Hello from the Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University’s Ford Design Center. It’s a beautiful building on a beautiful campus and I got to bike all around it and swim in the lake. The Chicago / Evanston beaches are nicer than many in LA. To my surprise the water was still colder than the Pacific but refreshing nonetheless!
My client here is a spin-out from the Info Lab, Beyond Broadcast Media. They specialize in automating the laborious process of supplementing media with highly relevant information. For example, you're watching your favorite Emmy award winning program, MAD MEN. The BBCast Media system has sifted through all the metadata associated with all of the episodes of Mad Men no mater how poor it may be. The system has structured the data into a “canonical” form and from that it goes on to create carefully structured queries that return incredibly contextually relevant results based upon pre-determined domains such as additional videos, fansites, news, blogs and shopping, I got a demo of their latest software tools for managing media related metadata. We also discussed how important metadata is to the user experience and to monetizing almost any form of media.
Earlier in the day I met with Associate Professor Michael Smith, Director of the Media Management Program at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. We discussed how media companies need to adopt new strategies to survive including institutionalizing innovation, giving next generation workers more opportunities, making partnerships and placing a business focus beyond just numerical performance goals.
I also met with Justin Kerr, the Executive Director and Publisher of Site of Broad Shoulders (www.sobs.org). A great not-for-profit niche site dedicated to publishing Chicagoland Artists. They are about to launch an Internet radio service. They have an interesting work style whereby everyone gets together weekly to “produce” the site. While Justin talks content and editorial, Jake Eldridge, CEO, tweaks the software and the Content Management System.
