My thinking about what platforms and ecosystems look like in the online media world seems to evolve constantly. It has certainly become more clear, bigger and more nuanced the last 2 years or so, but the language to describe a media platform feels very unfinished still.

It may be that the word ‘platform’ is throwing off conflicting ideas of what exists in my head. If you ask 10 people to define a platform you’ll get 10 different answers.

You can think of a platform in several different ways. There’s the functional role it serves. You can talk about the ecosystem around it. Some explain it in terms of the pieces and how they interact. It can also be an abstract concept or more of a strategic view of things.

Blogger (and conspiracy theorist) Kid Mercury has a paper of sorts defining platforms in terms of the strategies that they serve and their relationship to products, particularly in the Web 2.0 context:

“Products are “things” (goods, services, experiences, etc) that are sold; platforms are the intermediaries that deliver products. True to Yin/Yang form, the two are complementary yet opposing as well; platforms cannot exist without products, and products need platforms to be put into context and to be found.”

Wikipedia has several entries on platforms including “computing platforms“, “political platforms” and “platform shoes“:

“Platform often describes the set of hardware components that make up the computer itself, that the software is written to target (often just described as “written for an architecture”).”

Auto manufacturers initiated platform strategies in the 1960’s and ’70’s to improve several aspects of their processes:

“Vehicle platform-sharing combined with advanced and flexible-manufacturing technology enables automakers to sharply reduce product development and changeover times, while modular design and assembly allow building a greater variety of vehicles from one basic set of engineered components. Many vendors refer to this as product or vehicle architecture.”

Similarly, John Hagel and John Seely Brown noted how platform design in auto manufacturing in Asia has enabled amazing efficiencies in their 2006 paper “Connecting Globalization & Innovation: Some Contrarian Perspectives“:

“Honda’s share of Vietnam’s motorcycle market, for instance, dropped from nearly 90 percent in 1997 to 30 percent in 2002. Japanese companies complain about the “stealing” of their designs, but the Chinese have redefined product architectures in ways that go well beyond copying, by encouraging significant local innovation at the component and subsystem level. “

David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee go into great detail about various approaches to platforms taken by companies like Microsoft and Apple in their book “How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries.” They explained several models for how platform businesses work:

“In a multisided strategy, the software platform mainly facilitates inter-actions between the sides of the platform (particularly applications vendors and end users). In a single-sided (or merchant) strategy, the platform either produces the complementary products itself or buys them and resells them to end users. “

The book jumps from strategy down to specific detail such as this bit about how to develop relationships with customers:

“In the case of the software platforms we have examined, even the weakest relationships are far deeper than the arm’s-length relationships one sees in many one-sided industries. Software platforms can’t have direct relationships with the thousands of small developers, hardware makers, and peripheral device makers. Yet they document and make APIs available to developers, provide interface information to hardware and peripheral makers, and make sure their platforms have the relevant drivers for the peripherals. And they develop relationships through large developer conferences and small focus groups that bring some of these smaller players together. At the other extreme, software platforms often have deep relationships with several larger partners. These relationships involve regular exchange of information and joint work on defining new standards and specifications. They may also involve joint investments in product development or marketing.”

Thomas Eisenmann of Harvard Business Review has done some interesting work addressing the network effects of the modern media platform in his paper called “Platform-Mediated Networks: Definitions and Core Concepts“. He uses Visa’s and Microsoft’s XBox platforms to compare and contrast different methods for creating network effects. He talks about how a jointly sponsored platform like Visa’s leverages more complicated but more scalable relationships vs the single-proprietor platform like Microsoft’s which has lots of dependencies.

He builds on this view in his follow up work with Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne for MIT. In “Network Platforms – Core Concepts” he builds network effects as a necessary component of a platform:

“A “Network platform” is defined by the subset of components used in common across
a suite of products (Boudreau, 2006) that also exhibit network effects. Value is exchanged among a triangular set of relationships including users, component suppliers (co-developers), and platform firms.”

