Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Dogtown Movements

The other night I saw the documentary Dogtown and the Z boys on the root of skater culture and the birth of an industry.  Movies can be a reflection of you want to see in yourself, or not, but I related to the tale as a startup story.  I broke my share of bones on a board, bought into the marketing that framed this movement in the seventies, but regardless of if I was a skater -- there is something to learn from movements.

Tony Alva at the place and time where air was discovered. Photo: Glen E. Friedman

The craft of skating was borne out of the opportunities and constraints of achitecture.  In Santa Monica where pavement was laid with wave-like curves.  Jeff Ho & Zepher Production surf shop gathered a team that learned to ride it, each with their own style and pushing each others limits.  The Zepher Boys literally shredded a national competition when they applied their own style to the constraining flat architecture.  What was upright and balanced turned ground hugging and carved, leaving judges of a prior era perplexed.

After initial victory, the money came in and new management.  The team found a new challenge with new architecture.  The California dought left many pools drained, where they discovered new geometry to explore.  Armed with pickup, pumping system and hard work they rapidly drained pools of random houses to gain new edges to grind.  Throughout this period, their culture was magnified and projected by great storytelling, pictures and video -- commercialization that spread the movement rapidly.  Some of the kids built their own companies, some became stars, some produced films, some drove in less accomplished directions by some standards.

But the team kept innovating.  At one point, they gained perfect refuge in the large private pool (above), a perfect setting to experiment and test limits.  When Tony Alva rose above the edge to discover vert, which Tony Hawk later livingly immortalized, led to Extreme Sports and the further creation of industry.

Many an industry arises like Dogtown.  With a little leadership, a core group born out of passion within an architecture that seems natural.  Rejecting established culture to develop their own and spreading it in their own words, images and actions.  Constant iteration in practice and adaptation by shaping architecture.  Founders have moments where they cede and where they gain.  A 2002 review highighted how On a grander scale, Dogtown is a snapshot of how mass marketing can compromise sports.  This is true, depending upon your level of compromise.  All social movements are co-opted or die.  What is successfully different becomes the norm.  But what remains isn't just the history documented, but what participants make of it.

Web's Biggest Wiki Search Engine

This is pretty interesting.  Web's Biggest not only claims to be the biggest search engine, but the biggest wiki. 

It leverages existing search engines and scrapes the whois database.  The spider captures summaries, which is all the engine searches, which gives you easy breadth, but not depth.  The summaries are far from perfect, but it seems the idea is they are meant to be changed.  A smart hack, if legal (Andy Beal wonders if this violates whois guidelines).

Users can edit search results and must provide their email addresses to be notified when there is an edit.  Past edits are stored below.  This doesn't make it a wiki whatsoever, its closer to blog comments, but an annotated search engine isn't a bad idea.  The founding concept for Google wasn't a search engine, but developing the annotated web.  Kwiki-based Wikalong is the closest to that in the wiki world, blogs are the analog.

Revenue model seems to be some advertising, but mostly paid directory listings and driving comissioned activity to other search engines.  In effect, anyone can modify the site summary, and you pay for a more permanent directory description alongside the chaos.  So text ads are defending your territory, perhaps extortion could be a good business if it became popular or useful for reasons I can't fathom.

Even if its not a wiki, it raises an interesting question.  Can you automate information collection and then rely on bottom-up participation to make it useful?  This is the opposite pattern of social software, where you may apply some automation to help sift through and reveal social signals.  Wikipedia had one autopopulation in its history, importing the CIA World Factbook, but it didn't stimulate much refining activity.  Web's Biggest tries to incent participation through small enclosed interests and email notification to return, but I'd bet that real community is a much stronger force.

Feeding a Crisis

Steve Rubel covers how Robert Scoble, Buzz Bruggeman and Anil Dash tackled the thorny topic of crisis communications at the Blog Business Summit:

As the trio suggested today up in Seattle, continually nuture your network of blogging allies. This will make it easier to turn to them in the event of a crisis. Regularly feed them news links in good times that are unrelated to your company or cause. This will earn you points in the "favor bank."

