I realised last week just how trendy my life has become.

And I don’t mean because I am hanging out in ritzy bars. I have been working far too hard for that…

I have been following recently the various media sagas and their side-dramas.

General McChrystal spinning out of control and turning Rolling Stone Magazine into a household name….

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becoming a regular feature of my beloved Daily Show with Jon Stewart while inspiring one of the most hilarious YouTube videos I have ever seen…

And yes… I feel trendy because, in the same week, I had an editor upset me… for the first time in many years.

What do you do when, together with the edits, you are sent a long email with a lecture in journalism?

No, you don’t mention that the person writing the email has far fewer springs on their back than you do…. No, you don’t embark on a litany of all the newspapers and other media you have written for in the past 18 years…

All this runs counter to your meditation practice.

So, I just went into the kitchen, played a CD with my mantras, chanted for 10 minutes…

And I cooled down. It worked. That… and venting on my blog, which, as you know, I don’t usually do.

So thanks for listening to me this time.

I used to be in love with the inverted pyramid.

It would give a structure to my stories. When I worked as a journalist, it would serve as the scaffolding of my day… organising my thoughts, the results of my research and the quotes I would get from my interviews.

However, may be…  it’s time to move on.

In an article just published in Communication World,  Angelo Fernando writes about how “in the future, every story will need to have a beginning, a middle and a hyperlink”.

Hyperlinks put our texts into perspective and connect them with “the broader universe in which your story will live”.

We have to start thinking of every text as “an opportunity to be woven into a larger, ever-developing story line”.

Angelo also talks about the new print-to-Web experience.

Esquire magazine has just come out with its first Augmented Reality issue. The cover and some of the pages have codes. When held up to a web cam, the codes let the reader interact with the content (as shown in the video below).

It still feels a bit gimmicky to me…. but we might be on to something here.

Where is Augmented Reality Journalism taking us… I can’t wait to find out.

I work so much with social media that sometimes I forget what it is like to write an article for good old print media.

That’s exactly what I had to do this week.

I was amazed to see how much I have got used to blogging and twittering.

Writing for a newspaper, as I used to do every day in my previous life as a journalist, feels like remembering how to use the fountain pen you had in school.
 
Journalism has always been an integral part of me and my way of thinking. Deep down, I believe… I will always be a journalist…

But here is what I miss most these days when I have to write for newspapers or magazines:
• the ability to insert links and connect my ideas to the views and believes of other people. Print media does not allow multidimensional texts.
• the opportunity to use multipliers like Twitter and Facebook and post my text simultaneously on different sites.
• the immediate reactions you get from posting online. With print media you have to wait for your article to come out…that might take a couple of months… and by that time you might already be on to another subject.
• The feeling of community you get when you hit the right topic and people start to create a buzz around your post.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to be blogging again today!

I believe that if you live long enough in a place, it becomes part of you.

This is why I was really excited to hear about an interesting experiment with citizen journalism in the Czech Republic.

I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague working as a reporter. What made the job so interesting was not only the historic time (only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) but also the stories ordinary people would tell me when I was researching my articles.

Czechs have a unique way to relay facts. A fascinating mixture of magical realism and sobering analysis.

These are ideal components for the new venture launched by PPF Media. The group has set up a network of cafés in a number of Czech towns where people can go to surf the web, drink coffee and chat about local events with journalists who work there. The product is new type of reporting, which mixes the skills of professional journalists with those of the readers.

The network is coordinated by the “Futuroom” based in Prague, where seasoned editors work, adding national and international content to the local stories. The “Futuroom” also serves as a multi-media training centre and has already attracted the support of partners like Google and the World Association of Newspapers.

If I close my eyes and think back of the days when I was working at the English desk of a Czech news agency, I can see myself typing on a keyboard in the early morning in a semi-dark room with the snow silently falling outside.

Were we all working at an experiment? Did we contribute a least a little to the amazing progress that Czech journalism has made in the past 20 years?

I am humbly hoping for the answer to be “yes”….

My co-author Yang-May and I look very happy in this picture.

Our book has been nominated for the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Awards!

I got the message the other week in San Francisco…first thing in the morning when I turned on my Blackberry. I was rushing …. I had to jump in the shower and almost forgot about it. But in the course of the day, the thought came back to my mind and began to sink in.

When Yang-May got the news, she remembered writing the book in her pyjamas early in the morning…

Awards and pyjamas are such a funny juxtaposition…

Yesterday, we gave a talk at the Institute of Directors together with Giles Colborne on Creating Value through Web 2.0 helped by panel chairman David Wootton.

Many of the questions we were asked dealt with the ROI of social media for small and medium-sized businesses. We used our blogs to provide examples for some of the answers.

I have been blogging on XCulture for over two years. It has been a fascinating journey. One that has taken me in many unexpected directions. The part I enjoyed most has been floating ideas for our book and observing the reactions of my readers.

Click here to download our IOD presentation.

It is June and it’s time to leave for San Francisco again.

At the end of the week, I will be attending IABC’s international executive board meeting.

I am thrilled that my friend Mark Schumann is taking over as chairman. Mark has a great sense of humour. And we will probably need it in the years to come…

One of the issues we are discussing in California is the direction in which the communication profession is going and where it will be in 10 years from now.

At the moment, it feels like walking through a maze at a summer fair. You can only go forward. You can’t turn back. There is nothing to go back to.

Journalism, as we used to know it, is no more.

And the power of social media is chipping away at corporate communication’s old command-and-control culture.

The more I work with organisations to introduce Web 2.0, the more I realise that it is mostly about relinquishing fear. I believe communicators can play a major role in removing resistance and developing what Kevin Roberts calls “emotional connectivity”.

Now and again, I still meet people convinced that blogging and Twitter are only used for weirdoes who want to upload their frustrations on the internet.

So, it was refreshing to read an interview with Queen Rania of Jordan in which she calls social media “a catalyst for the advancement of everyone’s rights…It’s where people can find and fight for a cause, global or local, popular of specialised, even when there are hundreds of miles between them.”

Who needs to know how to exit the maze?! I just love the “attraction economy”.

If you are still having doubts about the world undergoing an acceleration, you need to watch this video.

It gave me goose bumps.

These are definitely exponential times.

As a former journalist, it blew my mind to find out that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

And did you know that if MySpace were a country, it would be the 5th largest in the world (between Indonesia and Brazil)?!?

We have all heard that in the post web 2.0 era, photos and video will replace text.

This is a scary thought for someone like me.

I was trained as a journalist. I spent my whole life writing. And thoughts in my mind have always taken the form of words and clusters of words and never of images.

My jaw dropped once, when my accountant told me that he could visualise the numbers on a balance sheet and turn them into images. How do you do that? I studied accountancy in high school but (no wonder!) I decided it wasn’t for me…

However, I have always been fascinated by pictures and the ability of photographers to capture the essence of a person or the spirit of a place.

That’s why my jaw dropped for the second time when I read Helmut’s article on RoubiMAGAZINE and saw Edward Steichen’s photographs.

Steichen’s ability to capture the character of his models is mind blowing.

I saw the photos from the exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and felt thrown back in time to the 1920s. The energy was so strong.

And the picture of Cary Cooper is surreal… almost three-dimensional.

Edward Steichen
Actor Cary Cooper, 1930
Courtesy Condé Nast Archive, New York
© 1930 Condé Nast Publications

I am not sure photos and video will manage to erase words and text from the face of the earth, as the evangelists of web 3.0 would like us to believe. I just can’t image it happening…. but if it happens, I hope there will be more Edward Steichens around….

Photo: thanks to Helmut Stampfli, Espaces Arts & Objects, Zürich