When conducting research with news organizations for the MMC report, one obvious trend is the demographic consumer split of printed newpapers. Most folks over the age of 40 want to hold the printed word in their hands.  They talk about it as a 'ritual'. Turning the pages is something they love to do.  Going on-line for news seems like they are betraying a deeply held religion.

Contrast that notion with the younger demographic who largely view the newspaper as a waste of the world's resources.  Why cut trees when I can get the same info on-line? And BTW - it's a boatload cheaper too. Why pay for something I can get for free? 

I find this generational split an interesting one.  In effect, subscribers are paying for a ritual.  The behavioral 'switching costs' of holding the newspaper in your hands to viewing the same information on a screen are so high, individuals are willing to pay a premium for it.  And the good news for newspapers is that the 40+ demographic will be around for a long time to come.

While I was working on this report:

I was also reading Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near.  While you may disagree with Kurzweil's conclusions about the future of artificial intelligence, one thing you can't disagree with is his primary point that the pace of change itself is changing. 

I'll blog about this book more in the future, but what's on my mind today is how the media industry is operating at the edge of exponential change.  Technology markets are changing so rapidly that new innovations seem like new litters of rabbits appearing in the blackberry bushes.  Keeping pace with the boatload of new products, new features and new methods of communication seems almost impossible.  As one of our interviews from the report, NBC News VP Lyne Pitts "There's nothing to be ashamed of feeling like you are on the edge in a strategy of chaos."

First you have to realize, accept and then celebrate that business is shifting all around and chaos is here to stay.  Get ready to ride the ups and downs because we are all in for a lot of change and it's going to be those who love the choas that succeed.

Everyone should have a chance to sit across the table from Allen Blue.  Allen is a co-founder of LinkedIn.  And if you haven’t noticed it, LinkedIn is growing faster than the weeds in your garden.  About 200,000 people per week.

Allen has an erudite style.  Hard to believe he is an entrepreneur because he sounds more like a professor.  He waxed philosophical about the value of iteration – trying something new and then tweaking it as you go along.  In effect, new ideas get perfected by the community of the many instead of the management ‘few’. 

I love his point, “We make it up as we go along.  If you ask consumers about your ideas, they will say, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’  It’s better to build something light-weight and see if we can innovate effectively and then iterate.”

It’s this brave innovation that contributes to LinkedIn’s success.  The ability to be willing to endure continual feedback, even if it’s negative, is a sign of strength and one of the web values of intimacy with your consumers.  Better to have your consumers co-create with you than launch something with your initials and ego all over it.

While researching innovation and the media for Northwestern University's Media Management Center, I was impressed by a guy named Rob Curley.  Rob is VP Development and runs a skunk works organization for the Washington Post.  What's great is the ability of his small team of 5 people to jettison the whole company into new and creative markets on the web.

They work as a small company within a large one and have the speed and flexibility to do things virtually overnight.  They were one of the first news media firms to design a successful widget for Facebook. Here's how they are organized vis-a-vis the 300 person washingtonpost.com team:

Our team has its own dedicated programmer; he’s been working with us for a long time so he knows how programming relates to journalism. This is a guy who practices his journalism with code instead of with sentences. We have a full-time dedicated senior designer who’s also a motion graphics animator and a Flash developer. Then we have two multimedia journalists — one in an editor’s role and one in a producer’s role, but both can do just about everything. They can write very well-written news stories, they can produce daily audio podcasts, they can shoot and edit video. You throw something at them and they can probably do it, or they’re going to figure out how to do it. They’re kind of jack-of-all-trades when it comes to storytelling.

“Then the fifth member of our team is this really smart guy who has the strangest role on our team. In fact, we had to make up a whole new title for him and that’s ‘Journalism Technology Specialist.’ He’s a weird guy because he’s a dang fine journalist; he can really write well and understands new media journalism really well, but he can also code a little bit, he can write CSS. Basically, this guy sits between the journalism and the technology. So once all the code has been written, all the sites have been designed, all the Flash animations have been built, all the stories have been written, all the virtual reality photos have been taken, he’s the guy who assembles all of that. And that makes him a pretty useful guy to have around.'

Rob was telling me about a hyper-local site they developed for Loudoun County, VA - one of the fastest growing counties in the DC area.  It's called Loudounextra.com. Rob's group wanted to include a list of all the restaurants in the county. Someone suggested they buy the data from the Yellow Pages.  Imagine all the time, money and debugging that would take for addresses and phone numbers.  Instead, their staff called every restaurant in the county, found out opening and closing time, pricing, type of cuisine, details that brought value to using the site.  With free Google database software, it was done - fast, cheap AND good.

Conventional thinking is that skunk works organizations are good for ideation but present problems when ideas scale and you have to assimilate the products and services back into the larger organization.  That's the beauty of the technology of content companies however.  The software itself creates the scaling.  Watch for even better innovations coming from washingtonpost.com. 

