Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Don't read the front page

David Weinberger highlights a comment by Michael Wolff in Vanity Faire about his new news site, Newser.com.

The metaphor, for 150 years — from print to radio to network to cable — has been the front page: important stuff first. "It should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests," offers [Patrick] Spain, not a man wild with his metaphors. [VF, October, p. 126]

I've been saying for a while, and I think in Everything Is Miscellaneous, that the new front page is distributed across our day and our network. Much of it comes through our inbox. It consists of people we know and people we don't know recommending items for our interest...

When I was around 10 years old, I was a member of the Optimist Club.  The group leader was a great guy, ran a construction company and drove a swanky green Caddie. Happy and successful guy.  I'll always remember how he said to never read the front page of the newspaper first.  All it would do is bring you down about what's going on in the world.  He suggested instead to start with the funnies and work your way back to the front page.

I find the same thing to be true about my inbox, the modern front page as David suggests.

Advertising is not Democratic

I was disturbed to read a pandering post by a Google employee that decries Michael Moore's documentary Siko and offers advertising as a means for the U.S. health care industry.  Others were, and Google's official position that was no position.  Dan Farber has been following the story, and added this update:

Update 2: Now we have an explanation from Ms. Turner regarding how to read her post. She just meant to state Google’s position that “advertising is a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue.” I won’t argue with the idea of advertising as democratic. Anyone with the money or winning bid can get their message out into the ether.  But ads tend to be one-sided sales pitches without footnotes, not a public dialog. If we want a public dialog, having the two opposing sides in a public debate would be a far better way to educate the public.

I will argue with the idea of advertising as democratic.  It is the opposite.  Spending isn't speech.  Sure, U.S. health care can buy ads to be placed in context alongside public discourse.  But not everyone can.  It concerns me that the bright people at Google could be talking themselves into believing that either advertising is democracy, let alone that it helps democracy.

If the U.S. health care industry really wants to respond to Sicko, they will engage in, if not host, online communities for civic dialog.  However, most online communities these days are powered by advertising. Community hosts and ad networks have to balance against the very strong incentives to smudge context and placement until where the line between paid and unpaid content are blurred.  A balance is struck, not unlike between editorial and publishing in traditional media, but with a very big difference in that the audience has the choice to go elsewhere with a single click.  Or create their own without the influence of advertising. 

Transparent Media and Wikify Everything

Chris Anderson is on a roll about transparency  and six tactics for transparent media:

1. Show who we are.
2. Show what we're working on.
3. "Process as Content"
4. Privilege the crowd.
5. Let readers decide what's best.
6. Wikifiy everything.

An interesting thought experiment is not only would this work for Wired, or a media company, but would it work for any company.

Expounding upon the reactions to his post, Chris clarifies:

These techniques works better for relatively short-form web media than they do for the print magazine. That's mostly because magazine features tend to be long (2,500-10,000 words)  and wrapped up in a package heavy with art and design. Long-form journalism is more about narrative and story arc, which is really best done as a close collaboration between a writer, editor and designer.

Actually, an interesting question is if you could make the short form more like the long form.  Many a time have I been interviewed by a writer and then had a photo shoot with someone that had little or no idea what the article was about.  Photo editors don't give a lot of art direction, especially to freelancers.  Wired features are more collaborative than the norm, but I have to ask if tighter collaboration could be fostered for short form stories.

At Ziff Davis a while ago, this process between the art director, writers and editors was made transparent through a wiki:

In order to put a story together, Art, Production and Editorial departments have to work together. The Editorial team is on the 8th floor, the Art team is on 9th floor and someone is always out of the office.

The team and department heads realized they could use Socialtext for day-to-day coordination, scheduling and requests. The groups need to communicate to each other what's needed for stories in progress: Art, HTML requests, copy, all in a back-and-forth conversational style. The groups set up a page for each activity, posting requests as they come up, and tracking fulfillment of the request. A structured approval process wouldn't address the need for iterative communication. "Because its not always a regular process, we can communicate when something isn't clear and coordinate getting it done," said Kennedy.

But the interesting question to ask with any process, especially an ad hoc process, is what would happen if we increase the scale and transparency through a wiki?

Chris suggests this is possible by wikifying everything.  But I'd suggest that for most newsrooms there is a preliminary step of internal transparency, and then involving freelancers.

