The web made the process as important as the results. You can formulate this sharper and say; because of the dynamics of the web there is no such thing as a result. It’s a continuous process.

Secrets are almost impossible to hide and a new website isn’t finished unless it had a public beta version. We are increasingly involving the ‘user’ in every stage of a project from the concept to the launch of product or service. Why? Not just because we don’t want to launch a service with bugs, websites want to involve people and a beta website involves people.

This is the web, it’s not Gutenberg (print and store), it’s dynamic. The web is about the process, it’s about sharing information and collaboration. The web is not movable type, it’s modifiable type.

This is why a news service should partially change the model they are using.

News is a process, it’s always been a process. We package news into smaller objects and send these items – when finished – to the media demanding it. A short item for television, a recording for radio and an article for print.

We pre produce, we research, make drafts, recordings, edits, final cuts and more. All to show a final package containing one article or a news item on television. Why do we hide the process? because it’s irrelevant? The web doesn’t care about relevant or irrelevant, we have infinite space and sorting mechanisms. The web is about access to every piece of information available.

Hiding the process is in our culture
The process is often hidden. It’s in our culture to hide the process. What if our competitor might find out what we are doing? Have you patented this technology, have you registered the trademarks.

This is traditional thinking from a result. The process doesn’t matter, as long the end result is unique and can be claimed as unique. This is where the old and new cultures collide, traditional (based on results) and new (based on process).

If you want to involve people you show your process. Not everyone will be interested in the process, but that’s not a problem, those people can just skip the process. A process is about storytelling it’s about building a community, it’s about creating an idea, it’s about context and it’s about the truth.

What does this mean for news
I’m not saying how journalists are working is wrong. I think being a good journalist is like being a photographer. Most people can write or make a photo, but not everyone can write a great article or make a great photo. I don’t know if writing an article should be a wiki or co-creation process. I think it would be great to experiment with. I’m not saying all journalists should start a blog, it would be great, but only if you like it. Just find a way to make your process available.

What I do think is that the research of an article and preparations you make for a video should be online as well. It’s the process, it’s how you come to a story. This is storytelling, you start with what you’ve heard or suspect and dig into it, in public.

You engage with your audience in your quest for the truth (beta phase). Your audience might even help you further with creative input and knowledge. In the end you have a production (alpha version) which aires on television or ends in the newspaper. This marks a time in your process and for your followers. From this point the story continues because the article creates new news or you focus on something else.

The process is open and controllable and everyone is able to verify your story. Everyone is also able to build upon, even competitors. Is this a problem? In the future all information will be available to everyone, everywhere. News is (or will be) omnipresent. The value is in the selection, collections and the connections you make with the content. Be creative!

What do you think? In a continuous modifiable culture will the process be more important than the results? And do you know examples that use this? Wikipedia is never finished.

Image used from Wikipedia

The NOS (public broadcaster in the Netherlands) is broadcasting an speed skating championship. Not only on television. They are also streaming it live on the web.

What is interesting about the website is that the NOS linked the time information to the website in addition to the video stream.

You’re watching the game and immediately you see extra information about the times and the context of these times compared to other ice skaters in the right column. This information stays visible until the game is over.

Watching something on the web is more fragmented. On a television we want a full screen experience, we don’t like it when so called screen-estate is traded for information (picture in picture). In web interfaces it’s the other way around. We don’t like a full screen experience. It takes away the feeling of control and interactivity.

We like separate windows with as much information as possible. The speed skating website is just doing this. It is starting to link real time data from a database to the web interface. And this is just the start of the things you can do with live data and streaming video.

This is me, these are words extracted from every 850+ post ever published on hypernarrative. This is meta data; data about data. It tells you what hypernarrative is about, and since it’s kind of a personal blog it also tells you something about me. These words are related to the things I care about.

The size emphasizes its frequency and thus importance. Sure, most of these tags are general words. The value is not in the individual tag but in the collection of tags.

The last years semantic classification in the form of tags got really big. Not mainstream, but big. Why? Because it is a raw classification, you don’t need to know classification structures to order data the same way scientists used to know to order species (how many legs does this creature have?). Tags are free and easy, I can tag objects the way I like, there are no rules and you don’t need any knowledge.

In the last years we have created a new layer to information on the web, we tagged hyperlinks, photos, video’s, presentations and articles. Almost every new website gives us the option to tag. Tags are the new categories. Categories are closed, tags are open and infinite.

