David Weingberger gave a very energetic and entertaining keynote this morning at BlogOn. Somebody in the audience asked about how artists were going to be compensated in the future. David replied that the concept of what is fair doesn't work anymore. When someone reads a book for the second time, should he then pay the author again? When a reader sells the book to a used book store and that book gets resold and resold, should the author get paid off each transaction?
What about libraries? Are libraries pirates because they offer creative works to anyone who wants them? You don't hear Amazon or Simon & Schuster crying foul when someone checks out a book from the library rather than buying one. And it's getting even trickier with some of the mashups out there. Jon Udell invented a little tool that allows you to browse Amazon to find a book and then
check your local library to see if the book is available right now.
In defense of Google Print,
Eric Schmidt made the case for opening up access to books even further, "How many out-of-print and backlist [book] titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them?"
Fairness can be equitible. When someone creates something and someone else wants it, there are ways to make a fair trade. But that trade may not best occur through an elaborate system of property laws that "protect" the content. If the outcome of blogging tools means that more people are writing, then that's a good thing. If more people are writing and performing music because there are easy ways to post your works publicly, then that's a good thing. That trend won't reverse. It would be tragic if it did.
The question of how to make a living as an artist is a really good one. Just as journalists are learning that they have to improve their reporting skills because of bloggers, musicians will have to elevate their game and offer more value to rise above the crop. And just as news publishers are learning to offer additional value in what they publish in order to stem the tide of lost advertising opportunities from slippery distribution channels, musicians, novelists, photographers, and painters need to find better ways to add value to what they create.
Maybe people will pay more for access to artists, concerts, one-on-one conversations, commissioned works. Maybe brand marketers will pay more to sponsor events where people can get more personal access to artists. These are proven business models that require no property law. The big opportunity may be for distributors to turn their businesses from ones that create false scarcity and become businesses that personalize the art experience.
Monday, October 17
October 17, 2005 03:43PM (EDT)
Steve Wilson of McDonald's sat with Chris Shipley for an "open discussion" at BlogOn about how big corporate America is looking at ways to leverage blogging. I've seen how big companies can struggle with this new world, and judging by Steve's carefully measured comments, McDonald's is struggling as much as anyone with this.
They've spent a lot of time, probably painful strings of meetings upon meetings and hirings and firings, sorting out how to approach the problem of speaking more directly with their community. Steve merely addressed how the company is learning to communicate with their own staff using blogs. I'm sure many would argue this is hardly blogging but rather using a new tool to publish press releases.
It's hard to congratulate them for what they've done (or for how little they've actually done), but just by watching how painful it was for Steve to talk publicly about this we all got a glimpse into a cultural battle that must be very frightening for everyone at the company. McDonald's has a lot to lose, not just scores of high paying corporate jobs but an historical position in the history of capitalism. They are treading the "open" waters very very cautiously.
I can't help but feel like these are exactly the types of organizations that will fall even harder when the next generation of consumers discover brands online first. At some point in the not too distant future, enough corporate PR will have opened up to the idea of transparency that the companies that craft messages will be assumed to be hiding things. At minimum, they should let their staff blog publicly under some kind of communications policy with a penalty of termination for breaking that policy.
October 17, 2005 11:03AM (EDT)
Seth Godin gave the keynote today at
BlogOn 2005 at the Copacabana in New York City. He started with an interesting perspective on old marketing versus new marketing. He said, "Your attention is your most valuable asset to a marketer. It's time to think about how to get paid for that. Traditional marketing has been all about taking your attention." But instead of giving us the answer to the important question of managing attention, he gave a product demo...
Seth then pitched his new
Squidoo product, what appears to be an easily customizable SEO jump page. Users will create a "lens" or a very basic templated home page filled with links and context which will carry AdSense. The AdSense revenue then gets pooled among all the users and redistributed based on traffic performance. I'm sure Seth has put in a lot of effort to optimize these pages for search engines.
Seems like a weird model to me. I don't know why I would create a home page and then share revenue from that page with someone else. If it's about getting help creating a better home page, then I'm not going to want that restricted to someone else's template design.
I'm also a little irritated that the keynote was a sales pitch.
One of the great disappointments of the Baby Boomers is that their Gen X children haven't taken the torch of rebellion to change the world as they once did. I was reminded of this as I listened to Chad Dickerson's latest weekly guest speaker here on Friday, Mark Hosler of Negativland, leader of a San Francisco area band/performance art group. (UPDATE: Chad details the event here, including more background on Negativland.)
Negativland battles convention with complex challenges to the structures that enforce those conventions. One example, they packaged a musical piece using an electronically altered cover of U2's "I Still Can't Find What I'm Looking For" mixed with an underground outtake of Kasey Casem cussing out a sound engineer. The work was the subject of a major lawsuit and then a book on the story which became the greater art work than the original piece itself. They challenged copyright law and the way the media laws cripple people's ability to speak freely and critically and to reuse art to create art.