Pincus Punked by the Post

Mark Pincus was made an example by the Washington Post today because he stuck to his principles and refused to be censored.  The article is a classic mainstream media take on the abject horrors of newstream media and how it can impact reputations.  Mark's response details many of the inaccuracies.

The irony is now Mark's reputation is at stake because of a mainstream media piece that does no better than what the newstream would.

Guestblogging by Telegraph

I'm guestblogging for Shane Richmond at Telegraph.co.uk.  First post: share control to create value. 

Most of my posts will probably be relating what's readers of this blog already know.  But if I make good fun of British newspapers or come up with something unexpected, I'll cross-post here.

As an aside, it is already interesting to have photos chosen for your blog post and a headline writer to have his way, calling the first post Why it's good to loose control.  Perhaps I have.

Wiki Wired

UPDATE: Veni. Vidi. Wiki. The published story, and commentary by Ryan Singel, The Wiki That Edited Me.  Charts of editors and saves by Peter T.

I believe the Wired Wiki experiment can be called a success, and yesterday I would have said it was doomed. Just came back from Wiki Wednesday, where Wired reporter Ryan Singel held a conversation about it.  How we conducted the experiment, what part of the editorial process it was directed at it and the participation of the community gives us a lot to learn from.

Do recall that the use of wikis in journalism has been significantly tainted by the LA Times Wikitorial debacle.  It was a failure in wiki implementation, goal setting, content structure and moderation.  While the media has embraced public blogs, they still have a while to go before public wikis are accepted. 

When I was an intern I got into an argument with the editor of the Washington Post that ended with him telling me I have a perception problem.  Since then I have been trying to prove him wrong, but that's a larger story, right now I might tell him the same thing.

There are different parts of the editorial process where wikis are perfect fits.  Public wikis of course run the greatest risks, but I believe these risks can be managed with the right practices.  Up front, this experiment was different from Wikitorial:

• Monitoring tools like Recent Changes and History were made available to let the community moderate
• Requiring registration to edit made contributors more accountable
• It could be argued that a WYSIWYG editor enabled domain experts to contribute, but in this case the domain was wikis, so it probably wasn't a factor.  Nevertheless usability always matters.
• Besides the article, we use a weblog for submission of headline ideas and an included page for the deck
• Choosing an article, instead of an editorial, provided an implicit guideline for what was acceptable.
• Most importantly -- a clear goal for the collaboration was set

There was one lesson from the Wikitorial, something I saw coming back then, that we had to employ in the middle of the project.  With the Wikitorial, an edit war ensued with differing viewpoints.  Jimmy Wales stepped in and forked the page, creating pro and con editorials.  With a wiki, there is space for everyone, even when the topic is war.  In this, the topic was wikis where lots of people have a stake.  Wired endorsed an Enumeration to also be published, for remaindered links and references.  This served as a pressure release valve, to let the quality of the main article improve.

We made some mistakes, perhaps on purpose:

• The collaboration was for an open group of participants to play the role of editor to Ryan's original submission.  This is a very unusual role for most participants, and most chose to edit directly in ways that an editor accountable to both the institution and journalist would not.
• While there was a goal, there were no guidelines.  Closest thing was pointing to the Wired Style Guide.  There were no rules, norms or conventions.  Unlike the Esquire experiment, there was no benefit from Wikipedia's established guidelines.
• Leadership was passive.  Wired explictly did not edit the article and did not pass judgement.

The article initially evolved reasonably.  A pattern I have seen before, say with sharing Wikified Books, where most of the contributions were lightweight and adding in references and associations that came to the minds of readers.  Personally, I stayed out of the initial editing fray (Wired did too, more on that later) to leave room for others.  But a wave of edits came in.  Angela called it "here's my favorite wiki" links.  This did reflect the topic of the article, a domain of vendors, open source and public wiki project managers.  Almost every wiki vendor added a link to themselves and editing in their positioning.  Part of this is a sad commentary about the space, I can tell you that if this experiment was done 2 years ago, the contributions would be more, uh, wiki-like.

There were some real gems, particularly in the education section.  One person took it upon themselves to interview an expert at Harvard after coordinating with Ryan and contributed a quote that persisted.  Someone suggested an expert to Ryan on the Comments page, but he didn't have time to interview her.  She got word of the experiment and contributed persistent edits herself.  There was a minor dispute within the section, and some backchanneling between the parties, but the result stands.