Following is mostly a rant on language, its no fault to those who spoke or wrote it, and hope its a reasonable contribution...

Most bloggers don't want to be 'fed' -- they want to be federated.  Being a consumer of leads, leaks and sources makes you expend energy and produce wasteful byproducts.  Embargos are the most rapidly decaying jounalistic convention of our very real time.  Being a producer is chasing down leads, following trails, having a well-tuned bullshit detector and remixing until you feel more than a sensation.  Feeding someone information instead of building a relationship is tantamount to a proverbial fish when they want to learn.  Relationships are abundant resources while information is but fleeting scarcity.  Stop trying to cover the news and be part of it.

We don't put food on our table through what we write, we have our day jobs.  We don't want exclusives that give us the edge over the competition, we want inclusives that let us participate in cooperation.  We don't make a meal out of leads and sources, we have our own leadership and resources. 

Sure, we keep a back-of-mind calculus of social capital, but what's front of mind is how we can trust before defecting.  BTW, I have a little golden rule that whenever a tech company starts thinking they are a bank they are on the verge of bankruptcy, and when people do the effect is the same. 

Now, there is something to be said about having more to blog about than your company or cause.  It's called having a life and sharing some of it.  Also keeps you from running out of material and helps you meet people you really should.  And if you feed people year round it certainly staves off a crisis.  But feed your own people and build a shared understanding within the company on norms and channels (this is their suggestion to have a Lockbox blog, but it really should be a wiki, and not just for activation when the Tylenol is tainted and your Viagra messages don't rise to the occasion).

There, I said all that without mentioning the word conversation.

Searching Wiki Feeds

Tim Oren picks up the RSS deficit in wiki land, via a Google translation of a German post and Dave Johnson post where Scott Rafer comments:

“Much of the work to be done is on the wiki side, unfortunately. Feedster, et al, would be thrilled to make wiki changes as easy to search as everything else, but (…) the Wiki vendors need to make RSS output a standard option”

Much of this thread was started by Jeremy Zawodny's valid complaints about RSS feeds that are barely-human-readable Recent Changes statistics.  He picks on the Channel9 feed, but its a common feature for wikis.

Socialtext was one of the first to provide RSS feeds for Recent Changes (partially because Steve Gillmor was bugging me for them).  We chose RSS 2.0 full text feeds as the first implementation in recognition of how news aggregators were adding track changes, which complements the diff of History when logged into the Workspace.  You can find the same approach with Kwiki, Purple Wiki JSP Wiki and other open source wikis by now.

The problem is in high volume wikis, getting a copy of every changed page is too burdensome, a problem noted by Jeff Nolan (btw, go read his 10 questions to ask a VC).  This part of the reason we offered tightly integrated group weblogs within Socialtext.  Any wiki page can be added to a weblog which has its own RSS feed.  One of our users created a convention called a Track Blog, where instead of flagging or bookmarking things of interest, they add it to their own blog (like a Watchlist) which pings them when there is an update.

The Pull Model of attention management puts the user back in control of what consumes their time.  Email notifications at the interval of their choosing, RSS the subscribe to, and more imporantly, unsubscribe from on their own accord.  To state it once again, RSS is pull, not push.  The model only works when a user can leverage:

• Transparency -- when everything is on a need-to-know and C.Y.A. basis, occupational spam proliferates and social discovery suffers.  When people work openly you can browse the periphery of your attention when its less scarce.
• Amplification -- when other people find something of interest they can edit it or link to it to bring back to top of group mind.  In other words, when you miss something in a first scan, there is a greater chance people will bring it to your attention. First order merits of attention are usually personal, covered by email and IM. Second order merits of attention are more difficult to judge at first pass and are best offloaded to a group.
• Search -- when you have confidence in your ability to recall the past, you can focus on the critical path of the present.

