ECOVIS / Wingrave Yeats
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Famous in 15 Seconds - Blog 17.09.09
How on earth did I get to know all these things? That Charles Dickens’ discovery that Pirate copies of his Christmas Carol were being run off in a dingy New York Press led directly to the establishment of Copyright Law? That London has more than twice the number of broadband access points than New York, and that the main Olympic Stadium for 2012 will be covered in a “digital skin”.
Well, by attending three speeches given by Boris in two days as the mayoral team raced round New York, ringing the opening Bell at Nasdaq and regaling the fashionstas at Asprey and also the good and the great at the Consul General’s with a hundred different reasons as to why any Chairman of an international business with a modicum of common sense should be steering it towards London, now!
Of course you will probably know all this already given the way news moves. Within less than 60 seconds of the Bell sounding at Nasdaq, the entire outside of the building in Times Square was covered with electronic messaging and pictures, the newsreel had been broadcast live by all the main networks and all the stills had magically appeared on www.flickr.com. Famous for 15 minutes, to use the words of Andy Warhol? Famous in 15 seconds I should say!
The speed of data transmission is now just plain scary. And the means by which it is broadcast and the manner in which it is served up is just a tad different to what used to happen even as little as two years ago. It is amusing that all the newsreel associated with this two day event, which after all would probably not rank as world-changing in most people’s book, is up there free for everyone to see. But wait: click on the download button and the newsclip from ITN will cost you £149!
And there we have it: the wonderful world of web 2.0 where everything is available for free but only for a bit.
Once we advisers have learned the painful lesson that much of the knowledge (data) that we used to make our living out of now has to be given away free, we can all then learn how to monetise the process like our brethren in the media business. So far, Accountants and Lawyers are at least two steps behind in the process!
So amidst this significant and transformational change in the way we communicate where social media is making email look old-fashioned already, it was still rather reassuring that some things still haven’t changed in the Big Apple: The signs up in restaurants advising customers on how to cope with choking are still there to read, iced water and tepid Cona Coffee still flow abundantly even without having to ask for it and it still takes at least two hours in the queue for customs to enter the ‘land of the free’.
Comments and replies to Christopher Jenkins
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