At one point, someone stepped in made the first significant edit.  They were kind enough to leave the remainder on what was the beginning of the Enumeration page, with an explanation:

Whereas the Wired Wiki story became too long, and became a soapbox for too many wiki, editors moved some of it to this page.

Hark, and know that you are upon an epic enumeration of wiki. Here, mentions of many wiki sites shall you find, and links shall you encounter.

At first I thought it was crazy, but then saw the wisdom.  Unfortunately, this created a vacuum that was quickly filled with the same.  Yesterday, with the deadline approaching, I thought the experiment would be a failure.

This morning there was a significant amount of edits, including some multiple detailed edits by one editor.  Suddenly, the article was a story again.  And the edits persisted.

At present, there is no plans for a community and I wouldn't say that one took root.  But some common understanding was reached in a short period of time.  I gained greater confirmation about some mediative techniques and moderation practices.  There are better parts of the editorial process to apply this too, some proven already, and many happening behind the firewall, but much work to be done.

The result is a good story, dear reader (at the moment), I leave to you to judge.

Participatory Media at Wiki Wednesday

Tomorrow night's Wiki Wednesday Palo Alto will feature an open conversation with Wired News reporter Ryan Singel about lessons learned from the Wired Wiki experiment.  I expect we will cover the broader topic of participatory media.

We'll have a parallel conversation for developers about the REST API and STRUT (a conversion toolbox.

See you Wednesday night, 6-8pm, at Socialtext.

Between Popular and Personal there is Social

Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing -- MeMeme.  Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in.  I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders.  Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven't missed something big.  That's the real value I derive from TechMeme today.  But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.

Today we have two new and seriously great kinds of attention tools.  Newsreaders give us the ability to personally personalize.  Combined with persistent query feeds, you can follow the people and things you know you want to read.  Similarly, social networking services with a purpose let you aggregate the objects of your friends, be it pictures with Flickr, or posts with Vox.  Tagging then lets you pivot for social discovery, but that is digging deeper than you often have time or interest for.

TechMeme and others show us mass popularization.  Different communities help things bubble up.  In Social Software, you first saw this with Blogdex and DayPop.  What in the blogosophere has the most attention within a given time period.  Now we have Digg, del.icio.us/popular, Reedit, Netscape, Technorati, YouTube, Dabble, Last.fm, Flickr Interestingness and a gazillion other increasingly rich examples.  This is a Wisdom of Crowds we couldn't gain before for discoverable knowledge.

As an aside, I wonder how original Slashdotters feel about Diggers' favor for a popular  answer rather than a leading question.

So more concisely, what I hope develops:
* Tools that let me personally personalize should give me just one more degree of interestingness and popularization. 
* Tools of mass popularization should give me social popularization

Since Flickr has both kinds of attention tools, let me give specific suggestions for extension.  For within My Contacts's Photos, show me the most viewed, favorited and commented by my contacts.  Then show me the most viewed, favorited and commented pictures by my contacts in Everyone's Photos.

Now, this is just one user's greedy suggestion, and there serious usability and algorithmic challenges to overcome.  But what I'm getting at is part of the future of media.

The other night I watched the evening local news broadcast for the first time in a while.  Its funny how local news attempts to localize national news.  The idea is that if they show you a Mom in the Bay Area of a Soldier in Iraq, you can relate to that and it brings the story home.  But unless the story originates from that Mom or Soldier, it is just an overlay with too much of a contextual shift.  Similarly, when an item of local news is made national -- it is too shallow for our local tastes and we are attracted to it simply because or fair city is made popular. 

I empathize with the expert editors behind these mass media and their attempts to connect the interesting for me, when me is lost in a demographic.  But I've had a taste of going direct.  When I carry the burden of discovery, and float around YouTube's popular and related clips, I can compose a broadcast for myself.  The outstanding political commentary, funny stuff and best soccer highlights from around the world.

But after a long day of work, I'm tired, and want the network to work for me.  Cue up not what is popular, or what the people I subscribed to produced.  Cue up what my social network has found interesting.  At any given time it may be local, national, international, topical or mundane.  Of course, in the process of actively consuming it, I'll leave behind breadcrumbs of attention to make it better for my friends.

UPDATE: I've been ranting about this for years.  Sam Ruby hacked together a nifty MeMeme and the result shows a clear and simple foci of attention (a post by Spoksky at last glance), FeedDemon has something in the works and Tailrank has something close.

