MULTIMEDIA MEETS RADIO

10 ideas for a successful multimedia strategy

Here are my thoughts on how news-based radio stations can rise to the challenges of multimedia convergence without overstretching finite resources. The key is sustainability.

1) Play to your strengths
The starting-point is your core product: the audio that you already produce and broadcast on the radio.

Make it available in a digital format like MP3 for users to listen to or download from your station's website. Podcast highlights of popular programmes and longer (complete) versions of broadcast interviews.

2) Start a conversation with your audience
Your website is not just a place for programme schedules. The easiest and most effective way to create interactivity is by having a weblog.

For more idea about using a weblog, see this post by the Bivings Group.

3) Listen to your audience
Try to respond to comments and always answer direct questions - giving your audience a voice only makes sense if you are prepared to listen. Make your audience feel part of the editorial process by soliciting ideas for future broadcasts/blogposts.

4) Don't bite off more than you can chew
(Pseudo-) multi-platform authoring is a good way to achieve sustainability. For example, with a bit of tweaking, the (carefully written) scripts that accompany your radio programmes can become your online articles/blog posts.

5) Make your podcasts interactive
Use free software like Odeo, Evoca or Voicethread to allow your listeners to leave messages on your website. Edit the voice messages for use on-air and in podcasts.

6) Don't reinvent the wheel
Whenever possible, use existing applications/platforms to build and foster communities. Not only do they work, but the best social software is often free.

Upload your videos to YouTube and then embed them in your weblog. Hopefully, you will attract comments and reactions on both platforms.

Create user groups. Put some of your photos on photo-sharing sites like Flickr  and encourage your audiences to share their pictures.

7) Create a multimedia culture
Winning over your staff may be your biggest challenge, but most will come round when they start feeling that they are engaging in a genuine conversation with their audience.

Make short films of your presenters at work and of any studio guests. This will interest your audience and also boost morale in the newsroom because everybody likes seeing themselves on video.

Encourage your reporters to take pictures and shoot videos to enhance online storytelling. As Howard Owens suggests, this does not necessarily mean investing in expensive, state-of-the-art equipment.

8) Cross-promote
Regularly remind listeners about your web address and talk about your online content. Use your weblog to preview upcoming stories - begin a conversation about your reports before they are broadcast.

9) Link to your community
Provide editorial guidelines online and link to the blogs of members who agree to abide by the rules. They may even link back to your website.

10) RSS feeds
Make your blog posts available as RSS feeds. This will make it easier for your audience to keep up-to-date and aware of new content on your website.

The 'size zero' broadcasting diet

A senior editor - let's call him Prendergast - recently confessed to me that he was assailed by doubts about the future of broadcast journalism. Prendergast claimed that his employers, like many other media organizations, were behaving like teenage girls on a crash slimming course.

"It's bonkers," he complained, "as an organization we're being forced to go on one of those size zero diets."

Prendergast was at pains to stress that he was not talking about the latest wave of redundancies to hit his company. Like it not, he said, there were usually solid financial reasons behind decisions to trim the labour force, be it budget cuts, diminishing commercial revenues or, in his country, a failure to collect license fees.

No, that wasn't it.

Prendergast was losing sleep over moves to embrace user-generated content. "We are pouring more and more editorial resources into sifting through pictures of kittens playing with balls of wool."

He said that it was turning his company into the editorial equivalent of a skinny model with a disproportionately large head. "Even if we come to our senses, I'm scared that we will have irrevocably damaged our health."

Prendergast was unimpressed as I tried to argue the case for UGC that I have blogged about several times before, including here and here.

I believe that by empowering audiences to tell their own stories, a UGC strategy adds authenticity to news output. Text, photos and video sequences from your audience can enrich and complement the analysis, context and background provided by your journalists.

Think of all that amateur video that captured the devastation wreaked by the Asian tsunami, or the eyewitness accounts of the July 7 bomb attacks in London. Quite simply, these accounts are more powerful than the cutting and pasting, or ripping and reading of Reuters news ticker that sometimes passes for journalism.

It enables you to engage more directly with your listeners, viewers and readers to build a genuine, two-way conversation.

Prendergast remained unimpressed: "Yes, but at what cost?" he demanded.

