Dr. Johnson is looking forward to joining in the Content in the Cloud Conference Track at the Consumer Electronics Show. The afternoon session—”The Impact on Consumers of Implementing Cloud Computing for Media Storage”— will run from 1:45-2:30 pm on Wed., Jan. 11 at North Hall N258 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
We’re releasing a very recent white paper that Dr. Johnson has written as a thought-piece about the impacts on media ownership of transitioning to the cloud.
You can download the paper at this link. Please join us as well with our e-newsletter, where we will be sharing future white papers, event announcement, and executive leadership programs.
Abstract:
In moving content to the cloud, content companies challenge social norms in ownership, payment, time, and place. This move toward empowered computing and shared online services is not new, and has been driven by long-term shifts in costs of digital storage, computing power, and communications across vast distances. As this ecosystem continues to develop and expand, challenges and opportunities are unfolding for consumers, content creators, and content service providers. These challenges include building new behaviors and attitudes about ownership, discovery, value of storage, offline media use, joint ownership, commoditization of services, competing with freemium business models, and licensing of content across blossoming new platforms layered on IaaS delivery. This shift may change across broad spectrums of media what it means to own content, as well as reshape the perceived need to own content. The shift also provides opportunities for new players to question what it means to create for “containers” (O’Leary, 2012) versus the past modes of creating for platforms. Content might instead spread between traditional media types and may add value with a perpetual beta mode and direct long-term connection with consumers.
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We enjoyed recording webinar sessions with Marc Johnson of marcato multimedia, which will appear later on Emmys.com for the Television Academy’s new educational series. We compared notes on resources available to create infographics and data visualizations for presentations and storytelling. I had begun a broader search, and created this list to share with Marc and readers of my blog.
A Bit of Background on Infographics
Infographics have been adopted by newspapers, PR, and others who want to share complex information for audiences to pass along. Sharing JPGs can be easier than sharing links, and has been referred to as linkbait in its ease of drawing social media links and referrals. Infographics are part of a whole spectrum of info-glut or infoporn. Job titles in this space also get expansive, including information artist, information designer, data enterprise editor, and visualization scientist.
I’m just a social scientist dealing with change management, however. I’m also amused at all the great tools out there at our disposal as less sophisticated storytellers using diverse sets of data.
Some Good Examples of Infographics
Some remarkable articles share regular “best” infographic lists, “how to’s,” and methods articles. Here’s just a few for perusing:
So what can we use to tell digital graphic stories? I’ll start with easier, and work to more complex.
Playing with Words
Wordle – http://www.wordle.net – fun tool to turn words from documents into word maps
Tagxedo — http://www.tagxedo.com – similar to Wordle, Tagxedo lets you create word clouds and sculptures from URLs, Tweets, and other social media documents, as well as export them into a variety of formats.
Playing with Maps
We can tinker with maps, both as pre-made images as well as data-driven tools.
Several tools let you expand how you lay out concept maps and linked ideas:
FreeMind — http://freemind.sourceforge.net – I enjoy this free tool. Graphically simple, it lets you play with a free tool for mind mapping that can be adapted into all sorts of other applications.
Webspiration – http://www.webspirationpro.com – I miss its freemium mode; it now has a trial period and then costs $6/month. I found Inspiration and Webspiration wonderful for group presentations and immediate work.
VUE by Tufts — http://vue.tufts.edu — I really enjoy this “Visual Understanding Environment” tool, which combines concept maps with search and graphics.
Playing with Presentations, Charts, and Graphs
I tend to live in PowerPoint, and enjoy some of the extenders that work with it. Beyond PowerPoint, there are some great presentation, chart, and graph tools.
Presentations
Prezi — http://www.prezi.com — My recent undergraduate class spent half of their projects in Prezi, which has a zooming camera metaphor across a vast digital white board. They enjoyed putting in music, video, and other embedded content. I got a bit dizzy, but enjoyed the creativity.