Edit this Wired News

Last time someone tried this it was a disaster, but Wired News has boldly put an article about wikis into a Socialtext wiki for anyone to be a Wired editor:

In an experiment in collaborative journalism, Wired News is putting reporter Ryan Singel at your service.

This wiki began as an unedited 1,059-word article on the wiki phenomenon, exactly as Ryan filed it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the job of a Wired News editor and whip it into shape. Don't change the quotes, but feel free to reorganize it, make cuts, smooth the prose or add links -- whatever it takes to make it a lively, engaging news piece.

Ryan will answer questions from the comments page, and, when consensus calls for it, conduct additional reporting. If there's something he missed, let him know, and he'll get on the phone and investigate, then submit new text to the wiki for your review.

Readers can also submit headlines for the story, and write and edit the "deck" -- a blurb for our front page and RSS feed that promotes the article.

To make any changes, you'll first need to create a free account at Socialtext.

We'll release the results under a Creative Commons license, and, if the whole thing doesn't turn into a disaster, run the final story on Wired News on Sept. 7, 2006.

To clarify, all people have to do is register to edit, a spam countermeasure.  This is of course different from the LA Times experminent as there is a clearly stated goal.  It will be interesting to at least watch.

Brewster Kahle on Universal Access to All Knowledge

An Impressionistic Transcript of Brewster Khale's talk at Wikimania...

You are really on to something. There is something big going on here and a lot of these talks are about trying to figure it out. At the beginning of the talk I'll talk about things I know about and at the end talk about things I don't know -- how is that for a VC pitch?

I'll talk about open source, open content and the rise of the technical non-profits. Universal Access to All Knowledge is a big goal, and if you accomplish it, what are you going to do? Move to Florida?

Wikipedia is the 15th most popular site on the web. This is because of the enlightenment goal. The goal isn't a technical one, but a structural one. Despite centuries old balance...1976 radical expansion of US Copyright Regulation. Property of IP is perhaps the worst idea since the Domino Theory. Information is knowledge, not property. Valenti's crowning achievement radicalized copyright regulation. Most people talk about 130 year protection, but it is the vast scope and repercussions.

First casualty was software. The response was Open Source licenses. MIT's sale to Symbolics, which forked development and RMS' experience lead to open source. This is Brewster's revisionist history, but it may be where it came from.

The second casualty was Music and Video. The response was Creative Commons licenses. Another response was organizations to facilitate community effort. We lost the help of institutions like MIT so we built new ones. The Free Software Foundation. DejaNews was a for profit, sold to Google, dissapated. IMDB, 6 guy community project was bought by Amazon. CDDB became Gracenote, Inc. WAIS Inc was sold to AOL. FTP Software sold to NetManage. Cygnus sold to Redhat. All commercial companies built upon community effort that don't last long. FSF is still around.

The response is the rise of the technical non-profit. Apache software foundation has no full-time employees, but is incorporated to last a while. OASF has gotten money not only from Mitch but from Foundations. Mozilla Foundation is a great success with Firefox and the Google toolbar (money) they spun off a for-profit company. Interesting ecology to watch and try and understand what it means. Linux. Internet Archive is based on the open access model -- can we get paid for the administration we do so everything we do can be openly accessible. Wikimedia foundation you know about. The rise of the technical non-profit is an interesting addition to the ecology, we went wrong with the over-corporatization post WWII. EFF., Public Knowledge and Open Content Alliance exist to enforce rights and serve us. We massively screwed up our law structure and the general approach of knowledge of property.

Open Hardware. Petabox, a cheap machine that is open sourced. The $100 Laptop Program has interest in the order of 5-10 million. What would happen if the next major laptop company is a non-profit? It is because they are non-profit that they are trusted and base on open work.

The structure is now in place to proceed towards Universal Access to All Knowledge. We have institutions dedicated towards these goals, but how are we doing towards it?