Then I remembered the BBC Manchester blogging project, which I believe offers a sustainable model that other broadcasters should explore. It started from the premise that sifting through e-mails, reviewing thousands of pictures of kittens, building message boards and creating community platforms is an expensive business.

The cost is not just financial, as it also exposes broadcasters to legal and moral risks. (I remember when the chat room on a website I was responsible for was taken over by a neo-Nazi group.)

The Manchester blog project, which is run by Richard Fair and Robin Hamman, turns the conventional BBC way of doing things on its head.

Instead of using sub-editors to review and approve UGC, Richard and Robin simply keep an eye on where contributors are publishing their content online. And rather than building new applications, the project team is helping people to create content on existing platforms, such as Flickr, YouTube and blogger.com.

Participants are invited to attend a series of workshops, the first of which takes place on 22nd February. Speakers will discuss production values, as well as offering practical advice on how and where to create content.

The BBC Manchester blog keeps in touch by subscribing to the RSS feeds of each participant and by highlighting interesting content, in return for a promise to abide by the BBC's editorial guidelines.

I told Prendergast that while the aim of the project was to stay slender, he should think of it as more Jeff Jarvis than Posh Beckham.

Richard and Robin will be visiting the EBU on 29th and 30th March to discuss the Manchester project at the Multimedia Meets Radio event.

The future of podcasting

Every few months, the EBU organizes a 'Lunchtime Business Briefing' to bring staff up-to-date with developments in media and technology. The last one was a few days ago, when I was press-ganged into sharing a podium with my colleague David Wood to speak about podcasting.

David went first. He provided technical explanations, showed off his new iPod, played the rather sad 'Star Wars Kid' video, which has been watched 900 million times, and recommended a few podcasts.

David even managed to play My Sharona, with the excuse that the song features prominently on President Bush's playlist, as he proceeded to inform, educate and entertain the audience.

The words 'short' and 'straw' flashed across my mind as I stood up to say a few words about trends and the future of podcasting.

My starting point was a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It suggests that while the number of people who have experimented with podcasts continues to grow, few people are downloading regularly.

Other significant findings are that men are more likely than women to download content and that the over-50s are surprisingly keen on podcasts. This last point also emerged from a recent survey by Gramophone magazine, which showed that in 2005 British listeners over the age of 50 downloaded an average of 11 pieces of music.

That podcasting appeals to radically different demographics is reflected too in the published results from the BBC's ongoing Download and Podcast Trial. The most popular weekly shows are In Our Time, where middle-aged intellectuals ponder the meaning of life, and the Best of Moyles, a youth-oriented podcast by the eponymous Radio 1 DJ.

In France, the most popular podcast is 2000 Ans d'Histoire, a history programme which appeals mostly to middle-aged listeners.

In my presentation, I played a clip of GeekBrief, a video podcast aimed at technophiles. I joked that the pretty female presenter was perhaps a reason why more men than women downloaded podcasts.

Music is likely to play a very important part in the future of podcasting. We need look no further than the success of the BBC's Beethoven podcasts - 600,000 downloads in 2005 - and more recently, DR's Mozart anniversary podcasts, which attracted more than a million downloads in the space of a few days.

NRK were pioneers of pop music podcasts in Europe, avoiding rights problems by featuring unsigned bands, under the label Untouched Music. Recently, Belgium's French-language broadcaster, RTBF, reached a landmark deal with local record companies enabling it to offer downloadable music programmes via a website with a friendly GUI.

However, as the Pew survey suggests, the real challenge appears to be getting people hooked on podcasting. Technology may help, but broadcasters need to work on what we used to call stickiness - creating a community of returning users.

On the technology front, Microsoft's MP3 player, Zune, comes with wireless technology that allows users to beam content to friends. Despite the limitations, it's a significant development if you remember that the web's most successful communities have been built on peer-to-peer file sharing.

Mobile phones will undoubtedly play an important part too, as more people start using them as MP3 players. Nokia has made no secret of its ambition to challenge Apple's iPod.

Things are also happening on the content front.

Some broadcasters, including the BBC World Service, have been experimenting with free software, like Odeo, to make their podcasts interactive. The idea is that listeners leave voice messages on a website, which may then be used to create a podcast.

