One day that summer I came in from my holiday to join a meeting about the project. We sat down, talked, and when we left the room it hit me: this project is never going to happen. I decided there and then that it was time to leave. It was a fairly easy decision once I understood that I was waiting for something that wasn’t coming.

Six months later I left and started Jeffery & Edling which later became Good Old.

This time the decision was anything but easy.

I’m leaving the CEO position at Good Old to become Director, Future Media & Technology at The Bonnier Group. At the same time I’ll switch to become the chairman of the board at Good Old. I wasn’t looking for a new job, but this opportunity was to good not to try out.

The official press releases are here and here, but let me tell you about why I want to do this.

The previous year, 2004, I was reading blogs about the web and thought it was the most interesting thing in the world. I had a bit of experience running different websites, but mostly I had a head spinning with ideas about what could be done in this new media climate. I remember thinking “surely someone, somewhere, would be willing to pay something for what I know”?. That’s where the idea of an agency started. I wanted to see if it was possible to make a living out of what I knew. Especially since I couldn’t really channel those ideas into anything constructive at my employer at the time.

In a way I created the job that I never got offered or could apply for. I called myself an internet strategist and tried to understand the web ecosystem as best as I could. Many bad ideas, stupid decisions and down right incompetence sometimes – they were all part of this immense learning experience. But I managed to get some consultant work at several media companies due to my background. I worked with them over several years and loved it. Media is my field, it’s where I’ve always been, and where I’ve always pictured myself to be.

For the last year I’ve been consulting at Bonnier R&D, working with the convergence of media and technology. It is a question that I feel passionately about and it was a privilege to get the possibility to get to work with it on such a high level. Indirectly and inadvertently, I created this new position through my time and work there. So when it was offered to me it felt as if it had been tailor made for me. I had to give it a shot.

I’m very proud of my accomplishments at Good Old, but I’m in no way claiming that it was my effort alone that has made it so. It’s been a real honour to work with people that are genuinely talented, and also are really good human beings too. People, that through their hard work and ideas, have shaped the company to what it is today. Thank you. It’s truly great to see. I look forward to being a part of our reinvention the coming years.

Finally, I’d like to thank readers of this blog that have put up with sparse updates and the odd pointless rant. I’ve been in touch with a lot of you during the years and look forward to keeping the discussion going over at my new digital home. Thanks.

The most disruptive thing must be people that don’t play with the same rules as the rest of their peers.

Simply put, companies are judged on their revenues minus their costs and their desired profit margins. If there is money left over, they are doing better than expected. If they don’t make enough, the company is failing to meet its expectations.

Technology plays a large part in lowering the costs. This in itself has proved to be disruptive. But even more disruptive, is to lower the expectations and possibilities of the margins.

Take Craigslist as an example. According to TechNewsWorld in 2004, they took $65 million from the newspapers in the area (and that was five years ago). The same year, Craigslist was expected to make $10 million of their own. As they were taking most of the classified ads, it’s easy to see that they could have made more than the expected $10 million. But they decided not to.

Due to technology, they had lower costs. But due to not maximizing profit, they didn’t have to charge as much for their ads as they could have done. They even let most of them be completely free, and still do.

As the product was comparable – better than the competition even – there simply was no reason to use the classifieds page in the newspaper ever again. But even worse – the newspaper couldn’t accept such a low margin, and through that made it impossible for them to compete. Game over.

Open source works in a similar way. There’s no expectation or requirement to present a profit. Therefore the price can be zero. And that is difficult to beat, if you’re in a company that doesn’t accept zero as a margin.

Disruption comes in many forms. Technology has made it possible to create a lot with little. The internet as a whole has brought back the notion that for a lot of people and companies, it’s good enough to make a living, rather than getting rich. Combine the two and you have the most difficult hurdle to overcome for any profit-driven company today.

Make sure you don’t miss the other videos from the event either – a lot of inspiring stuff.

Don’t worry about the gratuitous use of the word “illegal” before the word “download”, that’s just a generation thing. Like saying “social” before “media”.

- JP Rangaswami

One short quote from an article that has about ten, equally quotable, paragraphs that should be read, and re-read.

“Consumers couldn’t care less how much it costs to produce a product, be it news, clothing or cars. They don’t inspect your production facility and balance sheets to determine whether the price is fair.”

Absolutely correct, and valid in every way. I could rant about journalism as non-profit, public service and all of that. I won’t as Sonderman says it better himself, only more succinct.

However.

I question whether this means that journalism can’t be funded through consumer payment. I’m not talking about projects such as Spot.us, but about well designed and packaged (paid) services that enable and enhances the news experience. I haven’t seen any, although I assume there are a few.

If the perception that people were paying for content in their newspaper subscription was wrong (they paid for distribution), why are so many experimenting with the charging of online content rather than everything else attached to it?

Whether you can charge for online content or not is irrelevant. What is interesting and important to pursue is if journalism can be funded – in any way – from consumer payment.

