Terry Heaton: The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media

Terry Heaton's Pomo (for post-modern) Blog is one of about 225 RSS subscriptions that I read (or, more accurately, scan) weekly, but it's one of about four that I can think of that I read first -- out of alphabetical order -- because it's just essential reading IMHO.  So I was excited to learn he'd accepted the invitation of the organizers of this conference to speak.  As a matter of fact, two of the others I read first are here speaking also -- Diane Mermigas (who doesn't blog to my knowledge, but I have a Google RSS subscription for her name) and Rafat Ali of paidContent.org).  All three have provided plenty of fodder for my own weblog.

He got classified in a news-related track (he is a consultant to television news organizations after all) that unfortunately pitted his talk -- The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media -- against two others with similar appeal so the audience was smaller than it should have been.  Pity, because it was imporant to hear, particularly for CEO/COO types.  The link is for an essay of the same name posted at this talk.  If you didn't attend today, you really should read the essay, which I linked to here back in November.  He has others on the topic also that you can find on his weblog (see first ¶) on the left side of the page.

Terry's advice to broadcasters who find themselves entangled in a "mainstream media meltdown" is to unbundle their programming.  He quoted former FCC chairman Michael Powell as saying, "Application separation is the most important paradigm sihft in the history of communications, and it will change things forever."  By "application separation," he meant the ability to separate an application from the infrastructure required to deliver that application.  In the case of media, that's what he defines as unbundling.

I won't repeat the things you can read in his well-written essays, but I will quote the following, all from one slide:

1. In the beginning was the tower.  We sat.  We watched.  We bought.
2. Then came the web.  We browsed.  We bought. (Think web portals.)
3. One day, the great god Google appeared.  We searched.  We found.  We bought. (Coming in through the home page became the old model.  Coming in sideways became the new method of arrival for most users.)
4. Then came the great demon, RSS.  We subscribed.  It came to us.  We bought.
5. And now a new entity emerges, combining the great god and the demon -- search feeds.  We describe.  It comes to us.  We buy.
6. The tower, it seems, is upside down.

Lots more, but that's it for tonight.  Subscribe to his blog and, in particular, read the thoughtful essays.  --Dennis Haarsager