Let’s Go to the Video Tape!

I know I am most definitely dating myself by using that iconic Warner Wolf phrase from the 1970s.  Any baby boomer from the first half of the boom that ever watched sports on TV can remember that phrase.  Well, this is a column about going to the video tape.  Internet 2.0 is video.

On January 1 I wrote a column here called “The Transformation Decade”. It prompted comments and numerous emails and took off on Twitter and the blogosphere.  That prompted me to make it a video.  Let’s go to the video tape!.

As a futurist, particularly since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I have been called upon to make forecasts.  In the first week of January, I gave my economic forecast for 2010 about this “recovery that won’t feel like a recovery”.  Let’s go to the video tape!

Those of you in the entertainment business, and most of us actually, have all probably spoken the clichéd truism that “content is king” in the past decade or two.  Well, while that is true, it is a most definitely Information Age phrase.  In the Shift Age, “context is king”.Let’s go to the video tape!

Thanks for the phrase Warner.  And of course, for this Transformation Decade, the good old chestnut from Bob Dylan is most appropriate:  “Those not busy being born are busy dying”.  Of course any one of his phrases prompts another to pop into mind:  “The times they are  a’changin”

2 Responses to “Let’s Go to the Video Tape!”

  1. Gary Says:

    I know you’ve written about the state of the real estate industry in the past, that it’s ripe for disintermediation. Yet, it has not happened. Not yet, anyway. What’s your latest thinking on this?

  2. david Says:

    Gary-

    Complete disintermediation has not happened to the real estate industry, but disintermediation has certainly happened to that industry.

    Three years ago there were not discount chains offering to handle closing only at 1.5%; now there are several. For Sale By Owner is getting stronger every day.
    I know many people who have either negotiated the percent brokerage fee or gone direct.

    The number of real estate brokers in the US has fallen by some 30-50% depending upon region of the country in the last 4 years.

    So disintermediation has most definitely occurred and has changed the shape and transactions in the real estate business over the last 5 years.

    David