Which brings me back to Scott's comment.  I believe we helped start a general trend for RSS in wikis and this conversation may help raise the bar again.  Even though the vast majority of Socialtext wikis are private (providing private syndication), our handful of public spaces will ping cooperatively (we ping Technorati today). 

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales and others are working on Wikia, a wiki search engine, and Wikipedia produces a nice diff feed.  Adapting to MediaWiki covers 1/4 of public wikis.  There are well over 100 open source wikis, a wonderful diversity to respect, and search engines would do well to adapt to them over time just as they have with less standard blog implementations.

Tim's basic point was Wikis do not supply contentful RSS feeds.  I'd suggest that blog search engines have had the ethic of just ping us and feed us, we'll do the rest -- which should apply not only to blogs, but wikis and whatever else we dream up.

As almost a side-note, I should mention that the wiki world isn't wild about nofollow for at least one simple reason. On a blog you have an author and the audience (commentators?).  Within a wiki, everyone is an author.  We are still evaluating where we will use nofollow, I personally see it as  great industry cooperation creating a tool to use.

Friendster, Love and Money Heads

The NY Times has an article on the state of Social Networking Services, where I chime in:

"Social networking is at this very interesting point," said Ross Mayfield, a pioneer in the social networking field and the chief executive of Socialtext, which sells software for collaborative writing and editing via the Internet. "These companies are at the stage where they need to demonstrate real results in terms of revenues and their business model. That voyeuristic fascination of seeing who has the most friends has worn off for a lot of people."

Which is basically a longwinded way of saying the same thing as danah...the problem "is they haven't built anything new that gives people a reason to spend more time at the site."

Normally I would just link to the article in Linkorama, but I'm a sucker for floating head graphs.

Oh, and until this problem is solved, I'll keep quoting myself.

Similar to a Wiki

Here's some fascinating evidence on how I don't have to educate the market about wikis  A hosted provider of IBM's heavyweight collaboration tools issued a press release describing their product as:

Similar to a wiki, an online workplace is a website that allows its audience to add and edit content using basic web navigation skills via a user friendly interface. However it differs with wikis in one major area, security...

Of course, with Socialtext you get security.  But you also get something just as important, people actually like using it.  I'm poking fun at ProjectLounge and I'm sure they have a fine product, but my real point is the shift in popular language as a sign of adoption.  The word wiki isn't defined in the release, perhaps because it doesn't need to be anymore.

Cornucopia of Cooperation and Social Spillover

This is a lengthy rant, cross-posted on M2M (comment there), where I suggest that Cornucopia production can be realized not just through cooperation in developing a resource, but building upon success in governing each other as peers while in the act.

Tagging Napster

What do Napster and Wikipedia have in common?  Both had or have rapid growth with value created by users.  But what's fascinating is how this value was generated from personal and social incentives.

Dan Bricklin's classic 2000 essay (yes, anything written in 2000 that stands the test of time to 2004 can be deemed a classic), Cornucopia of the Commons, provided a framework with three ways of building a valuable database: Organized Manual (e.g. Yahoo), Organized Mechanical (e.g. Altavista) and Volunteer Manual (e.g. Slashdot)

Napster provided incentives for users to contribute organized content and a simplified UI where creating the copy in the shared music directory can be a natural by-product of their normal working with the songs. Bricklin defined this as a Cornucopia of the Commons, where Use brings overflowing abundance.

This is in contrast to Garrett Hardin's 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Back in 2000, around when Ev wrote his 2000th post, he pointed out: There should be a payoff to the user for entering accurate information.  Specifically he noted that HotorNot's ratings didn't provide any incentive for accurate photo data. 

By now you can probably guess that tagging is a Volunteer Manual construct that leverages Commons-Based Peer Production with incentives for accurate information. Creating bad labels hurts your own organization and lessens your group benefit when you want to pivot on the global view of the tag.  What Flickr demonstrates is not only adoption growth, but the creation of a database that scales socially.

