• by February 23, 2006

Consider this:

What if you had access to the way my brain organized and interpreted information and content? Sound far-fetched? Not so much, according to TheBrain Technologies. The Marina del Rey, Calif.-based company has developed a software application to help businesses input, organize, collate, and analyze all kinds of content and information. Companies can share visually rendered information online across departments, divisions, and countries.

TheBrain also markets PersonalBrain, which individuals can use to organize and share information about hobbies, professional interests, and virtually anything about themselves.

For example, say you're an avid scuba diver and you've enjoyed dives in remote areas of the Caribbean and the South Pacific. A friend wants recommendations for a scuba vacation. You could share your PersonalBrain with him, showing details from your travels and so much more, like the location of that fish taco stand down the street from the surf shop that's next to the bungalow where you stayed.

Want to see how it works? While you can't climb inside my brain à la "Being John Malkovich" (not yet, at least), we invite you to burrow deep within TheBrain's rendering of the March issue of Media magazine at www.mediapostpublications .com/nonlinear.

"TheBrain is like a visual taxonomy," says Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State University's Center for Media Design, who has studied and engaged with the system. TheBrain's visual search and categorization software allows for more streamlined collaborations among companies and individuals. Consider it a visual system for social networking.

TheBrain interface presents information as a series of animated diagrams, each one flowing into the next. The interface encourages engagement as users analyze multiple topics, issues, and data sources that seamlessly relate to one another. Users can drag and drop, knit together, and visually map out all related information to see content in a way that goes beyond linear lists of folders and search results.

"If you think about iTunes or any sites that deliver content, like Movielink, you have to approach them the way you approach Amazon .com, in terms of searching by genre," says Rodger Smith, director of content, research and development and the associate director of BSU's Center for Media Design. "They're very good tools, Google-like search tools, but not very intuitive ones. TheBrain allows you to come in and search databases -- to come to the store and shop. It's all about walking into Wal-Mart and scanning or visualizing," Smith explains, adding, "It's about context. This system allows you to visually look around, because content is graphically represented."

Smith, who teaches in the Theater Department at BSU and whose background is in the film industry, has experimented with TheBrain's knowledge-based technology to create content for media platforms such as podcasting, cell phone downloads, episodic and interactive content, and high-definition film editing.

"Google-like searching is [fundamentally] linear. It's Boulean search with recognizable codes," he says. "When you look at TheBrain, you see associations and 'jump thoughts.' It's more intuitive."

Jump thoughts, Smith says, are truly nonlinear. As visualized by TheBrain, they are also highly contextual. Individuals and companies can get a visual perspective on all their information -- and what's more, that perspective can be adapted. Similar systems, like SharePoint, require users to work within pre-defined vertical categories, while TheBrain lets users visually manage all of their information.

The result is a comprehensive spiderweb that changes as individuals and companies evolve. The technology seamlessly integrates a built-in natural language search engine with a visual display. If users don't know what keywords to use to begin a search, TheBrain's visual browser encourages exploration of the content.

Encyclopaedia Britannica used TheBrain to help it offer consumers sophisticated visual searches. "Users wanted to see the relationships between various content sets and search results," says Mark Almadrones, CD producer for EB. "We wanted to show a user what the relationship is between all these different things, because people use our data in a different ways," he adds.

The publisher incorporated the technology in its Britannica BrainStormer feature in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006. "We provided a number of options to display and engage with the content," notes Shelley Hayduk, TheBrain's vice president, marketing and sales.

Does a system like this spell trouble for Google? "They're not competitive, they're compatible," Smith maintains, as long as "you can both visually search [Google] and interpret information the way you want and need to." In Smith's view, TheBrain is a visual system "to look at what you're already looking at. TheBrain is a front-end, consumer-generated and consumer-controlled."

A media company might use TheBrain to share programming insight and notes, or ratings data across divisions. Content creators might use it to collaborate on storylines and character development. To be sure, there is more than one way to tell a story, send a message, promote content, or target content to the right audiences. The same is true for content delivery. Any number of storytelling devices and conventions can deliver a message.

Content Bull's-Eye

While TheBrain helps organize content and facilitate its exploration and exchange, Visible World attempts to get the right advertising messages to the right audiences. This task hasn't gotten any easier as media have grown more fragmented.

But Visible World President-CEO Seth Haberman has quietly hammered away at the issue for the last few years. Haberman knows a thing or two about nonlinear media: He helped invent the video editing process that eventually became Avid Technology. At Visible World, Haberman has created a digital dashboard technology that lets marketers and media strategists build a message and instantly adapt it to a particular audience by neighborhood, age, income level, and even individual household.

The technology, which the company calls "active video message management," is a response to dramatic changes in media consumption. It might well be the ultimate nonlinear media delivery system. The technology focuses on precision targeting, and getting the most relevant message to the correct consumer.

For example, say Land Rover wants to flag a local dealer's "deal" in New York City. Visible World's technology enables swap-outs of ad copy to tailor the offer precisely to residents of New York City. There is a "dynamic, real-time customization of offers," Haberman notes. Cable boxes in some 60 million homes currently deploy the technology via the cable systems of Time Warner, Cox, Charter, and Cablevision.

"The lesson for nonlinear media is, in our world, the narrative is sacrosanct. Anyone who screws with the narrative fails. At some level, we are wired to consume narrative," Haberman observes. "Visible World just wants to change how the story's told so that the same story can be told differently to different people," he says, adding, "The nonlinearity is not changing the narrative," but the delivery and consumption.

Haberman, like other media and technology strategists, notes that media are moving from a model of aggregation to disaggregation. As content winds its way onto more platforms -- mobile, gaming consoles, and in-vehicle systems -- there will be an even greater need for targeting technologies and multiple versions of messaging.

My TV Now

More and more, companies are embracing nonlinear media. PermissionTV, a distribution system for TV via the Web, aims to turn television into a targetable and measurable medium. The technology enables consumers to interact with TV programming via games and polls, and makes it portable via peer-to-peer transport.

Brightcove, a startup in the nonlinear vanguard, has an open distribution platform for any kind of video. This could redefine television as we think we know it, enabling consumers to program their own content lineups, watch anything whenever they want to, and swap video content with friends at any time.

Brightcove is helping publishers create bundles of video content they can monetize across multiple business models, whether on-demand, subscription, or another revenue model. The startup has inked partnerships with Publicis Groupe Media Ventures, AOL, and Reuters.

As TheBrain and other innovative companies have discovered, myriad options come into play as all media and content become digitally created, rendered, distributed, and consumed. The digital distribution and consumption of media content -- whether straight programming, advertising, or promotional content -- is profoundly affecting the way people access, consume, and share media, even media of their own creation.

So the next time your friend wants vacation tips, you can send him your own personal electronic vacation guide. After all, it's only an intuitive click away.

To access TheBrain's rendering of the March issue of Media magazine, go to www.mediapostpublications.com/nonlinear.