Back in my InfoWorld days (2004-ish?) I somehow woke up to the idea that media could be a platform.¹ Whereas my professional media experience prior to that was all about creating user experiences that resulted in better page views and conversions, something changed in the way I perceived how online media was supposed to work.

I didn’t have language to use for it at the time (still working on it, actually), but I knew it wasn’t inspired by the “openness” and “walled garden” metaphors so much. Neither concept reflected the opportunity for me. Once I saw the opportunity, though, the shift happening in online media seemed much much bigger.

In a presentation at the Bioneers conference back in August 2000 (below), architect William McDonough talked about designing systems that leverage nature’s strengths for mutually beneficial growth rather than for conservation or merely sustainability.

He tells us to design with positive results in mind instead of using less bad materials,

Similarly, the implications around the “openness” and “walled garden” concepts get clouded by the tactical impressions those words draw for someone who has unique assets in the media business.

It’s not about stopping bad behavior or even embracing good behavior. It’s about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for an entire ecosystem. If you do it right, you will watch network effects take hold naturally. And then everyone wins.

When you look around the Internet media landscape today you see a lot of successful companies that either consciously or subconsciously understand how to make media work as a platform. MySpace created a fantastic expression platform, though perhaps unwittingly. Wikipedia evolved quickly into a massive research platform. Flickr and del.icio.us, of course, get the network effects inherent in sharing information…photos and links, respectively. Washingtonpost and BBC Backstage are moving toward national political information platforms. Last.fm is a very succssful music listening platform if not one of the most interesting platforms among them all.

All of these share a common approach. At a simple level, the brand gets stronger the further their data and services reach outside of their domain and into the wider market.

But the most successful media platforms are the ones that give their users the power to impact the experience for themselves and to improve the total experience for everyone as they use it.

My commitment to flickr, del.icio.us and last.fm gets deeper and deeper the more I’m able to apply them in my online lifestyle wherever that may be. We have a tangible relationship. And I have a role in the wider community, even if only a small part, and that community has a role in my experience, too.

The lesson is that it’s not about the destination — it’s about the relationship. Or, if you like the Cluetrain language, it’s about the conversation, though somehow “relationship” seems more meaningful than “conversation” to me. Ask any salesperson whether they’d prefer to have a relationship or a conversation with a potential customer.

Ok, so user engagement can extend outside a domain. Where’s the opportunity in that?

Very few media platforms know how to leverage their relationships to connect buyers and sellers and vice versa. They typically just post banner ads or text links on their sites and hope people click on them. Creating a fluid and active marketplace that can grow is about more than relevant advertising links.

Amazon created an incredibly powerful marketplace platform, but they are essentially just a pure play in this space. They are about buying and selling first and foremost. Relationships on their platforms are transactional.

Media knows how to be more than that.

eBay and Craigslist get closer to colliding the buying/selling marketplace with deeper media experiences. People build relationships in micromarkets, but again it’s all about a handshake and then good riddance on eBay and Craigslist.

Again, media knows how to be more than that.

The big opportunity in my mind is in applying the transactional platform concept within a relationship-building environment.

A more tangible example, please…?

Washingtonpost.com is an interesting case, as they have been more aggressive than most traditional media companies in terms of “openness”. They have data feeds for all of their content. And they have an amazing resource in the U.S. Congress Votes Database, a feed of legislative voting records sliced in several different ways. For example, you can watch what legislation Nancy Pelosi votes on and how she votes.

Unfortunately, everything Washingtonpost.com offers is read-only. You can pull information from Washingtonpost.com, but you can’t contribute to it. You can’t serve the wider Washingtonpost.com community with your additions or edits. You can’t engage with other Washingtonpost.com community members in meaningful ways.

Washingtonpost.com thinks of their relationship with you in a one-to-many way. They are one, and you are one of many.

Instead, they should think of themselves as the government data platform. Every citizen in the US should be able to feed data about their local government into the system, and the wider community should be able to help edit and clean community-contributed data (or UGC for you bizdev folks).

For example, I recently spent some time investigating crime data and how that gets shared or not shared in various local communities. Local citizens could provide a very powerful resource if they were empowered to report crime in meaningful ways on the Internet.

Washingtonpost.com is as well suited as anyone to provide that platform.

Now, imagine the opportunity for Washingtonpost.com if people around the US were reporting, editing and analyzing local crime data from Washingtonpost’s platform. They would become a critical source of national information and news across the country. Washintonpost.com would be well poised to be the primary source of any type of government-related information.

The money would soon follow.