In talking about the weight of the legal system Mark made an interesting comment about how media uses its power, "I'm a middle class, white, straight male from the Bay Area, and I was attacked in a very frightening way. I have a new understanding of oppression."
The Negativland team grew up Baby Boomer, but the messages they drive resound with the Gen X mentality profoundly. Authority in 1969 was the US President and the conservative politics that supported racism and war. Authority in the new century is the media business and the way it controls information flow to drive political agendas and horde wealth.
The challenges Baby Boomers made to the power structures of the day gave rise to the media business, an unofficial 4th branch of our political system. The media's new position in society was firmly established when it overthrew Nixon, a President who ignored the voice of the people and believed the President was above the law. His resignation was the successful outcome of several years of cultural reorganization. The methods for change of the day were folk songs and concerts, investigative reporting and broadcast TV, student protests and long hair. The very power they fought for and ultimately attained then formed its own tools for repressing threats to its stability. The clincher was when one of their own took over the top spot, former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan.
Gen X has been developing technology that enables a new system to counter the strength of Baby Boomer media law and revenue streams that keep it healthy. Today's tools of change are open source software and personal computers, blogs and the Internet, hiphop sampling and digital photography. Baby Boomers are fighting P2P culture with lawsuit bullets and paperwork water hoses.
Negativland's art reflects the trends Gen X has naturally adopted into its cultural paradigm. It occurred to me while Mark was speaking that the torch of rebellion was passed successfully via ethernet and the message board rather than the megaphone and the sit-in. Gen X was less inspired by John Lennon, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and Martin Luther King. Instead, they've adopted breakthrough efforts of people like Bob Metcalfe, Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Lessig and Russell Simmons, unwitting leaders of a revolution, as calling cards for a new world order. These pioneers enabled new leaders to drive today's cultural shifts such as Linus Torvalds, Shawn Fanning, Craig Newmark and De la Soul.
I can hear Baby Boomers dismissing the idea that there's a revolution happening at all. "Kids steal music because its easy and its fun. They found a loophole in the legal system that just needs a patch. We know what a revolution looks like, and this ain't no revolution."
I wonder how many Boomers really went to Woodstock to hear some good music, do some drugs and hang out with their friends because it was fun, and how many went because they were rebelling against authority. It doesn't matter, does it? It was a movement whether you were just having fun or participating with a purpose.
If information is power, then the power structures as we know them are being turned upside down as you read this. Traditional TV and music businesses, publishing businesses, PR and marketing businesses are all propped up by fading revenue models, and yet more information is flowing more freely across wider geographies than ever before, without the overly produced packaging and closed distribution channels that the Boomers carefully constructed to solidify their power position. Kasey Casem's recorded outrage and George Bush's recent on-camera "fuck you" make the Baby Boomer packaged media sheen feel more like a new type of Gilded Age, one with a thin layer of information control, a coating much thinner than Boomer's are comfortable admitting, if they're even aware it exists at all.
Baby Boomers mistakenly interpreted understatement for apathy while Gen Xer’s created a disruptive force right under their noses. Gen Xers quietly fought the power from their PCs in their bedrooms while Boomers were busy congratulating each other on TV for throwing a great party in the 60s and 70s. Of course, despite all this upheaval in the works, Gen X is no closer to ending discrimination, inequality, poverty and war than the Baby Boomers were. So none of this matters in the end, anyhow.
We'll know the circle is complete when Sergey Brin replaces Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento on his way to leading the New Republicans to the White House.
Thursday, October 13
October 13, 2005 07:19AM (EDT)
My wife Jessica is making plans to return home to England for Christmas. Last night she asked me for assistance because she couldn’t find her way through all the various travel service options online.
I was chatting about this with a project manager who just joined us here named Micael. He excitedly proclaimed he was having the same problem, but get this...when I asked him how he solved it, he said, "We went to a local travel agent."
Let me rephrase this astounding scenario...rather than go online to search for and find the best travel options, something the Web has been very successful at offering over the last several years, Micael found his offline travel information services more useful to him than the online services. In 2005, that seems preposterous to someone who spends as much time living online as I do.
There is so much information out there, so much valuable information, that the old models are starting to show weaknesses. Micael didn't want to spend all day finding the right information online. He wanted information to compete for his business. It shouldn't compete for his screen real estate through the old advertising methods. It should come to him in ways that he invites. His behavior should indicate what he needs, and he should be able to permit certain sources (whether directly or through degrees of separation in his social network) to send him information that he wants, when he wants it.