Orders of Cooperation

This week Paul Hartzog provided a lecture on Creating Institutions for Collective Action for Howard Rheingold's Towards a Literacy of Cooperation class at Stanford.  Paul distinguished between two orders of dilemmas in cooperation:

First order dilemmas: how do we the users appropriately manage the resource?
Second order dilemmas: if I have to cooperate with you, how do I manage you?

Paul suggested that managing the commons was a function of rules, norms and strategies to address common problems identified by Elinor Ostrom: "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules."  He highlighted Elinor Ostrom's findings that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs (Common Pool Resources) that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Cornucopia of the Commons provides an example of how Napster managed the first order with simple rules that led value to accrete to the database.  But Napster wasn't Social Software and did not have to address the second order.  Is there a Cornucopia phenomenon that relates not to a resource, but between people?

I would suggest yes, that value accretes to social fabric as much as an information resource.  When groups achieve something together, there is a natural inclination to cooperate further.  In Political Science, this pattern is found in Neo-functionalism:

One theory of political integration, a study of how groups converge and new organizational forms emerge, is neofunctionalism. It suggests that all political integration begins with technocrats working together on non-political issues. As technocrats work with each other and achieve successful cooperation, the technocrats desire higher-order cooperation. Functional spillover occurs from technocratic to economic to political and even security domains.

Neofunctionalism can be used to describe the political unification of Europe. It begins with the Marshall Plan, with technocrats from different nations working together to distribute aid and rebuild. This cooperation and dense network of international relationships led to the formation of the economic structures such as the European Monetary Union to the European Union to the Euro. Functional spillover occurred into inter-governmental EU political structures. If NATO did not expand its alliance for ascension of Eastern European nations the same would have occurred for defense.

While Neo-functionalism does not account for all the factors that led to the creation of the EU, it provides a pattern of accretive cooperation at significant scale within institutional constructs.  When I asked Paul about this in class, he pointed out a fascinating example on the rise.  China's adoption of open source is a marked departure from totalitarian organization (Organized Manual) -- will functional spillover occur from open source to civic space?

Cornucopia of Cooperation

This is a very big question.  But open source organization is often marked by benevolent dictators.   While the right to fork counters abuses in power and encourages flatter organization and emergent leadership -- the complexity of developing software demands hierarchy at certain scales.  Paul suggested, as others have, that explicit reputation could enable open source projects to scale as heterarchy rather than heirarchy. 

Most open source projects, the ones you rarely hear about, have a flat structures without benevolent dictators.  Cooperation at scales below is not only easier, but an inherent value of the small:

In the 1950s, an economist, Mancur L. Olson, found that small groups are more likely to exhibit voluntary cooperation in these experimental games than larger groups, and that cooperative behaviors increase when the games are repeated over and over with the same groups and when communication is permitted among the participants.

Its worth noting that the risk of fork is greater at small groups (of course, there is less to fork over). But as they scale beyond 12 to 150 and more, the coordination risks increase substantially, especially in software production which is marked by a high level of interdependency between contributions.

Writing code is an act of vertical information assembly (e.g. Apache), marked by the dependencies between contributions made by team members.  By contrast, production of content (e.g. Wikipedia) is an act of horizontal information assembly without dependencies.  This perhaps explains the heterarchical governance of Wikipedia that continues to function at significant scale.  Perhaps explicit reputation could aid decentralization at scale for open source projects and address coordination risks.  But beyond Slashdot, making reputation explicit in the open source community may do more harm than good for factors of production.

Any good leader knows that success is an opportunity to build upon.  Volunteer Manual demonstrates a model of production where a resource of value with the right interface naturally accretes greater value.  Peer Production can be applied to creating a resource with additional social incentives, as in the case of tagging. 

