A name for times, welcome to the “pre-post era” of publishing and communicating:

Whatever we consider this pre- era to be, it’s undeniably post- many things that defined publishing until about ten years ago. It’s post- having to bend to big distributors. It’s post- ignoring the screen as a viable reading space. And we’re rapidly closing in on post- printing mass-market throwaway books (they’ll work great digitally).

Via Bobulate.

Some impressive work in the winners gallery from the 53rd annual World Press Photo contest.

Last night Mike Walsh launched his new book Futuretainment – which looks at the future of media and marketing – at the CBD Hotel in Sydney. He spoke with technology journalist Brad Howarth, and offered a few of his insights into advertising and marketing, particularly in Asia, together with a couple of trend predictions for 2010.

• People born after 1994 are digital “naturals”. They have never lived in a browserless world.
• “Naturals” have never known a time when they cannot access decent content somewhere online.
• Content producers and creators (copyrighters) such as musicians are effectively marketers.
• Musicians, for example, encourage “content theft”… they don’t make revenue from recorded music, that comes from sales of merchandise, live performances, etc.
• Social networks drive TV programming. People increasingly watch what is forwarded to them (videos, links to videos).
• Viewers are deciding what they will watch, not the TV networks.
• How will content producers make money? Become a celebrity… cue Ashton Kutcher and his declaration to become “the next new-media mogul”.
• Japan excels at producing content for mobile phones.
• The Chinese know how to make money with social networks. QQ, a Chinese variation of Facebook, made US$1 billion last year.
• In Korea people watch more TV shows on mobile phones than a television.
• Digital consumers in Asia are generally very tech savvy, have access to unlimited bandwidth, and have little regard for copyright.
• 90 per cent of Chinese internet users have broadband, which is considerably faster than that available in Australia.
• Augmented reality will put consumers in control by way of real time product and service reviews and critiques.

Jerry Mander’s book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” – which was written in 1977 – has been re-published online.

What’s the matter with our modern, technologically based society anyway? Why isn’t it more satisfying? Why do so many of us now feel that some vague something hounds us and diminishes us and makes us into something less than we should be? Most specifically of all, do we really use television – and so many other “benefits” and “tools” of our technological age – or does it use us?

For the time poor, a summary of Mander’s arguments have been posted on Wikipedia.

A four step recipe newspapers may be able to use to reinvent themselves, which includes utilising the services of an array of bloggers – as freelance writers – to provide content and opinion.

Find the best bloggers in the city, court them and recruit them into a partnership. Create a full view of your city: general news, crime, city hall, sports, entertainment and other vertical niches. Fill subject-matter gaps by encouraging experts to start new blogs. Ask an OB/GYN to write for your parenting site or an interior decorator for your homes site.

From a Daring Fireball article looking at online news revenue models, and the one very obvious, tangible, difference paying for news published in a newspaper has over online news sites:

When you pay a dollar for a newspaper it feels like you’re paying for the actual stack of paper, and it feels like a fair price. That just isn’t the case with web pages.

Mike Walsh laments the passing of the media moguls, including the late Robert Maxwell, a British newspaper publisher.

Watched a doco on plane about Murdoch’s old rival Robert Maxwell – will miss the era of media moguls – blog empires are just not the same…

One in four Australians are comfortable with the information they obtain online:

25% of the population list the Internet as their must trusted source of information. This is followed by newspapers at 20%, TV at around 17%, and radio at about 13%. Among the minority who are not online, radio is the most trusted medium. Only 1% of people chose magazines as their most trusted medium.

Why do magazines rate so poorly? Possibly because their content is somewhat out-of-date (some magazines have publishing lead times of several months) by the time they hit the newsagents shelves?

“Trends are useful – but in my view, anything beyond 2-5 years is pure fiction.” Mike Walsh’s pick of trends to watch now: cloud, cheap, solid, ubiquitous, and overlay…

Already iPhone and Android based phones offer applications capable of cross referencing your GPS co-ordinates and pictures taken with your phone with product databases to give you reviews and local data. That’s only the beginning. Eventually with micro projectors or enhanced eyewear, the Web will become a persistent overlay onto the real world – providing us with content tailored to our physical contexts.

The winning blog post of the inaugural Moggy Awards, or “Moggies”, which recognises quality content in Australian media and marketing blogs, will be announced today.

In the meantime check out the short list, or Top Ten posts, and see if you can make your own selection…

I have managed to whittle down the entries to a Top Ten. This was no easy task due to the high quality of most entries. Some bloggers were nominated several times as well, so I had to make a judgement call on which was the best post to consider.