In Text, getting the 26-28 million books in the Library of Congress. 1 megabyte for a book, 26 terabytes, $60k cost for the entire library on a Linux machine. But I actually like books, the printed page. Created the mobile bookmobile, which has printed a million books. The cost is a penny a page, a buck a book means you can give books away. In our first debut of this was the supreme court when they were arguing to extend copyright another 20 years, but we lost that one. Erik Eldridge has one, two in India, one in Egypt, one in Uganda... this gets closer to universal access, but what we realized is we need to scan more books. One way to do this is send them somewhere else. The Million Books project sends them to India, but we had to buy 100k books to send to them, but not many others wanted to send books to them. So the Indians were scanning their own books, which may be the right thing for them to do. Put the scanners next to the books. Sending to India to scan is $10 per book, in the US it is $30. The automatic scanners are not effective, so we made our own scanner and can do it at 10 cents a page. Scanning 400 books a day. $750 million dollars to digitize the Library of Congress. About a year an a half of the LoB budget.

Books are within our grasp technologically. There are issues about if it will be done by non-profits or projects like Google Books. We have an orphaned works problem. The way you ask a question in the US is through a lawsuit, Khale and Eldgrige. But if you get to frame a problem (orphaned works) you have already won. Who would forget the orphans? Give the orphans a home!

Next is in-print works. Amazon is working the other way, from print to out of print. We have found with the Open Content Alliance something that works. Even Microsoft is giving us money.

In Audio, if you take all the published works, there are 2-3 million musical works. A fairly litigated area. Some precedent that ripping them and putting them online might not be okay. A lot of musicians just looking to be put on the internet. The Grateful Dead allowed people to trade music. The key was, as long as no one was making any money. This allowed people to feel good about it. Legitimate bootlegging copies by other bands. So we went to this community and said: "would you like unlimited storage and bandwidth for free." They said, "we don't believe you." And they didn't like lossy compression. We said try us. Got lots of Okays. 2k bands, 30k recordings, everything the Grateful Dead played. Many versions of each concert, as there are debates over microphone types. If you give something for free, not only is it not taxed, but you get a tax rebate. Getting Slashdotted is a nightmare, your ISP bills could make you sell your guitar or house. Europe has a different copy-write scheme for performances (50 years), so we are working with the Dutch government to make old stuff free.

In Moving Images, 100-200,000 films. Not much, makes putting them online conceivable. We want to do this with DVD quality, but we are finding lots of archival films that never had distribution. Have 30k films on the Archive, dwarfed by YouTube, which is cool. Discovering genres like Lego Movies. Lots of these things end up in closets. Putting them online is $15 per video hour. We will host it, if it generally belongs in a library and it is okay to share it.

Television, we have a big Tivo, captured a Petabyte so far of 20 channels over a couple of years. We made one week available, the week of 911, we put online a month after. We are now understanding in the US that the news comes with a point of view. Chomsky used to say you should read 7 newspapers a day, recently this might make sense. Getting multiple points of view.

Television is technologically possible, there are some rights issues, but we could do it all -- all text, music, movies and TV is within our grasp. We got a change in the DMCA, yea! But we need a lot of help.

Web. We are best known from our web collection, about a Petabyte in size. In the history of libraries, they tend to get burned, usually by governments, and then they are sorry for 100 years, but it is too late. The lesson from the Library of Alexandria is don't just have one copy. Give copies away. Our first shot at this was with the Library of Alexandria version 2. If we had six or seven of these around the world I could sleep at night. We are trying to do this through large scale swap agreements.

Here is Wikipedia in the Archive. But most people are using it to look at their own stuff, their old websites. One of the reasons this is working is because we are non-profits.

Books, Music, Video, Software and Web -- it is all possible. Some open questions if it is public or private, for-profit or non-profit. Is Google the only shot we are going to have at scanning Harvard's library? Looks like it.

I'm going to use this opportunity to advertise some projects we need help on.

Non-profit Open Networks like SeattleWireless.net or MIT roofnet. Telecom company interests are not aligned with an open internet.

Distributed ownership network -- SFlan mesh network.

Open and transparent Web Search System -- Nutch. Let's build some alternatives and be more creative. Recall which does time-based search on the whole Archive, a project done by one woman that indexed more pages than Google, then she went to work for Google and hopefully she will come back.

Privacy and Anonymity. It is now known that the US Government is monitoring us. Tor.

Defensive Patent License. What if you did a GPL for Patents? The DPL is a license that reflects a public commitment to defense, so our patents are forever defensive. Any organization may freely use these licensed patents while so publicly committed to defense.

An Open Textbook system, started by Wikipedia. The number one request we get for books is textbooks.