The wisdom of crowds

Don't confuse 'crowd' with 'herd': the former is an assembly of people - the latter refers to a gathering of animals. Crowds are rational and clever; herds are invariably stupid.

It's a distinction sometimes overlooked by critics of the ideas put forward by James Surowiecki in 'The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.' Surowiecki uses anecdotes from everyday life to show that the aggregation of information from all members of a group is more reliable than information obtained from any single member.

His critics quote 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds', a book by the nineteenth century journalist Charles Mackay. In fact, I've seen Mackay quoted so many times that I recently downloaded a copy of his book from the Project Gutenberg website.

It's an enjoyable read, as Mackay debunks everything from the search for the Philosopher's Stone to the Dutch tulip mania of the seventeenth century.

"Men, it has well been said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one," writes Mackay. Although he often uses the word 'crowd' as a synonym, the book, as this passage suggests, is really about the herd instinct.

I know about the wisdom of crowds because I have had the good fortune to live in Switzerland for the past 11 years. Here, they call it 'direct democracy' and in my biased opinion, it is what makes the trains run on time, keeps Switzerland's crime rate comparatively low and enables people to enjoy a good standard of living.

In Switzerland, ordinary citizens have both the power to propose new laws, as well as to block legislation already approved by parliament.

A referendum must be held if opponents of new legislation can collect 50,000 signatures within 100 days of a bill being passed by both houses of parliament. The authorities must also call a nationwide vote before Switzerland can adhere to major international agreements, or if new legislation changes the constitution.

A popular initiative enables any person or group to force a vote by collecting 100,000 signatures over a period of 18 months. The outcome is binding if it achieves a "double majority" - that is, a majority of voters and cantons must support the proposal.

In other words, politics in Switzerland is a social, cumulative and collaborative activity. Governance does not just flow down a pipeline from the executive to a largely passive population - it is a two-way process.

Charles Leadbeater calls this collaborative process "the power to share and develop ideas" or "we-think." He claims that collective creativity and collaboration will eventually replace top-down management models.

Examples of where this has already happened include YouTube, which relies on its visitors to not only provide content, but also tag videos so they can be retrieved by the site's search engine. In just 18 months, YouTube has grown from nothing to attracting 100 million viewers a day.

It still does not make any money, but that has not stopped Google from paying nearly 900 million dollars for the website. Other examples provided by Leadbeater include Google itself, which ranks pages according to link popularity, and Wikipedia, which is compiled and updated by its users.

'We Think' is available online for readers to review and suggest corrections before the book's publication next year. My only complaint is that such a brilliant book could have done without the gimmick of pretending that the final version will be the fruit of collaboration.

Whatever Leadbeater's blurb might claim, this has nothing to do with Wikipedia-style collaboration. At most, Leadbeater appears to be inviting citizen sub-editors to correct his typos.

Where's the 'we' in that?

Elsewhere, much of the BBC's Creative Futures strategy is aimed at tapping into the collective wisdom of its audience to bolster newsgathering and create a new kind of conversation. In some cases, the BBC is building platforms for UGC; in others, it is helping people to create their own content on existing third-party (non-BBC) platforms.

Faced with all the choice on the Internet, sometimes I feel like a five-year-old again, with tuppence to spend in my local sweet shop. I stood gazing at all the jars of sweets, in much the same way that i trawl through the blogosphere.

In those days, when I couldn't decide, I stood back and watched how my classmates invested their pennies. Nowadays, when I'm online, I rely on the wisdom of crowds.

Sites like Technorati and YouTube use feedback from visitors to generate most-viewed and most-played lists. Even news portals provide a Top 10 of most e-mailed stories.

Are blogs scalable?

Some of the men in pyjamas who populate the blogosphere, at least in the imagination of one senior BBC executive, are gleefully predicting that the MSM will fall off the blogging bandwagon. Major media, they say, will encourage too many people to post comments, thereby making their blogs unmanageable.

Not even the BBC will be able to recruit enough editors to cope, as what was conversation rapidly degenerates into mere information. Blogging, they argue, is not scalable.

Apparently, blogging is an intimate dinner, for a handful of guests, not some vulgar office party. A few bloggers even suggest that popular sites may have to put a cap on the number of visitors who can post comments.

