24 hour personal broadcast : or, Uscream.tv

Anyone who works in the web will occasionally get asked “What’s the next big thing?” ( You get asked this often if you get very excited when the internet is mentioned, which I do). Annoyingly for my bank balance I don’t know that answer, however, I think I can see a next big thing. A future is Justin.tv and Ustream.tv.

These two sites have technology that allows users to video broadcast their every move. Justin now has a camera on his head transmitting his every move in San Franciso. Heck, even Jeff Jarvis’ son was able to rig up something that broadcast from his backpack. This makes blogging, vlogging and twittering seem like tools for the shy and retiring personal broadcaster.

I haven’t even watched that much of Justin.tv, but it is hypnotic. He’s cooking eggs. He’s walking. I’m watching. Why? Because human behaviour is fascinating. So if you’re not involved in a super neat Economist web innovation unit so can’t do anything about this, here are some things you could do :

i) Find 6 interesting people in diffferent fields and follow them as they interview artists, musicians, politicians and whomever.

ii) Or go niche. Find 6 intereting people who all do the same thing as they report on everything in music/politics/you get the idea. Remember, niche works.

iii) Find 6 socially stunted people who most definitely will not get on and make them live together and perform various taxing tasks. Yes, it is an even more hyper-invasive Big Brother with an out in the real world element.

Whatever, you do decide to do Mrs. TV Producer, do it quick. Because Big Brother is only Big because it got there first.

An amusing sidenote to this is that at the beginning of Project Red Stripe we did some thinking around potential future scenarios. Here’s one I doled out before either of these two sites came up (forgive the Terminator 2 style apocalyptic rhetoric) :

“The Rise of The Connecteds

In 2012 there arises a group called The Connecteds. Emerging initially in South Korea, San Francisco and Finland this youth culture constantly records, broadcasts and diffuses their lives. They become multimedia centres that not only create output but constantly scan shifting tides of information in many different forms.”

I think that shows that either that i) if you ask me to think five years into the future I’ll be able to tell you what will happen next month ii) the web moves fast so move your ass .