Add Attribution to Wikipedia. Gutenberg guys didn't were nervous about the copyright thing. We should know where the facts from Wikipedia came from. Go read about Transclusion with Ted Nelson, backpointers. Richard Feignman, a physicist in 1982, was talking about how many layers it would take from Propedia to Micropedia to books as sources.

Open Library: annotate the book collection. Why is this book interesting to someone in the modern world. What can we do to re-inject old books into today?

We can pull off Universal Access to All Knowledge. This is where Wiki is going towards, one of the great things that humanity will be remembered for, up there with a Man on the Moon in the mythology of humanity.

Wired Gets Wired, News

Conde Nast, owner of Wired Magazine, has bought Wired News.  If that seems confusing, it doesn't matter if you have been paying attention.  Lycos bought the online brand, Conde the off, and they were a family by name.  My sister was a reporter for Wired News and I watched from a distance as Lycos drove it into the ground.  It's more than common sense they come together again.  And I hope Chris Anderson gets to hire back all that great talent (no, my sis isn't available).

Establishing Common Fact in Fragmented Media

Jim Griffin provided great food for thought at Aula with the insight that mainstream media used to provide a basis of common facts for society to hold conversations of value and policy upon.  Regardless of they were indeed facts, it differs from fragmented media where each (e.g. Fox News) frames their own facts, leaving society to debate their differing facts (e.g. was 9/11 ordered by Saddam?) instead of higher value conversations that foster community.  And as advertising drives media towards isolated personalization, Jim's insight is that increased media choice when the network is a delivery mechanism, particularly in the mainstream, has a different societal impact than when the network is an interaction mechanism.  With the former, communities will erode, providing the latter a call to action for social media to build anew.

The first way to counter this trend is familiar to those of us engaged in social media -- leverage participation to strengthen existing communities and foster new ones.  The concern here is while early adopters have developed practices and tools to be more broadly connected, echo chamber arguments aside, mainstream crossover is a challenge.  Fifty million members in MySpace is more of a network than a community with a common grounding of media facts.  Stronger tie networks like Meetups or core communities engaged in collaborative intelligence hold promise.

The second way to attack this problem is the underlying advertising model.  Hyper-targeted advertising, notably keyword targeting, assumes intention to buy within search, but ignores social influence on transactions.  Alternative ad models that incorporate multiple media influences and the participation of social networks on individual buying decisions effect the shape of media.  Composite form follows composite funding.  But these forms have yet to arise.

The third and most promising dynamic that runs counter to fragmentation is how social media is connected to itself.  That is, unlike broadcast, media influences other media and the primary user activity is sharing.  When a fact reaches escape velocity, memetics serve to establish common fact. A false mainstream fact is checked by the blogosphere.  A fact gains credence from it's distribution.

In this post I'm not using the word fact in absolute terms, as I don't believe in absolute truth and would instead offer that facts are social.  The litmus test for if a common fact can be established across fragmented media could be simple: if a left-wing blog can cultivate a meme to the point of leverage where Fox News broadcasts it.  In that case, if its on Fox, it's got to be true.

The reason common fact matters is the accelerating pace of change presents a grave risk if we cannot collectively make sense of it.  In a world of decentralized and fragmented media, is there a source of collective fact-oriented media and underlying community.  I think there is one, so far -- Wikipedia.

Buy Side Publishing, An Open Model

Allow me to further simplify the Buy Side Publishing model. The most efficient part of the content business isn't in how or what they produce, nor how they distributed it, but how they make money.  Today the embraced commoditization is in advertising, with standardized metrics such as CPM.  But this makes money through directed attention, not directly from content.  To that, with the balance between freedom and profit motive required in a modern business model, you simply:

1. Apply CPM, and other standardized metrics developed for advertising, to content
2. Build upon the Creative Commons framework to ensure reuse without DRM under such commercial terms

This fills in the grey area between Commercial and Non-Commercial, or rather, let's you define Commercial use along with terms.  Maybe this is an over simplification, but picture this content universe...

1. But picture this post with a discoverable watermark that bakes in these two terms, with a CPM of $10 communicated to the clearinghouse each time the invisible .gif is impressed.  Say you read it and like it, fair reader and writer, and decide to republish it on your site. 
2. Someone else grabs it from my blogs and remixes it into a commercially minded remix.
3. Now picture someone finds it on your site, and thinks it would be a perfect complement to a Sell Side Advertising ad that is starting to take hold as a meme. 
4. Suddenly, as a publisher, I make money from all three transactions without the one-off transaction costs that plauge old notions of syndication.