The demise of the big blogs, they hope, will provide opportunity for the rest. The thinking is that users will resent losing themselves in the crowd and eventually gravitate back to the one-on-one conversations they have experienced on smaller blogs.

I think they are wrong: blogging is not about creating a single conversation. If you want one-on-one, then choose e-mail or IM.

Why should there be any limit to the number of discussions that can develop around a debate?

A case in point is Beppe Grillo's controversial blog on Italian politics. Grillo's posts regularly generate over a thousand comments, within which you will find dozens of conversations between smaller groups of users.

Ideas are not lost; invariably they are retrieved and revisited by subsequent users and make their way back to Grillo. These are genuine debates, rather than visitors leaving behind the electronic equivalent of "I woz here" graffiti.

It is the interactivity that keeps visitors going back, which is why the MSM are interested in the first place. Blogging is a community strategy, a logical progression from chat rooms and message boards, as Jay Rosen points out:

"User loyalty and engagement with the site: that's why newspapers need blogs. Some grasp that, some don't."

Rosen is writing about print media, but the same applies to broadcasters. Kevin Anderson makes a similar point:

"We used to call it stickiness, how much time people actually spend on your site. But this is even more than stickiness."

It is sound marketing and therefore highly unlikely that the MSM will abandon blogging in the foreseeable future. In my view, the idea of restricting comments is plain daft: no-one ever based a successful community strategy on excluding large parts of the audience.

John Naughton's recent essay on the changing media ecosystem suggests there is room for everyone: it is just a case of learning how to adapt. TV did not kill radio, Internet has not killed TV and big media blogs are not a threat to smaller blogs.

This is, after all, the era of the long tail: at least, that is how I console myself.

Why broadcasters should get a (Second) Life

In the cult John Frankenheimer film, Seconds, a sinister organization offers wealthy Americans the opportunity to buy a new and more glamorous life. The package includes a different identity, as well as the plastic surgery that transforms the film's dour, middle-aged hero into Rock Hudson.

I think I have found a better deal. Linden Lab offers a similar service for less than $10 a month.

Second Life is a virtual online world that has given this dour, middle-aged hack the looks and six-pack abs of a youthful Brad Pitt. My name - that is, my avatar's name - is RadioMike Regenbogen.

And unlike the film, where there is no going back, when I am fed up I can just switch my computer off. Joining the SL community involves no painful surgical procedures, although tasks as mundane as putting on a pair of trousers can be frustratingly difficult to master. 

In the last three months, the number of residents has doubled to 1.5 million. The population is growing at more than 30 per cent a month.

Habbo Hotel, a rival MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game), is already attracting seven million unique visitors every month. The Habbo communities in 29 real world countries, across five continents, have created 66 million characters since it was launched in 2000.

Admittedly, the websites of many EBU members are already attracting as much, or more traffic - seven million unique visitors a month is about the same as swissinfo.org. But these are ultra loyal, communities: around 75,000 members are spending an average of three hours in SL every day.

For the record, I haven't spent too much time in Habbo because it is really aimed at an 11-18 demographic, who meet to play games and chat about boy bands. I guess they just make me feel old and out of touch.

What sets SL and Habbo apart from other MMORPGs is their emphasis on user-generated content and social networking. They are both highly successful examples of what many people are calling the Web 2.0 trend.

Certainly, big business is taking an interest. Record companies have been joining Habbo to reach their teen pop customers, while Adidas, Sony, Toyota and Vodafone and are some of the corporations with a presence in SL.

The MSM are also beginning to take an active interest. The only irony is that with so much lip service being paid to the importance of bringing youngsters back to radio and TV, all the attention is for SL, with little for Habbo.

The BBC is renting a tropical island in SL, where it has staged virtual music festivals. It is providing visitors to the island with free digital radios that will allow them to listen to Radio 1 while they travel around the virtual world.

Last year, the BBC TV journalist Jeremy Paxman broadcast the first-ever studio session from inside the online world.

Not to be outdone, Channel 4 is planning to broadcast its audio programmes to SL residents next year by selling them portable radios. C4 Radio plans to offer a special SL show, reporting on the daily goings-on in the interactive community.

Channel 4 might even make some money out of the venture because SL has a booming economy. Residents can exchange real currency for Linden dollars and back again.

