The official announcement went on the wire today.  This button and several others like it are available for publishers and bloggers here: http://publisher.yahoo.com/social_media_tools/

I've had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd (former Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited), and we're lucky to have such a smart and driven guy making Yahoo! Europe a better place to be:

My oldest brother Mike said something a few months ago that really surprised me:


It wasn't the idea that surprised me.  A lot of people are probably tired of the way marketers treat them.  I was surprised that a high school teacher and Zen Buddhist community leader with no professional media background would use those terms in that way.  He may actually have been reflecting the views of his teenage students.

I was reminded of Mike's comments after reading Scott Karp's reflections that audiences are not equal:


Scott then carries this line of thinking further:


Part of the difficulty in crossing from Old Media to New Media is language itself.  Calling your readers "audiences" creates a distance that really should be reduced instead.  "Targeting" advertising is going to make people feel like they're being hunted.  And assuming that you can identify and rank the intelligence and talents of your readers is a dangerous, tenuous and potentially offensive position to take. (Doc Searls has some interesting ideas on language in new media.)

Old Media is freaking out because marketers have learned how to mix search advertising into the media buy.  Why?  Because marketers can offer the right product to the right person at the right time through search.  And the performance metrics, ROI and margins look pretty tasty next to a $15k full page ad in a magazine that may or may not hit much less get noticed by that "audience" they were targeting.

Digg is a community of people, not a marketing bucket.  The people in the community are valuable.  The participants are both intelligent and talented.  Whether or not the Digg environment is efficient for both the buyer and seller to negotiate attention is the issue.  The value of the people in the community is undeniable.

Washingtonpost.com and CJRDaily both added "Bookmark with del.icio.us" buttons on their article templates today.  At the bottom of every article is a link that spawns a popup for users to save this article with del.icio.us and to add tags to help them find this article later.  These are the first major media properties that I'm aware of to adopt the bookmark button.  (Are there others?)

I think it's critical for publishers to think about ways to enable their users to utilize content in more ways.  This bookmark button is one of the lightweight user actions that will expose content in new ways to mashups, RSS feeds, recommendations sytems, and all the other new discovery tools that people are using more and more in addition to search engines.  Even if only a small percentage of a site's users act on content in social ways, there will be positive effects that emerge from those actions.

Anybody can add the del.icio.us button to their site.  There are instructions for doing that here, and the bizdev contact at Yahoo! who can help is John Klem (jklem@yahoo-inc.com). 

Dave Winer spoke at the Yahoo! campus last week with Chad Dickerson's guest speaker series to offer his advice.  He dropped one nugget, in particular, that I thought was interesting.  Dave talked about video on the Internet and the user interface problems with streaming and downloading.


A lot of people have struggled with video's heavy data issues and the low adoption rates for years.  Now, it seems, there's just an assumption that video needs to be online and that people are going to get it there.

What happened?  Did broadband adoption hit critical mass?  Did TiVo inspire a time-shifting media revolution?  Did the price of personal electronics (PCs, digital cameras, etc.) subvert the strangelhold on content production?

Or was it, as Dave thinks, the combination of RSS subscriptions with enclosures that created the perfect storm and turned the Internet into a viable multimedia distribution platform?

Steve Outing reminds me that people should also be able to add value to advertising through their participation:


I can only imagine how much more useful advertising would get if something like "hot deals in my local area that people like me rated with 5 stars", for example, was filtered through a good recommendation engine.

The key flaw in the arguments about user actions driving better search discovery is that not everybody is willing to contribute an action.  A click on a link is enough to create some interesting discovery effects, but much better than that is qualitative effects of ratings, tags, comments, blog posts, etc.  As Steve Goldstein and Clare Hart noted, "People are busy."

I've been waiting for someone to put some kind of number out there that helps clarify why a segment of a community can influence the perspective of the whole in important and relevant ways through their participation.  Finally, a model emerges from Yahoo!'s Bradley Horowitz with his second post on his new blog.



He explains how this ecosystem defines the community and creates the opportunities that drive better discovery:


This is what drives the ability to bubble up tail content in meaningful ways.  It's all about user actions.