I spent the better part of the summer interviewing 36 leaders in the news media on their strategies for innovation.  Northwestern University's Media Management Center commissioned my firm to conduct the research study and formulate recommendations for action.  Listening to how these leaders are handling the seismic changes in their industry was fascinating. Wow. Great stuff. 

From the publisher of the Washington Post to the founder of Twitter, I got a download on how the pace of change in the market is forcing media companies to work in new ways.  In the next few blogs, I'll be sharing some of my insights from the study.  You can view the entire report here:  http://www.mediamanagementcenter.org/innovation/innovationreport.pdf

One thing I heard again and again was the difficulty many of these folks had managing the present and the future at the same time.  Because the pace of change itself is changing, there is increasing pressure on leaders.  I'll be sharing some of the ways firms can keep one hand in the present and step into the future at the same time.  

My head is rising from a dense summer project and I realize that I have a monogamous intellect (if you can call it intellect at all).  I love to lock on to a subject to the exclusion of all else until the job is done.  Now, don't get me wrong, I can multi-task with the best of them, but my imagination is engaged elsewhere, in the full-time work of solving the central problem confronting me. It's as if my mind is an infra-red telescope on the top of a rifle and can't disengaged until the prey is shot.

I admire the intellectually promiscuous, those who can move gracefully from one idea to the next.  Make progress on many ideas at once.  I met someone this summer who wrote a 250 page novel in 3 months time.  She had no idea how the narrative would unfold, she simply wrote.  But what amazed me most is she admitted having 'fifteen" other story lines in her head.

So I'm happy being monogamous.  My ideas don't have to be jealous of each other or vie for my attention.  But I do wonder how that celestial fire burns in promiscuous thinking.

I'm watching my kids relax from the pace of the school year and settle into a different way of life.  They are doing the work of adolescence; laying around and complaining there is nothing to do.  Call me crazy, but I organized it this way. I'm famous around my house for saying, "It's good to be bored".  It's only when you've reached the end of the fancy schedule, that the real learning of discovering your native interests starts and you find what is really worth chasing. 

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with Ted Leung.  I was introduced to Ted through Scott Rosenberg's book Dreaming in Code.  Ted is a contributor to the Open Source Application Foundation's Chandler project.  I was impressed by his wicked will to navigate the tangle of developing the Personal lnformation Manager product. 

When I met Ted, his committment to community and collaboration was clear.  I could tell from our conversation it was these principles that made the work matter and provided the ability to innovate. While his education at Brown and MIT surely provided a knowledge base for the hard work of software development, this internal drive can't be taught.  It can only be discovered.

And so this summer I'm letting my kid's minds wander. Because discovering those driving interests is the only summer school that matters.

It's going to be 96 degrees here today and missing the cool breeze of Seattle, but find comfort in my native coffee company.  Only wish the internet were free...

Check out Luis von Ahn a computer science researcher from Carnegie Mellon.  He has created some incredible games.  I especially like esp in which you and an anonymous partner guess until you agree about the names of images. This game is similar in structure to the Turing test which I'll explain in another blog.  But leave it to say that von Ahn estimates that in 2003, humans spent 7 billion hours (yes, 7 billion) playing solitaire on the computer.  He is setting out to eliminate wasted human mind-space by using games to tag pictures on the net.

I was so impressed by a presentation that he gave at Google (which is on his site) that I e-mailed him to ask what he thought were the skills that humans still do better than humans. He said that among other things, like responding to visual and auditory stimulus, human intelligence exceeds computer intelligence in common sense reasoning.  At least for now. 

And this morning, it defies my common sense reasoning that 22 people are waiting for coffee in the Starbucks line.  And I may even go back for a refill. 

It's a widely held belief in the scientific community that one of the enduring characteristics of human life is our ability to predict.  Throughout history we've been quite adept as a species at creating scenarios of what the future may hold and anticipating possible outcomes.

Enter the 21st century.  As the pace of change itself increases and more access to the innovations that change brings, human capabilities of prediction are less and less accurate.  Who could have predicted that a defunct presidential candidate would produce a powerpoint presentation that would revolutionize American consciousness about global warming?  Or that humans would be spending 7 billion hours a year playing solitare on the computer?  (More about that in another blog).  The point is that as our ability to anticipate the future declines, our anxiety about the future increases.  We wonder how to manage change and maintain a sense of control in our daily life.

Some advocate giving up trying to control as a way to deal with the future.  And certainly there is some sense to that argument on a spiritual level.  But practically, our evolutionary brain won't allow us to give up control.  Humanity will always find a way to try to shape the change and survive it.

Fortunately in addition to our ability to predict, another characteristic that is uniquely human is our ability to create. We are wired to shape our experience and that around us in new and different ways.  Because participating in creation - whether it's writing a computer program, raising children or painting a canvas - is finally one of the most satisfying parts of being human.  And as Virgil noted, hanging stars in the sky might be God's job, but it's the human trajectory as well.