Media Dojo

Archive for June, 2011

I’m up from a deep dive in which I developed a course on transmedia production and distribution for the Master of Communications in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. I teach the first class tonight as an adjunct professor and then take a crack-o’-dawn flight Wednesday morning to San Francisco to attend GigaOm’s Structure 2011.

Structure is hands-down the most important pure cloud computing get-together of the year for my money. All the players who matter are there as are a bevy of new start-ups. By and large, the agenda focuses on computing iron and performance rather than specific industry applications, which I think is good even though I consider myself a media guy first and a cloud guy after that. I make it a point to go because it’s how I top up the tech tank given the pace of change going on.

However, I do see this as probably one of the last Structure events in which there isn’t a hard-core industry track. Maybe not next year but definitely the year after that, Om and crew will need to start including the voice of the user beyond the obligatory hat tips to Facebook or Werner’s rapid-fire listing of various start-ups and enterprises using AWS in his state of the cloud presentation.

In the media space, the news is mixed. Sure, there is no way in hell that a new media start-up gets funded without being heavily cloud-based. But notwithstanding some Black Swan pop from a start-up, most of the development $ for media properties come from traditional sources and they are just getting started. It comes back to the old saw of people overestimating what they can do in one year and underestimating what they can do in three years.

That’s one reason why I’m 90 degrees into transmedia right now from a media services point-of-view. Just as e-business evolved from buzzword into something more substantial once it let go of the e-commerce angle and focused on how to deliver a superior customer experience through a network interface, so too will transmedia grow into something beyond trying to bounce people all over platforms once media creators realize that they’re still in the business of delivering an experience to the user.

That experience will rely on the interplay of creative narrative, applications/networks and social connections which most likely will be riding on computing clouds. That’s why I’ll be in San Francisco.