I happen to think this is a model that not only unlocks value, but discovers it.

Jeff Jarvis comments:

But Ross, you assume that anyone would pay for content when they can link to it. Not sure that's a valid assumption. What am I missing?

Commercially viable remix use cases.

For example, search and aggregation are limited to fair use cases today.  Google scrapes and indexes an entire page, but only presents a link and summary on their own site.  What business models could they come up with going beyond fair use?  Or take more traditional media and their reliance on newswires as fodder.  What if they could efficiently syndicate diverse content sourced online into print?  Or from the initial publisher perspective, is there content you want to offer openly for non-commercial reuse, but also not restrict commercial use so long as you get paid?

Mourning the Merc

As a Palo Alto native, the Merc has always been important to me since I was a paperboy.  When I was an expat abroad in the mid-Nineties, it was the Merc who looked across the net to tell me Good Morning Silicon Valley.  Hard to picture the valley without it.  Today we may mourn it.

Dan is on to something that the local community should save the paper, even if it takes the form of a local company, or is just an online spinoff.

Aside: remember when the website was the cutting edge of tables?

Capitalized Punishment

Unfortunately a journalist from the Times Online in the UK took a comment off of Mark Pincus' blog that was full of hate speech on the Tookie Termination and attributed it to him.  I really feel for Mark.  It's not just bad journalism or understanding the difference between a blog post and a comment.  They should know that Mark is against capital punishment -- and rarely capitalizes his posts.

Long-armed Law of the Wiki

I'm just an amateur, but it seems to me that Mike Langberg is afraid of loosing his job.  Can't blame him, The Mercury News just went through a round of layoffs and print media economics are in shambles.  But one of my favorite local columnists took the easy way out when buying into Nick Carr's argument on the amorality of Web 2.0 with a column called An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening.

Oh, wait, I am a pro, at least about one thing -- wikis.  So I guess I have to speak up about this:

Carr added some perspective last week by proposing what he called the Law of the Wiki: ``Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. Making matters worse, the best contributors will tend to become more and more alienated as they watch their work get mucked up by the knuckleheads, and they'll eventually stop contributing altogether, leading to a further fall in quality.''

Wrong.

I'm very much on Carr's side of the fence. I don't want to read blogs by political extremists, listen to podcasts recorded by droning amateurs, or watch videos produced by talentless would-be directors -- even though the Internet makes all that possible.

I want to get my news from highly skilled professionals, listen to music by the world's most brilliant performers and composers, and be entertained by big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas.

Of course, I'm biased. I make my living writing this column, and my paycheck is threatened if everyone decides freely available blogs -- even at lesser quality -- are an acceptable substitute.

Output quality increases with edits over time.  Yes, you can find one edit where it declines, but odds are the next edit will revert or improve it.  Now I don't know what quality is, but I know it when I see it, and I'm a lot better seeing it with a group.  It's not that Wikipedia is faster, it's that the community process that once wondered about quantity continues to raise the bar with quality.  Don't take Jimmy Wales' comment that two pages need improvement as a sign of systemic failure (no, I haven't talked with him about it).  Authority is another matter. 

See my response to Carr for more on how Wikipedia works. 

Back to being an amateur. The frickin Internet was made by amateurs.  I'm in good company.  Mike should know that, given the exposure he has in the Silicon Valley.  Or from his peers and former colleagues. Mike may be writing tongue-in-cheek, but 'Nuff said.

Carr's argument concerns me for the same reason IT Doesn't Matter did.  The claim then was that IT no longer provided competitive advantage, music to the ears of every other industry under disruption.  JSB and Hagel and others tore apart that argument, fortunately, and today those other industries are working with tech to invest in competitive advantage again.  The concern is it is an argument that will resonate with the disrupted, gaining a core constituency and create a false divide the engenders further disruption.

Case in point, let's get back to Mike's job.  If every columnist seizes on the threat of disruption that social media represents and and argues for the status quo, they will be left in it.  This can easily seep into the newsroom and when the publisher side of media relates the disruption to revenue, a core bias can set in (note that Mike more than disclosed the inherent bias -- and I have to disclaim that I wish him well and it is unfortunate I am using his single column as an example). 