Given this volume of content generation, is our usual strategy of ‘build it and they will come’ one that holds water? Isn’t it time we thought better about how we might swim with, rather than against this, tide? Think more smartly about how we bring online and offline marketing together as one (how do we promote our online content)? Realize a funny ad might not be funny enough (there might be funnier content in culture outside advertising)? Think that we need to either make something more magnetic and beautiful (craft) or be quicker and have a more disposable attitude to the stuff we make? Any way you loom at it, it’s quite sobering to see how truly frenetic culture has become.

Also, here are all the links to the blog relay that I participated in:

PM Nilsson: Kommer journalistyrket att slås ut?
Martin Thörnkvist: Musicians and fans will continue to gain power
Unni Drougge: Mer eller bättre?
Isobel Hadley-Kamptz: Moln med solglittriga kanter
Gunilla Kinn: The Show Must Go On (and it Does..!)
Fredrik Wass: Min bransch i framtiden

I see a major insourcing trend coming up. It’s a fairly simple theory based on the current economic climate. All budgets will be gone through one extra time to see if anything can be cut. When they look back over the past few years, a lot of companies will find the “web development” post will have been substantial. And it’s probably not going down either. This means that the internet, like it or not, has become part of their everyday business. That also means it’s time to insource.

So what happens to web agencies and consultancies in times of insourcing? They either lose business or they change. We’re opting for the latter.

Imagine this: a marketing executive is running the company website. Things are going well, lots of visitors and page views. A thought occurs though: could we be doing even better? And who can answer that question?

If you call a web agency they’ll say that you need a new website. If you call a management consultant they won’t understand the website, but they’ll find ways to cut costs. Arguably they would both be wrong, but as consultants they have to propose the product that they are selling. That’s what businesses do.

Marketing and product development have merged. And the internet is becoming core business, no matter what line of work you’re in. I think the future of internet consulting is in becoming a partner that helps your clients develop their online business continuously. Less campaign sites in flash, less banner concepts. Instead: analytics, business development, developing new online products and partnership that the customers need and want. Perhaps sharing the risk of a project by trading consulting time for equity or revenue. That way there’s a shared focus in improving the business long term, and not maximizing the attention during a short period of time.

Perhaps the time for consulting within this area is starting to pass. Perhaps the time for strategic partnerships with specialized business developing units is coming.

Let’s find out.

I’m handing over the relay stick to my friend Martin Thörnkvist at Digital Renaissance. Looking forward to reading his thoughts tomorrow!

Same thing goes for my other colleague Ulrika who will be writing about how to reach people in the new blog Good Old Attention.

If you need to balance your reading up with something a bit more easy going, I’d like to also plug our new blog Being Tyler Brûlé. If you’re a Monocle, Fast Lane or ex-Wallpaper reader you’ll catch on pretty quick.

Sales person: You know, now we even cover blogs!
Me: Really? What blog index are you using for that? [I was, admittedly, smirking]
Sales person: Index? We’re adding several hundred – every day!

She didn’t get a sale.

After the call, it occurred to me that the sales girl regarded blogs as any other media outlet: one that should be regularly monitored and followed on a daily basis. Arguably most people look at them that way. But as there is an abundance of interesting people to follow, myself and a lot of my friends suffer from RSS-anxiety – the “unread” figure is simply to high to handle. And we don’t won’t to miss out on anything?

For a while now I have started to think about this differently. An abundance of information, a scarcity of time. This miss-match will never be in balance however we try to adapt and evolve. As the publishing threshold is so low, the amount of “interestingness” produced will always surpass the time you can spend consuming it.

That’s why we need to regard blogs and microblogs as flow, not as regular media. Limiting ourselves to just follow a predefined set of blogs (just as we follow newspapers, tv-channels etc) is an inadequate way of consuming this new media. Unsurprisingly, it is the exact way we have consumed old media – we got a newspaper each morning and “followed” it. We had a tv-channel, and “followed” it too.

So how should we follow this new media more efficiently? I think it will be through combining selected voices that we never want to miss with sophisticated search strings and meme trackers. We need a system that tells us what we should be reading, rather than reading everything just in case. Sure, there are Techmeme and players like that, but we’re not quite there yet.

At Reboot last year Jyri Engeström said that if an article was interesting enough it would elevate through his social network with such a frequency that he knew he would find it interesting. That wouldn’t work for everyone, but it’s the type of logic that we need to be looking at if this information flow is going to be manageable. Social filtering together with aggregated data processing.

In DN today there is an article about Swedish politician´s blogs and that nobody is reading or commenting on them. In the light of what I’ve just written, the perspective of the article is warped. Why would loads of people regularly read or comment on the daily lives of a politician? The interesting thing is that once they do write something interesting, it can be found and become a conversation piece where they can choose to be a part. Having a blog gives them an honest chance of that. But the amount of readers and comments should probably not be among the key success factors when evaluating the project. The abundance of information and the scarcity of time makes that a tough challenge to handle for anyone, and even more so for a politician that is supposed to run the country at the same time.

So keep on blogging, politicians. There’s nothing wrong with just being part of the flow.