Yesterday the first mobile monday was organized in Amsterdam. A free and great organized meetup, with some great speakers and free beer in the end. The most interesting talk was by Jaiku-man Jyri Engeström about Jaiku/microblogging.

I wondered what it was that made microblogging via Twitter or Jaiku interesting. According to Jyri It is all about disruptive innovation. How can you make something that already exists simpler, cheaper and more convenient. This is the success behind the popular social sharing sites around.

The idea behind Jaiku comes from this question asked at blogging. How can you disrupt innovate blogging?

• Making it simpler (a microblog post lifenotes, don’t think just publish, it’s more continuous and frequent)
• Making it cheaper (I’m not sure how this worked out for blogging because it is already free, but it did. I didn’t make a note of it and should check the presentation again.)
• Frees you to go to an inconvenient place (on your mobile, everywhere, everytime and you can interact / comment)

I think microblogging is more about lifeblogging than lifeblogging itself. We should redefine some terms here. All those blogs, social networks and applications really made a mess of lifeblogging.

Jaiku and Twitter are about blogging your life in realtime. People can tap in and out whenever they like. It’s a persons feed, instead of a blog.

This doesn’t say it makes sense what floats around on those networks or that it will stay. It is just more talking, less thinking. Not necessarily a bad thing when just published in a stream of messages instead of a blogpost. Jaiku and Twitter represent the new blogging, and blogging is the new publishing. Twitter seems the winner for now, it doesn’t say they’re better or were earlier. That’s were the action is right now. It can be completely different within a few weeks.

Apart from the practice, I think it was the actual idea behind Jaiku that made the presentation good. In the race for the next big thing we sometimes forget the concept behind something. Content King, Concept is Queen.

Watch a presentation Jyri did for MSN in december, which is quite similar to the one yesterday (*.wmv).

Or listen to it
[audio:http://www.campaignhost.se/msn/innovate/061207/media/MP3_Jyri_Engstrom.mp3]

Can you think up a way how we can disrupt and innovate the news business? It might have something to do with collaborative editing, co-authorship, mobile platforms and so on. Ideas? Leave them in the comments.