Elsewhere, technology journalist Adam Pasick is giving a whole new meaning to the term 'embedded' by reporting full-time from SL. As Adam Reuter he is the head of the news agency's first virtual bureau.

Incidentally, if like me you are a bit of a news junkie, a good place to hang out and discuss stories is the atrium of the Reuters offices. Just fly or teleport there - this is a virtual world.

If I were you, though, I'd get there quickly because Germany's Axel Springer appears hell-bent on dumbing the place down by launching SL's first tabloid newspaper.

It's a slippery slope and no-one is there to fight the corner for public service journalism in SL. Perhaps the EBU should open offices there?

Why Wikinews will never match BBC News Online

I have just received an email challenging me to justify my comment in an earlier post that "Wikinews will never be a substitute for BBC News Online." I thought I had already dealt with that.

Anyhow, I'll answer the question by telling you about a book I never read.

A few years ago, somebody gave me a copy of 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' by Eric Raymond. Unfortunately, I had only managed to read a few pages before I lost the book, somewhere in China.

From what I remember, the book was based on the seemingly utopistic premise that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." In other words, if the public has access to the source code, then software bugs will be detected and fixed more quickly.

This is the bazaar of the book's title - a then revolutionary approach to software development known as open source. Raymond contrasts this to the cathedral model, which relies on highly organised teams of specialised experts.

While I was losing my copy, a certain Jimmy Wales not only finished the book, but was inspired to try applying the bazaar model to content creation. The result was Wikipedia.

The ironic thing is that nowadays Raymond is one of Wikipedia's biggest critics. Among other things, he claims the entry on him is strewn with errors.

"Disaster," he fumes, "is not too strong a word" for the people's encyclopaedia. I'm told that what really got Raymond's goat was that other citizen editors had had the effrontery to re-write his Wikipedia entries on science fiction.

But questions of ego aside, he makes a very important point: Raymond believes that the open-source model only suits software development because it is immediately obvious if something doesn't work. The same objectivity, he says, cannot be applied to writing or editing entries for an encyclopaedia.

Fans of Wikipedia, myself included, would counter this with the observation that over time the collective wisdom (and eyeballs) of thousands of editors will remove any inaccuracies or bias. The Wikipedia community is not as anarchic as many suppose: a significant number of pages on the site are actually dedicated to discussing controversial entries and resolving possible disputes.

The problem is that all this takes time, which clearly an up-to-the-minute site like Wikinews does not have. The collective wisdom of millions of users may be a powerful tool, but it cannot deal with breaking news.

The problem with Wikinews is that it tries to mimic MSM without the aid of professional journalists. South Korea's OhMyNews may have 30,000 citizen reporters, but the whole thing is held together by a small number of professional editors.

"Citizen journalism won't replace the professionals, at least I hope not," says 'We the Media' author Dan Gillmor. "We need the best of what the pros do."

Gillmor envisages an ecosystem where all kinds of journalism coexist. In his vision, professionals would provide citizen reporters with tools and training, while in turn enriching their own output with user-generated content.

This is an area where the BBC is setting the pace. At News Xchange, Pete Clifton talked about a user-generated content hub that employs six people (now seven) to sort through the 10,000 emails and texts the BBC receives every day, together with 300 images in a typical week.

But the user-generated content hub is only part of the picture. Vicky Taylor runs a team of 22 people directly involved in interactivity - four of them, for example, work on a special TV and radio programme called Have Your Say.

Last week, the BBC College of Journalism launched a three-hour workshop on user-generated content. It covered topics such as the authentication of material, taste and decency, health and safety, as well as legal matters, including copyright, defamation, contempt and privacy.

Advice on all these areas is also set out in a new guide to editorial policy.

The BBC and other PSBs are already exploring Gillmor's ecosystem and reaping some of the benefits of UGC. Wikinews is living in a wolrld of its own.

User-generated authenticity

On its final day, the News Xchange conference revisited the tedious "journalists vs. bloggers" debate as ITN's editor-in-chief, David Mannion, launched a withering attack against Charles Leadbeater. One of the few things I learnt at business school was that there is always resistance to change, but still the vehemence of Mannion's attack caught me by surprise.

