as the only way of paying for it.

The thread was dropped, but I'd like to keep it alive here. Or somewhere. Because I think it's a mistake.

Link in the 'log: The New Attention Driven Advertising... Part 2, by John Husband.

The revolution that matters is the demand side supplying itself. Not the supply side co-opting demand, and leveraging the old inefficient funding systems. (Not to say that's what Mike is doing here, but that's the kind of thing that happens when we talk about 'consumers' and 'audiences.')

Susan just said something about consumers wanting to experience what other consumers were seeing and doing, for example around what's happening in London. Eyewitness reports. True, but what matters here is that what's most worth reading here comes from producers who happen to be individuals. And what makes their productions worthwhile is the fact that other producers can reference the original producers as sources, reproduce them, add value to them, and drive forward what we know, together, about what's going on in the world.

Now Mike is talking about the Open Media Registry, from OurMedia, which is a cool thing.

Just noticed that the Open Media Network's service is browser-delivered, and headed toward Windows/IE first, with Firefox, Mac and Linux support planned later.

Mike just announced that they're open sourcing their client software. Which is cool.

It's a network component that selects sources, and does back-and-forth required to get the data. A multi-source way to deliver files. Has the intelligence required to find the right places to get the data, and put it together. Other stuff around security, protocol encryption... Now it's an 800k activex control. They have a modular architecture. The core component is what will be open-sourced. Can't keep up with Mike's description, but if you're interested, listen to the show. Sounds encouraging.

Okay, it's over now.

It's not clear to me whether the open source component Mike's talking about is something that will only work on OMN's private network. I guess we'll have to see how that unfolds.

I'm also concerned about silos in general. Not clear to me how much of OMN is a silo, or a walled garden of some kind. A private space for public use.

At the end of the show I found myself in agreement with Mike Vizard about the future of media being led by parties other than the current leaders.

I understand why Susan, Mike, Dana and others continue to think and talk in terms of big producers and millions of consumers, and to pay the most attention to what the Big Players are up to. But at some point we'll all have to face the fact that consumers are producers now too, and there are entirely new practices and economies to go with the technologies that make personal production possible.