As a result of becoming essential in the ecosystem of local and national citizen data, they would expand their advertising possibilities exponentially. They could create an ad platform (or partner with one) that is tuned particularly for their ecosystem. Then any number of services could start forming around the combination of their data platform and their ad platform.

You can imagine legal services, security, counseling and financing services wanting to reach directly into my local Potrero Hill crimewatch community. The marketplace would probably be very fluid where people are recommending services and providers are helping the community as a whole as a way to build relationships.

Washingtonpost could sit behind all these services, powering the data and taking a cut of all the advertising.

Again, it’s not just about being “open” or taking down the “walled garden”.

The “openness” and “walled garden” concepts which often turn into accusations feel more like objectives than strategic directions. If “openness” was the goal, then offering everything as RSS would be the game.

No, RSS is just step one. The media platform game is much more than that.

It’s about both being a part of the larger Internet ecosystem and understanding how to grow and design a future that benefits lots of different constituents. You can be a source in someone else’s platform, a vehicle within a wider networked platform and a hub at the center of your own ecosystem all at the same time.

I would never claim this stuff is easy, as I certainly failed to make that happen while at InfoWorld. The first place to start, in my opinion, is to stop worrying about “openness” and “walled gardens”. Those are scary ideas that don’t necessarioly inspire people to build or participate in growing ecosystems.

Instead, it’s important to understand “network effects” and “platforms“. Once you understand how media can be a platform, the world of opportunity will hopefully start to look a lot bigger, as big as the Internet itself, if not even bigger than that.

It’s at that point that you may wonder why you would pursue anything else.

¹ It shouldn’t be surprising that my thinking changed while surrounded by thinkers like Jon Udell, Steve Gillmor, and Steve Fox to name a few who all waved the web services flag and sang the software-as-a-service song before many of the leading IT efforts at some of the most innovative companies knew how to put those words into coherent sentences. Those concepts can apply to lots of markets, media among them.

Paul Conley rants on Ziff Davis for their latest breach of journalistic ethics. They’ve gone so far as to sell the very text of their editorial mission statement to advertisers. Check out this screenshot:

“If you want to see the single most ridiculous, most offensive, most disgusting and dimwitted thing in the entire history of B2B publishing, then take a look at the Editorial Mission statement of Baseline magazine — the Editorial Mission statement, for god’s sake!!! — where ads have been inserted in the copy.”

Rex Hammock agrees and clarifies his distaste for the intelliTXT model:

“I’m not even opposed to having clearly marked advertising or sponsored content that is interspersed with editorial content. The practice that Paul (and I) oppose is the hidden nature of hyperlinked-text advertising…This is a slippery slope.”

It’s just unbelievable what people will do to their future to get an extra dollar today.

Much like print and tv are becoming marketing vehicles to drive people online, the domain name for an online media service is becoming sort of an abstract utility or maybe just a brand address for media services rather than the real estate upon which the core activity occurs. The service a media vehicle provides matters more than the vehicle itself.

And this isn’t only happening in the content space. Every aspect of the media business is pointing to a services model. Here’s what the key pieces look like, in my mind:

1. Data is infinitely distributable. All data…not just editorialized words. The RSS standard opened the doors for vast distribution networks, and services like Yahoo! Pipes and Feedburner figured out how to make the distribution methods meaningful. There’s an endless supply of microchunks flying around the Internet, most of them unattached to any domain or URL except as a handy reference point.
2. Data can be visualized in meaningful ways. AJAX and the many freely available widget kits and javascript libraries such as YUI are rendering these microchunks in the right place at the right time in the right way for people which, again, is not always on a web site. The Internet user experience is no longer held back by the limitations of HTML and the packaging a site owner predefines for their media.
3. Media is created by everyone. Whether written in long form by a reporter or researcher, captured as video by a mobile phone owner, or simply clicked by a casual web site visitor, expressions of interest are shared, measured and interpreted in many different ways. This results in a seemingly neverending stream of media flowing in and out of every corner of the digital universe.
4. Distribution technologies are increasingly efficient and inexpensive. Personal media services like instant messaging, blog tools, podcasting and collaborative media services like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, etc. are easy to use and often free. Web services and open source software enable people and companies to scale distribution and production functionality for large audiences or groups of users with negligeable costs. Most importantly, these tools enable people to be influential without ever owning a domain.
5. The distance between buyer and seller is shrinking. There are more and more ways for buyers to find sellers and sellers to find buyers from search engines to recommendation tools to coupon rss feeds, etc. Distributed ad markets like Right Media are enabling marketers and service providers to negotiate both the methods and the value of a marketing message. Advertising can operate as a service, too.