"I have never heard so much tosh in all my life," screamed Mannion after Leadbeater predicted that news editors would come to rely increasingly on user-generated content (UGC). Why so much anger, given that the former FT reporter was hardly saying anything new?

"There is still an awful lot of material out there that is not user-generated content. And may I remind Mr. Leadbeater that we stood here yesterday, in front of a roll call of professional journalists and cameramen who had died because of authenticity and because they were on the spot."

Leadbeater had argued that broadcasters were at the beginning of "a fundamental shift in the economics and culture of news production." This was because previously high barriers to entry and high capital costs were falling rapidly.

Leadbeater had claimed that Wikipedia's account of the July 7 bombings was "almost as good as the BBC", but had been achieved with no employees.

It was a tad provocative, perhaps, but hardly a declaration of war against MSM.

Leadbeater was not, of course, suggesting the BBC, or ITN for that matter, should sack all their journalists. UGC is not about pulling content from users - it is a process involving two-way traffic, which is why Wikinews will never be a substitute for BBC News Online.

A UGC strategy means empowering audiences to tell their own stories because eyewitness accounts are more powerful than ripping and reading Reuters news ticker. Dare I say it, they add authenticity.

Forget Wikipedia, in this respect the BBC's coverage of the July 7 bomb attacks was a watershed. It was the beginning of what the BBC's Global News chief, Richard Sambrook, called "a long journey that will take us to a very new place."

Journalists provided analysis, context and background, while eyewitness enriched the BBC's output with text, photos and video sequences. One survivor - Rachel from North London - began an online diary for the BBC, which later turned into a blog.

The BBC now employs six people to check the content that flows in every day on a variety of more or less newsworthy topics.

The head of BBC News Interactive, Pete Clifton, told News Xchange that 95 per cent of submissions were worth looking at, if not always worth using. "There's always a small minority that want to put one over on us: you become very expert in looking at these things."

The BBC's Mary Hockaday was more succinct: "A lot of that stuff is rubbish, but some of it isn't."

The important thing is that broadcasters like the BBC are beginning to think about audiences as partners, rather than mere users. They have become an essential part of the newsgathering operation.

Something that did not come up during the session was the idea that the bloke on the Clapham omnibus may be an expert in his field, who could provide an informed source. Jay Rosen calls it "users know more than we do" journalism.

It was not discussed because old-think Old Media delegates were too busy worrying about whether UGC was a threat to their editorial standards. The simple answer is no because one of the first things you learn in journalism is to check your source - whether it's Reuters, AFP or a "citizen journalist".

Web 2.0: reality or hype?

"It's perfectly ordinary banter," protests an RAF squadron leader to some baffled-looking pilots, in a famous Monty Python sketch. They are still straining to understand and too late to evacuate the RAF station by the time the "cabbages" drop.

In real life, every profession has its jargon and understanding the banter is not usually a problem. A journalist will know what to do if his editor tells him to spike a story; those working in New Media know their ASP from their ISPs and their bitrates from their BitTorrent.

Occasionally, though, a word or phrase creeps in that has everyone nonplussed, but at the same time afraid to admit that they do not really understand. When this happens, self-respecting professionals start behaving like the courtiers in The Emperor's New Clothes.

"Web 2.0" is a good example. Everybody uses it, the blogosphere is full of chatter about Web 2.0, but what does it actually mean? Is it just hype, or are we witnessing the birth of a new generation of Web-based services?

Internet guru Tim O'Reilly, who claims to have coined the phrase, defines "Web 2.0" as "a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles." Perhaps the most significant thing Web 2.0 sites have in common is their heavy reliance on the active participation of users.

For example, peer-to-peer systems are Web 2.0 applications because their services actually improve as more users become involved. Akamai, in contrast, belongs to the Web 1.0 era, since it needs to add servers to improve service.

Participation is also at the core of two sites that in the minds of many people have become synonymous with Web 2.0: MySpace and YouTube. Their phenomenal success persuaded Rupert Murdoch to part with half a billion dollars to acquire the former, while Google forked out three times as much for the latter.

Both sites build communities: MySpace even bills itself as "a place for friends". It allows users to create their own area, where they can write about themselves, upload pictures and do a spot of social networking.

In other words, the MySpace community provides the content, as do YouTube users, who post videos on that site. But there is nothing very new about that.

