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Just scanned the rough draft of The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War?, in which I will have a modest contribution ( which needs some work, in my view).

The book will be controversial.

Published by Nimble Books and edited by Dan of tdaxp.

More as the project develops.

Hard to believe that this was an amateur production. For film making, this is akin to what the first great blogs were to publishing, a tipping point moment toward mass amateurization:

THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM – FULL Trailer 1 from Independent Online Cinema on Vimeo.

I watched the full 40 minute film a few days ago on my computer at The Hunt for Gollum website, it was impressive. Incidentally, the creators had permission from the Tolkien Estate to proceed as a non-profit venture and gave J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision, mostly culled from extant writings, notes and appendixes, a respectful treatment.

Hat tip to Scholars & Rogues.

I have a monumental amount of things on my plate right now, in every sphere of life you care to name, so blogging is going to have to take a backseat this weekend. A disharmonic convergence of due dates is upon me and I need to start checking them off of my to-do list. I may or may not post anything here for a few days and will just have to see how things pan out.

The MSM has bumped up against the internet – and lost. 

Clay Shirky called it a while ago in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
but big media, if they wish to make the leap to to Web 2.0 life, have to leverage the one thing they do better than everyone else, original investigative reporting, that’s where they create value. Instead they are looking for government protection, subsidies or both.

Rupert Murdoch envisions a walled garden strategy but news has a brief shelf life. A high price on all content is a barrier to entry for older news items that just interest a few people. A flat rate drives down their market share for attention, their traffic and in turn, the market value of all the content they own. A sliding scale would be needed that rapidly discounts toward free as public attention on a news item waned.

Right now the media are like a brontosaurus that has just realized it waded into a tar pit.

I recommend that you check out CounterStories, particularly readers interested in futurism, 5GW, IO and strategic thinking.

Edited by journalist, think tanker and long time blogfriend Paul Kretkowski, CounterStories develops scenarios for purposes of alternative analysis, counterintuitive thinking exercises, predictive futurism and good old fashioned fun. Scenarios are a very helpful complement to more quantitative futurist methodologies.