Source: Straits Times, Friday, September 5, 2008 by Chua Hian Hou

Context Is King On New Web, Says Expert

Media firms must not just cater to users' needs but also ensure 'good experience'

A Digital media specialist yesterday declared that while contents was king into today's media business, context would reign in the interactive, collaborative next generation online world.

Professor John Seely Brown said that, in an increasingly fragmented Internet world with its countless niche audiences, each looking for different things, media companies had to tailor their offerings to fit their different audiences.

The traditional "one-size-fit-all" content model will no longer work, he said.

And while catering to each other nice audience's needs, media companies also need to ensure that the media consumer's overall user experience is good.

He cited the example of the Amazon kindle, an electronic book reader, which has trumped it's rivals by being more than just another gadget - it offers its users access to it's library of 180,000 books and newspapers, and allow them to share their experience with other Kindle users.

Prof Brown, here at the invitation of the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) foundation,, was delivering a lecture titled Redefining Media in the 21st Century.

He is a visiting scholar with the University of South California, co-chairs the Deloitte centre for edge Innovation, and used to be Xerox Corporation's chief scientist.

His personal research interests include digital youth culture and new forms of communications and learning.

Among his audience yesterday were SPH chairman Tony Tan, SPH chief executive officer Alan Chan, the Public Service Division's permanent secretary Lim Soo Hoon, National Library Board chief executive N.Varaprasad and Singapore Institute of Management chief executive Lee Kwok Cheong.

Prof Brown also said the Web of the future needed to come up with new business models that will take into account the open source movement, in which people collaborate, share and build on each other's ideas.

He was responding to the editor's-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay Newspapers Division Patrick Daniel, who had asked him for his take on the business impact of the new web.

Prof Brown also encouraged his largely adult audience to at least try social networks like Linkedin instead of demission them out =of-hand as time wasters or something for the younger set.

Thos who did so stand to benefit professionally, he said, because - contrary toi what some may think - "a lot of real work is done around the water cooler", and that social networks were an "amplifier of the office water cooler".

The mission of the 4 1/2-year-old SPH Foundation,, a registered charity and an Institution of Public Character, is to build a life-ling learning community that embraces language enrichment, creativity, diversity, healthy living and sport.

SPH put up SGD20 million in seed money to start it up.

Prof Brown's lecture last year was delivered by Professor Henry Jenkins, the director of the Comparative media Studies programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.