They spell out some of the trickier issues the platform organizations need to consider such as channel conflict:

“Platform providers must determine how much of the value created through network
interactions they should seek to capture and from which users. consider who adds the most value. A bigger network served by a single platform can create more value in aggregate, but users may worry that a dominant platform provider will extract too much value. Likewise, when the participation of a few large users is crucial for mobilizing a network (e.g., movie studios vis-a-vis new DVD formats), conflict over the division of value between platform providers and “marquee” users is common.need to give in order to get. Controlling most of a multi-billion dollar business is better than controlling all of a million dollar business. “

Just having a platform and a platform strategy is not enough. There are organizational requirements that make it possible to drive a platform business. Kid Mercury adds some insight into the ways in which organizations must institutionalize capability creation to serve platforms rather than functional hierarchy to serve products:

“There can be no long value chains where each employee is a rung in a ladder, with all the value ultimately flowing to the top. Such hierarchical organizations are essentially immobile by design; they are not capable of creating new capabilities because everyone in the vertical hierarchy is participating in a way that only serves the existing value chain. This is great for incremental innovations, as such a structure essentially institutionalizes the process of adding more value to existing value chains. It is not so effective, though, for creating new value chains.”

I’m looking for more views on platform strategies and ecosystems, so please comment below if you have any favorites. I haven’t found as much dialog and literature as I’d like.

I suppose all this goes hand-in-hand with some of the discussion around designing for growth. Maybe I’m alone here, but I’m more interested than ever before in this old magazine idea.

EveryBlock has taken a very data intensive look at local news reporting. As founder Adrain Holovaty explains:

“An overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We’ve been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web.”

This generally takes the form of raw data points placed on maps. They recently rolled out a variation on the theme by using topic-specific data which adds more context to the local news reporting idea.

“A week or so ago, 15 people were arrested on bribery charges as part of a federal probe into corruption in Chicago city government. We’ve analyzed U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s complaint documents and cataloged the specific addresses mentioned within. On the project’s front page, you can view every location we found, along with a relevant excerpt from the complaint. You can sort this data in various ways, including a list and map of all the alleged bribe locations.”

This is the type of value that’s otherwise kind of missing from the experience. Rather than providing a mostly pure research tool, the site now gives some insight and perspective with an editorial view on the data. In this case, the data is telling a story that otherwise might seem a little distant to you until you see how the issue may in fact be a very real one right in your backyard, so to speak.

But it occurred to me that the community is probably even better able to capture and share this level of useful insight. It would be really neat to see EveryBlock open the reporting and mapping process so that anyone who has an interest in exposing the trends in their neighborhood or elsewhere had a platform to do so.

Similar to the way Swivel allows you to collect data in spreadsheet form, visualize it and then share it the way Flickr and YouTube allow you to share, EveryBlock could provide an environment for individuals to do the reporting in their neighborhood that matters to them. The wider community could then benefit from the work of a few, and suddenly you have a really powerful local news vehicle.

This isn’t necessarily in contrast to the approach Outside.in has taken by aggregating shared information from around the web, but it certainly puts some structure around it in a way that may be necessary.

Managing a community is a very different problem than aggregating and presenting useful local data. But I wonder if it’s a necessary next step to get both of these fledgling but very forward-thinking local media services closer to critical mass.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sean Connelly and Katy Newton for YDN Theater recently with YDN videographer Ricky Montalvo. They created the amazing (and award-winning) crime data mashup Not Just A Number in partnership with The Oakland Tribune.

After getting tired of watching the homicide count for 2006 climb higher and higher, they decided to humanize the issue and talk to the families of the victims directly. They wanted to expose the story beneath the number and give a platform upon which the community could make the issue real.

Statistics can tell effective stories, but death and loss reach emotional depths beyond the power of any numerical exploration.