After re-reading this description myself, it looks like I’ve just echoed much of the whole Web 2.0 thing yet again. That makes me think I didn’t articulate the concept properly, as I believe there’s a very different way to visualize how data get created, packaged, distributed and remixed and how the various parts of a media business can be coupled both within the organization and across the wider network. Maybe that’s Web 2.0. Maybe it’s edge economics. SOA. Whatever.

The important thing is to think of how your media business can create for yourself or leverage how others offer Marketing As A Service, Sales As A Service, Operations As A Service, in addition to your editorial and community building efforts. Here’s a quick chart of how a media business might look that hopefully gets the point across:

We’ve seen Journalism As A Service evolve with a little more clarity, particularly recently. Mark Glaser provides a step-by-step guide on how to structure a community-driven news organization:

“Reach out to the community for bloggers, muckrakers and go-to experts. Each topic area would require more than just reacting to news. The Topic Chief would be sure to enlist as many experts as possible not only to be sources but to also be contributors, commenters, and word-of-mouth marketers. Anyone who possesses the skills that go beyond basic participation can be hired on as freelancers or even full-time staff.”

Similarly, Doc Searls’ “How To Save Newspapers” post also lays out what needs to happen on the editorial side. Here’s step #5 in his list:

“Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers. Or at least as partners in shared job of informing the community about What’s Going On and What Matters Around Here. The blogosphere is thick with obsessives who write (often with more authority than anybody inside the paper) on topics like water quality, politics, road improvement, historical preservation, performing artisty and a zillion other topics. These people, these writers, are potentially huge resources for you. They are not competitors. The whole “bloggers vs. journalism” thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There’s a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it’s barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit.”

There is lots of guidance for the newsroom, but all parts of a media business can become services.

For example, the ultimate in Marketing As A Service is the customer evangelist. It’s not about branded banners, as Valleywag points out,

“When paid-for banner ads lead to another site that’s supported by banner ads, you know that something’s wrong. Anyone who relies on that circular spending is asking for trouble.”

Marketing should be about enabling customer evangelists whether your customer is simply promoting your stuff for you or actually distributing and reselling it. Fred Wilson thinks of this in terms of “Superdistribution“:

“Superdistribution means turning every consumer into a distribution partner. Every person who buys a record, a movie, reads a newspaper, a book, every person who buys a Sonos or a Vespa becomes a retailer of that item. It’s word of mouth marketing, referral marketing, but with one important difference. The consumer is the retailer.”

None of this needs to happen on a single domain. The domain chain in any of these actions probably should be invisible to people, anyhow, except maybe to ground the events in trusted relationships.

Now, there are many domains that can create wonderfully useful and valuable destinations once they reach a certain critical mass. Invoking another over-used dotcom jargon word, this is what happens at the head of the long tail. And there are obviously lots of nice advantages of being in that position.

Most media companies want to be in that position and fight tooth and nail for it even if it just means being at the head of a niche curve. But instead of or maybe in addition to competing for position on the curve, most media companies need to think about how they provide relevant services outside of their domains that do something useful or valuable in meaningful ways across the entire spectrum.

Posting articles on your domain isn’t good enough any more. The constant fight for page views should be positive proof of that. There’s a bigger, deeper, longer term position out there as a critical part of a network. Sun Microsystems’ mantra “The Network is the Computer” is still meaningful in this context. What is your role if “The Network is the Media”?

Similarly, is Marshall Mcluhan’s widely adopted view that “The Medium Is The Message” still true? Or, like many have asked about the IT market, does the medium matter anymore?

If we are moving to an intention economy, then those who best enable and capture intention will win. And that doesn’t have to happen on a domain any more.

There’s a magazine that I’d love to read if someone published it (yes, the print kind). Of course, it’s about the Internet. It’s about the stack that makes up the Internet, the platform or, as many people are calling it, the Internet Operating System. It’s mostly technology. But it’s a little bit business. And it’s definitely artful.

It’s not Business 2.0 or Red Herring. It’s not The Industry Standard, though I’d be happy to read that again, too. Those were/are too business-focused and often misunderstand the wider impact of many breakthroughs.

It challenges the people in positions to change things to make changes that matter. It exposes the advances in the market that have negative repurcussions to the Internet as a platform for good.

It’s critical and hard-hitting. It’s accurate. And it is therefore trusted and respected.

It isn’t first to report on anything. It might even be last, but it gets the story right.