I can hear publishers celebrating today as research shows that their lead generation programs look healthy still compared to the big kids:


Those numbers don't match up to the conversions and cost-per-lead numbers of more focused sites.  Now, if niche publishers could just figure out how to drive better volumes.  I would certainly start considering new distribution methods and revenue models if I were still playing that game. 

I'd also keep close watch of TechTarget who reported revenues of $70 million for 2005, which is up from $48 million in 2004...their whole business model is driven by the lead gen model. (Alan Meckler is jealous, I'm sure.)

John Battelle defined PageRank in his book as the key factor that differentiated Google's technology and forever altered the search landscape.  PageRank gave currency to the hyperlink and mapped the online world using that pivot point and all its inherent values.

A lot of people seem to be asking themselves, "What will happen next?"

The PageRank concept was very clever and very simple.  It made finding things a hell of a lot more efficient than browsing a hierarchy, the PageRank predecessor.  But the haystack is just too big to find ever smaller needles, and the ratio of useless to useful information out there is getting really ugly:



The hyperlink was a vote in the search-driven Internet.  Now I'm dependent on a new currency - human action.  The click is much more potent than the existence of a link.  Even more potent than clicks are tags, ratings, comments and emailed URLs.  A hyperlink is still a vote, but seeing some form of human action gives me much more confidence that a source has value.

So, the trick now is for content creators to figure out how to get users to act on their stuff.  How do you get people to add that extra bit of value to your content that validates and then qualifies the value for other people?  And then how do you expose the user-contributed value so that the right things get picked up from the right tools at the right time to reach the right people?



I won't predict I have the solution to this problem, nor do I have the answer to what's the next PageRank.  I think encouraging people to tag, send, rate, blog about and comment on your stuff and then exposing the results of those actions is crucial in this next phase of the Internet's evolution.  I also think understanding how the new crop of recommendation systems works may make or break a publisher who sits anywhere under the head of the long tail.

It makes sense when you look back historically on the Internet's evolution that there will be a new method for finding valuable information on the Internet soon if it doesn't already exist.  Again, I wouldn't predict what that is, but you can be sure that you will need your users' help to cross that chasm when it's more obvious what it looks like.

The discussions around sharing lists have felt a bit empty to me, generally, mostly because I don't understand it.  Even something more tangible like sharing playlists doesn't quite get to what I want as a consumer despite the idea's unmistakeable coolness factor.

What starts to get interesting to me, though, is seeing the effects of people's subscriptions rather than the subscriptions themselves.  I've been fascinated with memeorandum ever since I heard that the tech channel was seeded with Scoble's blog roll (is it true?).  So, it's logical to consider an interesting lens might be yourboss.memeorandum.com and yourmusicobssessedfriend.memorandum.com.  

Then I started seeing referrals from megite.com in my logs a week or so ago.  And this week Alex Barnett posted about megite showing that he now has, essentially, alexbarnett.memeorandum.  Doc Searls' blog is a bit of a pain to read, but I like his views and what he's all about.  Luckily, I can now see the Doc Searls lens on the world rather than read all his posts.

Megite is the Being John Malkevich RSS Reader.  Here's the view through my head (Apparently, I'm a gay AJAX programmer.  My wife will be surprised to hear this, as will my boss).

UPDATE: Nick Cubrilovic challenges both the accuracy and utility of a service like Megite:

The 37 Signals guys have a really interesting perspective on product development.  They commit to small chunks and singular functionality.  They aim to make the one thing that a product does the very best at that one thing.

This same philosophy is what made Pat McGovern of IDG the 321st richest man in the world.  When he founded Computerworld magazine in the late 1960's, he realized that the specific will always drive out the general in the media business.  He proceeded to build a portfolio of computer magazine properties around the globe on this basis.

What these guys all share is a clear vision of how their products help the consumer.  McGovern understood intuitively what his readers wanted and kept cutting new properties from the same mold based on a live, working, successful product.  37 Signals is following a similar strategy with online productivity tools.

The strategy wins, though, not just because of the focus.  It wins because these guys understand their users.

This model works for lots of things, including platforms that have a slightly different dynamic than consumer-facing products.  Platform products not only need to know what the software tool needs that it serves, it also needs to understand what end-users want.  