Sites like Napster and Kazaa were doing it years ago, albeit illegally. Even I was having a go at building online communities, six years ago, with discussion boards.

Wikis and weblogs might have moved into the mainstream, but they were already around back in 2000. It is just that now every media company feels obliged to have one.

As a consequence, many journalists are now producing weblogs for their company websites, as part of the much heralded Web 2.0 revolution. But editorially their blog posts are no different to the articles they used to write for the same websites.

The American comedian Jon Stewart dismisses the phenomena as "giving voice to the already voiced." In actual fact, these pseudo-blogs are no different to what media sites were doing seven or eight years ago, when they simply invited readers to "comment on this story".

It is a fashion thing: web pages must look as though they have been cobbled together in Blogger or Typepad. Many of Tim O'Reilly's other "principles and practices" were also around well before he invented the term "Web 2.0".

Amazon.com has been allowing visitors to participate for more than a decade, encouraging them to write reviews. It then uses their activity to hone search results and offer recommendations.

It is human nature to look for patterns and create categories where none exist, a behaviour exacerbated by the success of management manuals. In truth, though, "Web 2.0" is no more meaningful than the "excellence" label applied to companies in the 1980s by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman.

Web 2.0 does not reveal anything about where the Web is going; it simply identifies good practice and highlights what is possible today.

The long tail and international broadcasting

How do Swissinfo and other international broadcasters survive in a media jungle dominated by 900 pound gorillas like the BBC World Service? The answer is a strategy that takes full advantage of the "long tail".

Originally, the term was used to describe statistical distributions, such as the frequency with which different words occur.

For example, if you were to draw a chart based on the occurrence of words in the English language, the high end would be dominated by short and frequently used words like "the" and "have". Moving along the chart, you would see a long tail of increasingly obscure words that occur less frequently.

But it was Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson who first used the "long tail" to explain the success of Internet-based businesses such as Amazon.com. The idea is that the length of the tail can make niche products as lucrative as top sellers.

Music download services, for instance, make much more money from their entire catalogue than from just the top 100 bestselling titles. As demand increases for niche products, they become more profitable.

This is the argument behind Anderson's new book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More".

I believe the same thing is happening in broadcasting, where more platforms are increasing choice and fragmenting audiences. Thanks to Internet radio, podcasting and DAB, more broadcasters are able to cater to minority tastes.

Traditionally, international broadcasters have reached their target audiences via analogue shortwave radio, which is very much a hit and miss affair. Listeners tend to remain loyal to one brand name, such as the BBC WS or Deutsche Welle, because the radio dial is quite possibly the worst interface ever invented.

This is likely to change. Digital Radio Mondiale has the potential to bring the long tail model to shortwave broadcasting by making it easier for users to find new stations.

But let's get back to Swissinfo.

A few years ago, Swiss Radio International/Swissinfo provided a 24/7 world news service on shortwave. They had state-of-the-art studios and good journalists compiling very respectable news and current affairs programmes.

The only problem was a lack of evidence that anyone was actually listening. At least, that is what the Swiss authorities told SRI in 1997, when they hinted they might withdraw their half of the station's budget.

In the end, Swissinfo saved its lard/Speck/pancetta by going online and adopting a strategy of "Swissness". This meant no more international news and a back-to-basics mission of presenting Switzerland to the outside world.

The Internet did for Swissinfo what it had already done for Amazon: it enabled the Berne-based broadcaster to slash distribution costs and win a completely new audience. The focus on Switzerland means they are part of the long tail, providing a specialist news service that not even the BBC or CNN can match.

As Anderson argues in his book, a shift is taking place from mass markets to niche markets as Internet search engines aggregate less popular products and make them profitable.

The challenge for broadcasters is to ensure that their content is not too far down the tail and difficult to find. For websites, SEO is essential and is certainly a cornerstone of Swissinfo's strategy.

Elsewhere, other international broadcasters, including RFI, Radio Netherlands and Radio Prague are now getting together to look at ways of aggregating their content. Ideas under discussion include the creation of a common web portal.

I believe that the future of international broadcasters will depend on their success in driving demand down the long tail by making their content easier to find. Collaborative projects and cross-promotion will play a key part in this.