More specifically, Jessica should be able to watch a price ticker on her desktop that shows the going rate for flights from SFO to Heathrow. It should offer alternatives for adjusting what data she wants to see in the feed. It should pull data from sources that she finds credible. It should give her the best source for purchasing the ticket. And it should go away after she purchases her ticket.
The technology and data is all there. It's a matter of assembling the pieces.
October 13, 2005 06:57AM (EDT)
I have to say I'm a bit pissed off that I just bought a Nano 3 weeks ago. I paid
$250 for a 4GB device (actually, my wife and brother bought it for me for my birthday). Now Apple ships
the video iPod with 30GB for only $50 more. Are you kidding me?! What choice do I have but to
return my Nano, scratched and all? Who's making the decisions about their pricing strategy over there? Sheesh.
This is the first time I can say I've wished a competitor would come in and swipe market share away from Apple. You can't play underdog anymore, Steve. It's time for a new computing startup to throw hammers at big screens.
Wednesday, October 12
October 12, 2005 12:55PM (EDT)
Chad Dickerson put together a really useful (and precisely simple) maps tool for locating doctors from his provider network that are near him:
"I was sorting through some old papers and found one of those thick
health care provider directories that you used to get when you started
a new job with new health insurance...To get ahead of the game (while I’m not sick), I created a
Berkeley-area doctors maps mashup using screen-scraped data from
my health care provider...There’s a list of medical specialties on the left, and when you click
on one, the providers that match that speciality display on the map in
the window on the right."
Chad, are you up for making a few changes to it for the rest of us? I could really use this, too. It's a real pain to find a doctor sometimes.
- Add a way for me to define my location by zip
- Get someone to help you pour in data from other providers
That's all it needs (and maybe a silly name like "drahoo.com" or "feelgoodfinder.com").
Tuesday, October 11
October 11, 2005 03:45PM (EDT)
One thing I've found that Yahoo! is very good at is thinking about mass adoption. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but I've been impressed with the thought process behind some of the things I've seen here. For example...
The new
podcast site (and
Yahoo! Music Engine plugin) is a really strong implementation for bringing podcasts to the rest of the world. We found in
a research study done recently that very few people are actually consuming podcasts yet. So, it makes a lot of sense to build a set of tools that will help the general public discover, listen to and subscribe to the stuff that matters to them. Before this launch, it was really just too complicated to figure out how to get a podcast or even just identify one that might be interesting to you. You don't have to have an iPod to enjoy a podcast.
Similarly, RSS has a big adoption curve ahead of it still. The same research shows that about 27% of the US Internet population are consuming RSS feeds without being aware that RSS is the transport mechanism. Again, My Yahoo! is enabling that wider adoption of RSS by simplifying how people adopt it. It's conceivable that without
the introduction of RSS into My Yahoo! that RSS consumption in general might have stayed below 5%.
Then today the search team launched
Blog Search. But rather than offer a copycat solution, the team here thought about the right use case for an index of blog data. It makes much more sense integrating that index in relevant context than as purely a standalone search engine for blog content. Why would Average Joe want to search blogs? Average Joe has a lot to gain by discovering relevant blog posts, but he's not likely going to want to search against a big index of blog posts without context.
Friday, October 7
October 7, 2005 04:25PM (EDT)
At the Web 2.0 Conference this morning
Stewart Butterfield of Flickr gave a very insightful perspective on how media and its centralized distribution systems changed the way people think about their ability to participate. He suggested that prior to radio and tv, families would serendipitously gather to play music and that everyone participated on some level even if it was just singing. He suggested that perhaps more people played instruments in the past, but as radio and tv emerged, the concept of fame made the music experience for most people more about listening and less about contributing.
I really like this view whether its totally accurate or not. Centralized distribution may have given the world more stuff to listen to and more exposure to different kinds of art forms that could never have happened otherwise. The value of that influence on humanity is incalculable. But what I love about the Internet is this premise that everyone can participate in any way that they are able...and that their participation can be contributed to any family you define, anywhere in the world. The distribution model is no longer centralized and, once again, everyone can play in the band.
Is Warhol's
'15 minutes of fame' still valid, or does the younger generation even care about fame? Perhaps Warhol's own response to the adoption of that quote is more accurate these days, "In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous."
October 7, 2005 02:37PM (EDT)
The battle of the big co engineering research labs at Web 2.0 this morning showed a really interesting contrast that I think reflects some of the differences between what these 2 companies are about.
We both demoed some forward-thinking work in the area of photos.
Prabhkar Raghavan of Yahoo! showed a dynamic timeline of photo and tag bursts. Images and their respective tags scrolled across the screen as days incremented indicating bursts of activity from the community as they upload bits of their lives over time, providing an historical view of primary source information in a very interesting way. Google's
Alan Eustice showed how they are now scanning faces in images to identify characteristics such as male or female. They then demonstrated how a face could become a search criteria which then pulls up results of other photos where this face also appears...amazing if not a little scary.