Take the neverending CMS project behind every media site.  The CMS platform's primary customer is not the editor.  The CMS must serve the site visitor first.  How many major media sites are now using MovableType, Drupal or WordPress as functional CMS's on one level or another?  How many have actually considered replacing their expensive CMS with one of these cheaper, easier-to-use tools?

The reason Vignette didn't end up dominating today's CMS market was not only because of technology issues but also because they lost touch with the real customer of the product...the site visitor.  MovableType, Drupal and WordPress all make it very easy to make web sites that people like.  Users like the site.  Site owners are happy.  The platform is doing it's job.

Platforms need to be clearly focused.  But, more importantly, if a platform product doesn't understand the end-user, they will suffer the same fate of the consumer-facing products that don't know their users...they will get replaced by better, more clearly defined and focused products.

Like most people, I've made the mistake of overdesigning a web site a few times.  It's easy to do.  You can get excited about the possibilities and forget that most people who come to your site really don't care what you're up to.  They're just trying to find something.

How do you make it dead simple to give people what they want as fast as they want?  And then how do you help them do more at that crucial moment when they are highly engaged with your content?

I think the first question is harder than the second, but there are some new answers to the problem.  Jon Udell might be on to something with his Metadata Explorer UI.  When I saw how simple it was to dive into topics and then surface back out with just simple intuitive clicks, I started wondering why you wouldn't just make your home page more like that.  We've all learned that publisher's search engines always suck.  Exploring through data this way makes much more sense.

Then once you've helped someone find what they want, how can you incentivize them to add value to your content, to share it with others, to find more things like it, to come back again?  The little action buttons like the ones on my blog here are helpful to people.  (...more info on Yahoo!'s buttons here: http://publisher.yahoo.com/socialmediatools.)  Giving people related stuff to click on is smart, but there's an art to that.  There's an interesting method for using del.icio.us to create related links at InfoWorld.  And Feedburner has added a new FeedFlare API that allows publishers to add lightweight interfaces within items of their RSS feeds.

People have learned how to use more complicated user interfaces on the Internet, but I find it fascinating that people still gravitate toward the simplest interactions.  I like the idea behind CNet's cluster cloud with each article, but I never click on it...it's too heavy.

Publishers are always thinking about their next redesign.  Maybe instead of adding functionality, your next redesign will have less functionality.

A lot of blame can be placed on the tools providers.  The business models have some headroom before RSS is required in the publishing mix.  And the format itself has some inherent awkwardness. 

These are obvious to those of us watching the evolution of RSS every day, but I think there are some other important issues that must be addressed somehow:

• Maybe the user has too much control.  What kind of people want to take responsibility for managing high volumes of incoming data?  I like seeing new mail in my inbox because someone wants to contact me.  I don't like seeing unread items, though, because that feels like work.
• More better filters, please.  Where's the PageRank equivilent for ranking items of interest from the RSS cloud?
• The data isn't pretty.  RSS can be about so much more than headlines.
• Its social power isn't obvious yet.  Email, IM, SMS and blogging all have specific and tangible social implications.  How will I explain to my mother that RSS can help her connect with people in new ways?

Or maybe it's all a bunch of hoo-ha, and RSS will just fade into oblivion.

I really like Thomas Vander Wal's "Come to me Web" post where he contrasts that with the "I go get Web".  He talks about web design being about usability, not information reading.


We're seeing the online user experience evolve into a more complicated space that's less about request/receive behavior to one that streams and flows based on triggers and loose couplings.  I also like the idea of information searching for me which I was exploring in a few posts last fall:

Umair Haque's Media Economics presentation (ppt) from April 2005 makes some fascinating statements about the mix of forces in the media ecology and where it is going in a Media 2.0 world.  A bunch of people have been referencing it recently which you can track at Technorati if you don't want to read it yourself.

It starts with an analysis of Media 1.0 economics and how supply meets demand.  And then he shows where this model breaks down and finally how to take advantage of the new market.



There's a lot in here, much of which I can't get my head around yet, but one piece I like is the supposition that production costs don't efficiently capture attention at certain levels...at big media levels.  In other words, expensive high quality content does not pay off.  It's more efficient to spend money on ways to capture attention directly than it is to use high production value content as the bait.


