El Rey está desnudo

The future of media?

Thanks to @joshlachkovic and @BigBigBen I discovered  last Friday that a new blogging platform called Dale & Co. has been launched in the UK. The idea is similar to the Huffington Post, well, with some differences. However we all know how the HuffPo has now converted into a reference media in the Net, with Dale&Co. maybe following the same fate. 

On the other hand last week I read also the economic difficulties that one of the main Spanish communication groups (Unedisa, owner of “El Mundo”) is passing through. And everybody knows in Spain the economic problems of the major communication group of the country (and part of South America) PRISA, owner of the newspaper “El País”.

You do not need to be very clever to see that the context is changing in the environment of communication media. Which will be the future? Well, If I had to make a bet, I would do it for the distributed communication networks, with a much more lighter infrastructure than the traditional media. And the later these traditional media realize of this, the worse for them. 

In Twitter, the director of El Mundo Pedro J. Ramírez disagreed with the model of the contents with Creative Commons licenses because “the journalists, the editors and all the people around need to be paid” (even if one thing has nothing to do with the other). He also recognized the drop of incomes from publicity and the problems that led to the closing of the TV Channel Veo7 (of the same group Unedisa). The same with PRISA merging Cuatro with Tele5. And Planeta merging Antena3 with La Sexta.

Well, maybe what they need to do is to change the model. The same as we have been years now claiming to the music and video corporations.

Just networking.

Pesimistic

One friend told me on Friday that the reasons why the world is so crazy is due to the effect of the moon. However I still did not arrive to that level with regards to superstitions.

Nevertheless I share her view that the world is a little bit crazy nowadays, a little bit more than usual, and that makes me to feel a little bit pessimistic about the future. Too many bad things are happening, or we are knowing, that let us little space for being optimistic. 

The planet is crazy. The earthquake and the tsunami last week in Japan are the last chapters of a whole series of disasters that seems to be accelerating with the time, and not all of them are related to the global warming-human effect (supposing that we believe on it). However there is little that we can do on this (unless we learn how to control earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes).

On Saturday a coalition leaded by US, UK and France started attacking Libya after the green light given by the UN Security Council. Whatever the reasons that led to it, in my opinion the coalition did not plan the way ahead of the operation, and they started to act moved by other interests that just the real willing to protect civilian people, without thinking “what is next”. Let´s see how it finish (if it does), but for the time being the Arab League has already withdrawn its support to the operation. 

There is also a global plan of governments of the “free world” to “disconnect” Internet. They have realized that the network has escaped to their own control, and with the excuse of security (remember Franklin) or the protection of whoever privileged rights they are introducing step by step, with the needed collaboration of the big telecom companies, more and more restrictions that will end with the freedom in Internet as we know it now: ACTA, AT&T data cap of 150GB and the application of the anti terrorist law to protect the copyright in Internet are three of the symptoms of what is coming. The today known news about AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile is only another needed step. If I am now wrong I consider that the US Government will allow with little impediments the operation. 

And last but not least, thanks to Anonymous, we discovered also this past week the secret plans of the US DoD about how to manipulate the Internet social conscience through advanced tools of identity emulation. However, that the plans are now known does not mean that they are being stooped (indeed they are not).

As a summary: natural disasters, war, less freedom, reduced civil liberties and stronger governmental control on our movements. And everything in just 10 days. Do you still think that we can be optimistic?

But not everything is lost. There is something on the way. Pay attention to your screens.