But something altogether more powerful happens when you leverage both first and second order effects.  In Wikipedia, users govern each other through shared control and produce as peers.    Tagging in its present form is only additive, although nofollow/anti-links/vote links are harbingers of what's to come.  With blogging itself, users govern each other with their words, silence and the act of not linking.  Not only do wikis accrete value to the resource in first order cornucopia -- but strangers trust one another with social spillover for a second order cornucopia.

Value of Impressions and Subscribers

In this week's Gillmor Gang, Steve Gillmor argued that RSS subscribers are the readers you really want.  Now that should be a little obvious, but the tools to track them have only been around for a while and I have yet to see a study comparing the value of impressions and subscribers.  It got me thinking.

• Impressions are information, subscribers are relationships
• Impressions are on-offs, subscribers are recurring revenue
• Impressions are directly monetized (today), subscribers are influence

The cognitive readiness to trust what is said when you come across something through search or browsing is very different from when its placed in a recurring context.  But that should be a little obvious too.

Free Crap

I'm honored to be included in The Silicon Valley 100, a group of influentials formed by Auren Hoffman that gets free crap.  Its kind of like schwag for a virtual tradeshow with a decentralized  cocktail party.   

Newsweek has a scoop on the group, which includes Marc Andreessen, Tim Draper, Stewart Alsop, Aileen Lee, Igor Sill, Bill Gurley, Ron Conway, Heidi Roizen, Katie Mitic, Pat House, Rusty Rueff, Hooman, Trevor Hewitt, Sean Parker, Brad Templeton, Joi Ito and Zaw Thet.

The larger question is whether an endeavor like the Silicon Valley 100 inadvertently transforms natural Connectors into public-relations flacks. Does it dilute these bigwigs’ influence when companies are, in effect, buying the chance to get worked into their cocktail chatter?

Dan Gillmor goes one step further:

I hope the people named in this story -- some of whom are friends of mine -- will decide either to disclose what they're doing, or bow out of this exercise entirely.

The first item is a high tech toilet seat.  My wife and I discussed accepting it and decided to pass this time, too silly for us -- otherwise I would have disclosed to my readers.  I was potty-trained in the era of water shortages in environmentally hyper-concious Palo Alto.  She grew up with Soviet toilet paper.  I have personally learned to flush every time, and developed a shit or get off the pot ethic.  So there, more than you wanted to know, and well beyond disclosure.

As readers know, I have a personal interest in influence marketing and tinker with related social networking models.  So crap or not, this will be interesting to participate in.  I think this differs from being paid to market or write about something, all choices and the risk I take with my social capital is mine.

Joi posted his own disclosure and policy (he also posted an audio interview with Auren).  I don't think I am on this list because I am a blogger, but because I am one, let me put it clearly: If I accept a product or service I will disclose it, may write an opinion about it, not sure if I will keep it or not it as I explore this grey area openly. What do you think?  Keep it or flush it?

UPDATE:  Slashdot implies recommendations would be given to unsuspecting masses, as do comparisons to BzzAgent in Dan's post.  Not in my case, at least.  Its one thing to be paid to write or talk as a shill, as with Marqui.  Its an entirely different and quite frankly disgusting notion to be bribed to deceptively sell to friends and report back their marketing data.  I took an additional step of adding a disclosure statement to my bio, lest I lose the trust of readers and friends.  I appeciate the constructive comments and suggestions.

Nofollow is Leadership

Wow.  Now here is a case of cooperation over competition. Six Apart, Google, Yahoo, MSN, WordPress, Userland and others worked together to support the nofollow tag to reduce the value of comment spamming.

Reminds me of Anti-links and VoteLinks, an interesting affordance.  You could use Nofollow to link to someone you disagree with and not have it contribute to their PageRank. 

UPDATE: Scoble makes a similar point to anti-links.  Sunir, who is actively involved in fighting wiki spam, raises some really significant issues.  Pete suggests VoteLinks to negatively rate spammers may be more effective. 

Best thing about cooperation is that it can be built upon.  Good thing too, as curbing link spam will take many iterations in practice and this is a change in the structure of the web itself.