This isn't true on smaller scales where media microchunks are both produced and disseminated cheaply.  He explains that the fixed economies of mass media get hijacked by consumers who are able and willing to consume lots of content through convenient channels at low cost.  The consequence is that production values stay low and quality gets fragmented and harder to find.


Mass media really feels the heat when micro media takes away the ability to franchise content.  Soundtrack sales, video rental, syndication and other tie-ins enabled high production cost economics to scale.  Micro media erodes those revenue streams and kills production-driven models.

But there's still hope.

He defines the effect of Media 2.0 on Media 1.0 as "hyperdeflation".  Effective margins can't be found in average content (a boring article, a crappy film, a stupid song). But by leveraging the strengths of the new systems, margins can come back.

He goes on about Snowball Economics and defining how the 3 key types of players (Smart Aggregators, Microplatforms and Reconstructors) are going to serve the market most efficiently.  But I loved this abstract description of the interplay between Media 2.0 and its consumers...

1. DJ plays a selection of tracks
2. Audience reveals preferences, expectations, and satisfaction with their feet: private info is made public
3. Consumption externality: your dancing reduces my search and transaction costs
4. Tracks which maximize aggregate utility are efficiently revealed, and value creation is maximized...
5. ...across multiple niches/different genres of club music
6. Music listeners are a connected network ... DJs realized it, the music industry didn’t...
7. ...Now, dance music is the fastest growing segment of the music industry and the segment which most regularly produces snowballs

This presentation is a must read for people in Media 1.0, but it also puts some really powerful perspective on what those in Media 2.0 are doing whether they know it or not.

Though the issue at hand is very serious and the implications of this have far reaching consequences, I find the timing of the Old Media attacks on Google to be very convenient for another battle taking place.

We're watching the media go to battle with it's future self.  Editors who use their deep analytical processing capabilities and expensive liberal arts educations are lashing out at the man-made machines built by their antisocial computer science adversaries.

They couldn't win the battle on cost.  They couldn't win the battle on efficiency.  They've even been losing the battle on relevance.  But now they found a place where the editorial voice cannot be replaced...ethics.  But to be sure it wasn't the machines who made the decision to cooperate with Chinese policy.  It was the stockholders and two young billionaires who might be getting in over their heads.

Michael Malone articulates the big picture challenge for expanding Silicon Valley companies nicely:


The threat to media is not the machines.  The threat to media is money.  The current economic models of Old Media are not going to survive.

Now that Google is starting to look a little more like one of them, it's a lot easier to know where to aim the gun.  But I would spend more time looking at how to recapture the trust, imagination, creativity, curiosity and thirst for human connection that people want.  The money will come back.  And then editors can wrestle with their own bosses over how to handle increasing demands from stockholders to show growth while huge opportunities in places that don't respect the same cultural priorities beckon them with cash rewards.

There was a really funny exchange between Ricky Gervais and his idiot sidekick Karl Pilkington on his podcast the other day.  They started talking about Chinese proverbs and quickly devolved the conversation into Noah's poor decision to let similar animals onto the Ark.

This is paraphrasing, but you get the idea...


Not sure if I captured the humor there, but, regardless, I like the premise of the initial statement.  Design-by-committee is bound to produce suboptimal results.  I think the Internet business is very good at rolling out visionary products invented by passionate people.  But how do you institutionalize that drive as the company evolves?  How do you formulate a process for initiating vision and committing to its delivery?

I can point to a few Yahoo! products that suffer from camel-ness, but out of respect to my colleagues, I'll pick on other people instead.  Here are some of the industry's worst design-by-committee products (mind you that doesn't preclude success):

• Google Video Search and Google Reader
• The new IE browser and Live.com
• Amazon's left-hand site navigation
• iTunes Music Store
• Every home page on the Internet

This issue is everywhere.  It's the classic Marketing 101 mistake at big car manufacturing companies where they take the concept of giving customers what they want a little too far.  On more than one occasion Detroit has designed cars entirely by feedback from people who were asked what features they wanted in the ideal car.  Of course, the result is always a variation on the minivan.