One company is building tools that reflect how people are expressing themselves. The other is building tools that will help find needles in haystacks. One is facilitating community development. The other is facilitating data retrieval.
October 7, 2005 01:43PM (EDT)
Google announced "
Google Reader" at Web 2.0 this morning. It's another AJAX-style RSS reader. They have a subscriptions drawer, kind of like the iTunes UI for managing subscriptions. They also have an inline player for audio. They use the GMail labeling. And there are, of course, connections to Blogger. Looks pretty slick, guys. Well done.
October 7, 2005 01:17PM (EDT)
Here's one of the most interesting ideas I've heard in a while...from
Vinod Khosla at the Web 2.0 Conference...what if students' text books were wikified? Why not let the contents of these books evolve into more organic and deeper resources online? They would stay more current. They would provide more depth for students who wanted to get deeper on a subject. It would save the publishers time and money (at the expense of profits, of course) which would save taxpayers money. A printed version would be much cheaper and therefore more accessible. But the most intesting aspect of this idea is that the cultural biases of today's educational text books might get washed away with the participation from the contribution pool or at least put in the right context as biases.
Jeff Jarvis pointed out in Q&A that this is already starting to happen at
WikiBooks which I had seen before but didn't really get until now. Check out this
US History book which spends proportionately more time on pre-Columbus America than the text books I recall from my primary school days.
October 7, 2005 11:39AM (EDT)
I usually tune these things out because I know who my top bloggers are. But it's a really nice surprise to be included in someone else's list.
Thank you, CNet!
October 7, 2005 12:22AM (EDT)
Jon Udell wrote about
the formation of distributed local events systems using Upcoming and EVDB as the tools and the local newspaper as the content authority. These tools have done a great job of facilitating user-contributed content, and the local newspapers should be doing everything they can to leverage that data and user experience for their web site users.
I see a very similar model for product reviews. Product reviews from site users could be generated at the web site of an independent publisher who covers a given product category (perhaps a local newspaper, perhaps a niche publication or trade journal). That user review data could be shared with other publishers by posting it all publicly. Other sites or tools would then leverage that data and use it to get their users to contribute to the wider pool. A federation of similar media properties would then be able to foster product research in a very robust way for their combined audiences.
Jon explains how the problem of different event data coming from different sources could be solved:
"Compare the
Upcoming and
EVDB records for the Keene metro. The superset of these records is more useful than either individually: one lacks a precise address, the other lacks the theater's URL. Similarly, the superset of venues tracked by these (and other) services will, over time, be more complete than the sets tracked by individual services...Who is motivated -- and would be trusted by the community -- to own this process? My hunch is that local newspapers are the ideal candidates for this role."
Similarly, users reviewing products at different web sites may have different names for the same products or different ideas of what constitutes a product. Publishers should be motivated to solve this problem. The benefits are very powerful -- Users are talking about products on your site. Advertisers are crawling over each other to talk to your audience. You're making loads and loads of dosh.
The obvious question of competition quickly follows. If NichePublisher X is better at driving user reviews into the pool than NichePublisher Y and NichePublisher Y is using all that content on their web site to drive additional page views, then NichePublisher Y is getting more value for less effort than NichePublisher X. And what about managing quality control?
It's an interesting problem. Maybe there's a link carried with the review to the site that facilitated each product review, thereby rewarding sites that are good at driving more data into the pool. Maybe certain licensing rights need to be applied to the content to curb malicious behavior.
Regardless, a system like this would clearly create some new winners and new losers, but I'm certain that after the shakeout, the new losers will be the ones that failed to drive reviews, proving that they were unable to serve the needs of their own site users. The new winners will be the ones who are first to market, first to identify how to serve their users, first to help marketers reach potential customers in ways that customers want to be reached.
I was reminded of this yesterday while giving a presentation to a group of publishers at Stanford's Publishing on the Web course run by Holly Brady and Janet Wright. Except this time I had a little more perspective than my view only a year out of university back at Amdahl.
He had some interesting ideas on how people discover new music. He's clearly an advanced music searcher, perhaps obsessed even, with several different methods for staying in tune with the market. Being an employee at MySpace gives him a lot of visibility into the underground scene. As a content creator, he has self-imposed deadlines for finding a few new tracks each week to play for his audience. Listeners to his show email him ideas for things to play. He goes to live shows. His friends are obsessed with music. He has a handful of labels that provide jumping off points to new artists. He subscribes to some email newsletters. And he gets a CD delivered to him each month, a compilation of new music called the Cornerstone Player.
Digg
Comment