It dives into services like Pipes, EC2, and Google Apps. It analyzes algorithms, data formats, developer tools, and interactive design. It studies human behaviors, market trends, new business models, leadership strategies and processes.

It’s not about startups, but it may be about why VCs like certain startups. I love the fact that Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures disclosed the broader motivations for investing in AdaptiveBlue:

“We are particularly excited about the prospect of AdaptiveBlue developing tools that allow users to build the semantic web from the bottom-up to fill in the gaps and correct the top-down approach when necessary.”

This magzine should be printed monthly with lots of possibilities online that may actually be more successful in the long term. (I can imagine the print magazine turning into a sort of marketing vehicle for the web site. )

It includes longer deep-dive articles that have been throughly researched and copyedited. The editors are paid very well because they are experienced and talented. It also includes samples from the blogosphere and insights from contributors and participants who care deeply about the subject. There are intelligent interviews of people who are innovating and actually doing important things. There are insightful case studies of both the methods and results of certain technology breakthroughs. And there are columns that remind us to keep it real.

What I want from a new magazine about the Internet Operating System is to understand the technology breakthroughs and their meaning in the conext of the history of the Internet. I want to know what we can learn from art and innovation online to understand what lies ahead. The business model breakthroughs matter hugely, but I think they often matter as a result of an innovative technology rather than serve as a driver.

How is the Internet as a platform, operating system, network — whatever you want to call it — evolving? Who and what is influencing change? What are the trends that indicate this progression? How do new online developments impact communication, governments and social organizing principles?

Of course, a lot of this is out on the web in bits and pieces. But I’m too lazy to go through my entire feedreader and follow all the links to all the interesting stories out there. Maybe someone could invent a personalized and distributed Digg that surfaced what mattered to me more efficiently. But even then, I’d still pay a subscription fee and happily browse through endemic advertising for someone to assemble something thoroughly thought through, designed nicely and printed on my favorite portable reading medium — paper (recycled, of course).

And I’d read it in part because I would know everyone in the business would be reading it, too. At least, I suspect I’m not alone in wanting this…?

I’ve been a believer for a long time that the magazine business is best-suited amongst the “old” media markets to embrace and extend the online media world successfully. They understand communities. They understand niche content. And they get targeted advertising. They intuitively understand some of the hardest things to get right.

But watching eWeek handle the recent IntelliTXT controversy (more here from Paul Conley and here from Jason Calacanis) reminds me why there are newcomers in every market nearly every day displacing the magazine incumbant in that space.

RollingStone is kicking itself while MySpace displaces everything they once were. It continues to pain ZiffDavis and IDG every day that CNet and Slashdot control more and more of their once-dominant market positions. Everyone who was working at Time Inc. while Yahoo! rose to power is embarrassed every time they check their email.

Instead of embracing the Internet, the magazine businesses, particularly niche publications, choose to hide under their old business models. Then each time a Digg or a BoingBoing or the next new media site screams across the network, the internal fingerpointing and backroom politics escalate. And while everyone plots the next move, key thought leaders inside the company head elsewhere for employment.

There was a collective ‘ouch’ when InfoWorld lost Jon Udell to Microsoft.

I’m surprised that the trade associations are only just now picking up on things like this and the damage they cause. Martha Spizziri of the ASPBE takes a first pass at what IntelliTXT means:

“…at best the IntelliTXT model is annoying–in the same way that even editorial links can be annoying when the text is vague. In both cases, you aren’t really sure what kind of information you’ll get if you click.”

The American Business Media, on the other hand, has chosen not to take a side. In fact, they’ve chosen eWeek as a Neal Award finalist instead. B2B media watchdog Paul Conley explains why that’s a bad idea:

“it’s beyond me why the screening judges at ABM would think that a site that embarrasses the entire world of B2B journalism should be considered a symbol of what is best in B2B journalism.”

And Bill Mickey at Folio faults eWeek for being desperate:

“I’ve written about this before, as has Conley, who this time suggests that pressures stemming from owner Willis Stein’s efforts to sell Ziff Davis have resulted in a revenue-at-all-costs Web site strategy.”

Its obvious to everyone that print is struggling. And the stories of a market in turmoil only get more critical when a leader like eWeek sells out its last asset…the words on its pages.

Look, relevant advertising is great. It works for everyone in the media ecosystem. But when credibility is the elephant in the room, you can’t disrespect your customers. It’s as if your own content is getting in the way of what you want from people.

Do you want my clicks or my attention? If you capture my click, you’ll have a dollar today. If you capture my attention, you’ll have a customer tomorrow.