Sliderocket — http://www.sliderocket.com — Several of my students enjoyed using Sliderocket for class presentations. It gave them a robust and elegant toolset to work with.
Brainshark — http://www.brainshark.com — Friends who are professional business development executives heartily recommend Brainshare as a way to pre-package and present content at a distance. We’ve just started working with them as a teaching/broadcasting medium here at Maremel.
Graphs and Charts
Google Charts API – http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ — you can use Google Charts to create animations in charts, dashboards, and lots of other goodies
Gliffy — http://www.gliffy.com/ — I just found Gliffy, a great diverse creator of charts and graphs. Different versions of it work with different social workspace/sharing software:
VIDI — http://www.dataviz.org/ — VIDI Data, run by the Jefferson Institute, provides a visualization module for Drupal CMS to show motion charts, timelines, geodata, and comparative data.
TrendCompass — http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass — lets you add your own data to their data visualization tool if you register
GIMP — http://www.gimp.org — For those who would want to tinker with Photoshop, but wince at the pricetag, GIMP (“GNU Image Manipulation Program”) is an open source alternative.
I enjoyed a recent article in The Bookseller by Philip Jones. Philip Downer, who used to run Border Books’ UK operation, warned of the glut of content and the control by Amazon, Google, and Apple of the pipelines to the consumer with proprietary formats. He urged change and a pooling of resources by the publishers. He expressed concern about the “seduction of colour, movement and noise” with digital ink, and concern that publishers are not quick to act, stating in their slowness, “Steve Jobs is dead, but sometimes I think Queen Victoria is still alive.”
In Richard Caves’ 2002 book Creative Industries, he stated that without the natural filters (like agents and publishers) within creative industries, which make money by making judgements for production, the vast volume of creative properties becomes overwhelming.
The cost of creation has plummeted, as has music. When we all can (and we already can) self-publish to our hearts content, will we be under the deluge of new books like we are underwater with new tracks coming into the music systems from the likes of Tunecore, CD Baby, and Reverbnation?
TED.com inspires, thrills, amazes, saddens, and enlightens. I enjoy getting their regular email blasts as to new videos, learning something new each time.
I spend a lot of time with my classes and learning partners on trying to look with a critical lens at change and its impacts. Sometimes part of the challenge is to recognize how we are refolding data, time, and space when the idea walks in our door.
We are hosting a Digital Media 101 Panel at 10 am on October 17, 2011 at Digital Hollywood (http://www.digitalhollywood.com/). We’ll be at the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Ray, CA, as part of the Digital Hollywood series of workshops and seminars.
Pre-Day Events – The Strategic Sessions Monday, October 17th 10:00 AM – 11:15 AM
Track II: Poolside Screening Tent I Digital Media 101 – The Primer – Multiplatform Trends,
Search and Social, Deals and Financings – A Prep Course for Getting the Most Out of Digital Hollywood
This energetic three-guru panel will get you ready to hit Digital Hollywood at a full run. We will share big trends, via news and data visualizations of recent statistics, to allow early participants a chance to get their bearings ahead of the sessions. We’ll hit what is happening in film, TV, music, advertising, search, social, publishing, mobile, multimedia, and that thing called “transmedia.” We’ll touch on recent deals and comparative sector trajectories. Get ready for an hour and a quarter of a full fire hose of information…plus a way and place to ask the questions that you haven’t wanted to ask in a detailed media sector session. You’ll walk out of the session ready with new ideas—and with even more questions to ask over the next few days of Digital Hollywood.
David Tochterman, Head of Digital Media, Innovative Artists; adjunct professor, Syracuse University
John David Heinsen, CEO & Executive Producer, Bunnygraph Entertainment, Inc.
Dr. Gigi Johnson, Executive Director, Maremel Institute
On a recent trip to Paris, this doll beckoned from a shop window with a display of skincare products. My cellphone video posted directly to the web, capturing out of context this funny moment.
We’re releasing a very recent white paper that Dr. Johnson has written as a thought-piece about the impacts on media ownership of transitioning to the cloud.