Sean and Katy posted recordings of the families talking about the sons, daughters, sisters and brothers that they lost. They integrated family photos, message boards, articles and more along with the interactive homicide map on the site to round out the experience making it much more human than the traditional crime data mashup.

Here is the video (7 min.):

I also asked them if they had trouble getting data to make the site, and they said the Oakland Tribune staff were very supportive. There weren’t any usable open data sets coming out of the city, so they had to collect and enter everything themselves.

This, of course, is a very manual process. Given the challenge of getting the data Sean and Katy didn’t see how the idea could possibly scale outside of the city of Oakland.

SOmebody needs to take that on as a challenge.

I’m hopeful that efforts like Not Just A Number and the Open Government Data organization will be able to surface why it’s important for our government to open up access to the many data repositories they hold. And if the government won’t do it, then it should be the job of journalists and media companies to surface government data so that people can use it in meaningful ways.

This is a great example of how the Internet can empower people who otherwise have no voice or audience despite having profound stories to tell.

OJR’s Jim Wayne dives into Oakland Tribune’s “Not Just A Number” web site. The service won the Service Journalism Award from ONA for an amazingly powerful view of crime data.

The basic premise was to create a data visualization for Oakland homicide crime data that made the victims and, more importantly, the people in their lives real participants in the story rather than pure statistics (or just plain ignored entirely).

It’s a very powerful site and a model for all local newspapers to follow. It’s disappointing but no surprise the media creates these kinds of community services before local governments do. At least we’re getting more access to crime data.

Wayne also points to a crime data visualization from the Los Angeles Times called The Homicide Map that I wasn’t aware of.

They have a nice map mashup that takes a more statistical approach, yet they also include things like images of the victims.

Unfortunately, as Oakland Tribune producers Katy Newton and Sean Connelley point out, a mug shot is not a fair image to use for a violent crime victim in a statistical map. But I’m glad to see them exposing data that needs to be shared.

732 homicides in Los Angeles so far in 2007! Unbelievable.

Jay Rosen has an interesting post on the failure of AssignmentZero, an effort to build a publicly funded crowdsourced news organization.

Among the many lessons, he keeps coming back to motivation and incentive.

“A well managed project correctly estimates what motivates people to join in, what the various rewards are for participants, and where the practical limits of their involvement lie.

…amateur production will never replace the system of paid correspondents. It only springs to life when people are motivated enough to self-assign and follow through.”

The idea wasn’t fundamentally broken, in my mind. Crowdsourced news is very powerful. As Derek Powazek said,

“At its best, crowdsourcing is about expanding the walls of the newsroom to the internet, giving an opportunity to people with real experience to share their expertise. This is a point that’s often lost on people who are just looking to make a quick buck on Web 2.0.”

More than anything else, I suspect that AssignmentZero failed because there weren’t any readers. Motivation wouldn’t have been a problem with a NYTimes-sized audience.

To date, I’ve never seen a better explanation of the motivations in collaborative online experiences than Yochai Benkler’s paper called Coase’s Penguin. One of my favorite excerpts from that is where he warns against paying for contributions from the community:

“An act of love drastically changes meaning when one person offers the other money at its end, and a dinner party guest who will take out a checkbook at the end of dinner instead of bringing flowers or a bottle of wine at the beginning will likely never be invited again.”

There are as many motivations as there are contributors in a shared media project. What holds them together is more art than science. Some of that art includes good timing and luck. But it also requires a unique kind of commitment and salesmanship from the leaders of the project.

I’ve begun to wonder if the tipping point happens when the confluence of the community size, the ROI to the contributors and the depth of the trust relationship with the company or the brand creates more value than the sum of the parts. Maybe the science of collaboration services can be found by quantifying the meaning of the relationships between those elements: size, cost, benefit and trust.

Or it could also be that the secret sauce inside the Craig Newmarks, Stewart Butterfields and Jimmy Waleses of the world is much more complicated and nuanced than anyone realizes.