My semantic profile
But what if we trace tags back? Tags tell you something about the tagger. What if you would trace back all my web accounts and the tags I have used. If you collect this information in a database you have a semantic layer about me. I have a semantic profile, and this is valuable.

It shouldn’t be difficult the come up with an application that can use this. For example you could make a social network that automatically connects you to other people that have similar interests through the tags they have used on Flickr (what they have seen for real) on YouTube (what they made) on Delicious (what they like) on blogs (what they care about) and more.

It would create a cross websites social network that doesn’t need an invitation system. It just connects you to minds alike based on what you have done already. Maybe it’s already out there.

Link to the picture on Flickr

This Coca Cola commercial – already for one year on the web – is running on Dutch television. It’s amazing how they have used a cultural youth icon like the ten year old Grand Theft Auto into a commercial. This commercial can only make real sense to you if you know the game.

If you, as a company can assume that every teenager (target group) knows GTA, the game has become an icon of its time. It’s a typical commercial you will show ten or twenty years from now when you’re telling someone how game culture became part of an entire generation.

And the commercial makes you feel good too, great job.

I got introduced to Grand Theft Auto through the very good and very cheap drum ‘n bass CDs they advertised on, released by the Moving Shadow label.

I like the way the Onion criticizes news. This video is great, it shows you what happens when journalists instead of listening, filtering and summarizing start creating their own story.

The conventions we know from television that are used to emphasize emergency and truth make it easier to believe a story even if the content is completely nonsense.

Is this a task for journalism? Not just finding the truth but also be aware of the power that storytelling conventions have? And feeling comfortable playing with it and showing the weakness of some of these conventions?

Today was the fiftieth birthday of the ‘Onze Wereld‘ (Our World) magazine. To celebrate this event the magazine released a special issue and at todays event the first copy was officially handed to Bert Koenders the Dutch minister of Development Cooperation.

My design was chosen as the winning design and to my surprise used to decorate pretty much everything in the venue. And even better, my design is on the front and back of the black and gold celebration issue.

I’m mostly into the interactive stuff and I never had my design on a cover of a magazine before. I love it :)

Lev Manovich – photo by Ssahn. Make sure to see his collection of one-eyed people. I don’t know why he makes it, but I like it. Especially this one.

Last week Anne Helmond visited a talk by Lev Manovich and I almost forgot how he argues – for a long time – that the database is media as well. He’s completely right, and you can see this slowly emerging to a more prominent place in our digital culture.

If the database as a medium sounds vague to you think about it. You store your personal things in databases all over the web. You don’t see those databases but you know them as Flickr, Twitter, Google, Amazon, This website. The database is an object like an infinite cabinet with information.

The database itself is boring, it labels and stores content. Exciting are the connections you make when querying the database for information.

The interface performs queries on the database to retrieve information. If you type www.flickr.com/photos/wilbertbaan it will show you the last 18 photos I have uploaded to Flickr and set to ‘public’.

This is how we have used the database for years. The owner makes a service and decides what queries a particular interface can do on the database. With the introduction of API’s (programmable interfaces) this changed. With an API the database becomes a semi-public object. With an API everyone can build the connections within the information that he or she wants to make.

The API opens the closed circuit between an interface and the database. With an API the same database with the same information can have unlimited different interfaces with unlimited different functionalities performing different queries.

The database itself has become the object. What you store in a database and the amount of valuable information you can retrieve decides the value of the database.

And since the medium shapes the message, the database as a medium will eventually shape the message and thus its content.

How do we store information?
If we make information ready for an unlimited amount of outlets (interfaces and templates) we have to think about how we build up this information. For example think about text. If you make a story ready to publish on different media without editing it over and over again. How would you set up this story? Does it need a headline, introduction, paragraphs? Do you need tags, relations, quotes? How many words, does it need a summary?

The database will be a serious medium to work with in the future. We can’t continuously adapt our content to every new media (outlet) available. It’s too labour intensive.

Will the database as a more prominent medium change the way we make content? What are your thoughts about this?

What is the key success factor for a social application or service? I used to think this was a great functionality that makes it unique. Like last.fm was unique and so were Flickr, Twitter or Delicious. They created something new.

Most new applications have social network components. You can share, invite and more. I wonder what is more important for a new successful project. Is it the network you are building around your service or is it the technical environment?

Content is important, Originality and Technology are, but the People using your great invention are equally as important to make your service a success.