Don't argue for quality, deliver it.  There will always be demand for quality.  The masses are not asses.  This isn't a broadcast degradation of news into entertainment.  Readers are becoming more savvy, not less.

Social media presents an opportunity for mainstream media to save itself -- not from blogs or people spending more time online -- but from a 20 year trend of bad economics.  If print media asserts it will stand on it's brand it will end up on the cutting room floor.  Now is the time for piloting things where the economics were the barrier before, because amateurs are here to participate.

UPDATE: Techdirt, Jeff Jarvis, Om, Mitch, Tim

Editorial Structure and Social Media

John Battelle on the LA Times Wikitorial fiasco:

But when I read about this, I instantly recognized a core problem with the approach: it was top down community, rather than bottom up. Michael Kinsley, who created the site for the Times, was attempting to force a considered, editorial structure onto a set of readers who had yet to identify themselves or their own interests in any kind of structured way. It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.

...It's one thing for the LA Times to kill the trolls - that feels like censorship. It's another for the community itself to do it.

The traditional editorial structure that we call journalism was created by a community, of journalists. Part of the problem all along is that readers were not part of this community. As new communities are formed and old ones evolve with social media, not only do editorial structures need to emerge from the bottom up, but the social contracts that bind the top and bottom.

Another prime example of how the LA Times needs to evolve it's editorial structure is that the open letter to the editors goes unrecognized and unpublished. But that's okay, the community will find a home elsewhere.

Wikitorials

Blogging LA reports that the LA Times is launching "Wikitorials."  From the editorial page:

"Watch next week for the introduction of "wikitorials" — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials."

This is one media experiment to watch.  However, from Socialtext's experience with public wikis, offering up otherwise finished text for rewrite has limited effect.  Generally, wikis can work best when something is slightly unfinished, when room for contribution is left clear.  Finished text leads people to drop in links or short comments.    Quite different from wikitechture that involves people in the process of production and encourages development of shared practices.

Also, this is a marked departure from the reference model most public wiki users know, the neutral point of view of Wikipedia.  Almost begs for edit wars.  But starting with the least newsy section of the news could be a good place to start.

UPDATE: I should also disclose that it is a life-long dream to debate Michael Kinsley.

Roles of Traditional Publications and New Media in Innovation Journalism

Andreas Cervenka, AffŠrsvŠrlden, was working at Sweden's largest daily during the boom and saw a demand for tomorrow's news today, so he started his own new media venture.

One thing they started with was the attention of other journalists, as they were shaking things up. Traditional media helped bring them their first readers. Covered a major IPO as the first story that showed up on the web before print. Realized that attention of mainstream media, covering their coverage, was an instrumental tool. Advantage was speed, updates, flexibility on publish dates and story length. But mostly interaction with readers.

Published a story about a CEO who hired his wife into a major bank when she had no experience. In hours, comments showed outrage, even from people in the bank. A few more hours later they issued a press release saying she wouldn't be hired. All in less than 8 hours.

Learned from what links people clicked on. This effectively shaped how and what we wrote about. Tweaked headlines for better clickthroughs. No tradition in the editorial staff, letting people pick topics more freely.

Time pressures meant they got some things wrong and didn't get to dig as deep into some stories as they should. Had trouble getting access, but that changed when they started appearing on television, "then they become eager to meet you." This was before online advertising was sustainable, so they provided a subscription service that proved fruitful, then were acquired.

Now I have to get up to join the panel, alongside David from BoingBoing and others...

NY Times Topics

David Weinberger breaks the news of the news, where the NY Times will open its grand old archive in the form of definitive topic pages. Supposedly this will provide a linkable reference at the time in which all media moves to linked formats. He rightly contrasts this with the trend of linking to Wikipedia articles as definitions, as well as the risk of imposing cost when readers seek trust.

But I have to wonder if any major move in the name of search engine optimization is simply. Just as the market flocks to abundance (or scarcity) because of arbitrage conditions until the opportunity is saturated. It also cedes the advantage of direct navigation, perhaps too early.

The web, and how it is indexed, does not reward first mover advantage. It rewards the latest advantage. Especially as weblog search engines and market demand are driving indexing towards real time.

Blogs do not reference the past, or definitive topics, enough, quite frankly. An obsession of new is only trumped with now. Media does seek a mainstream and trusted resource to link to in definition, but they are, after all, competition.

But really, the NY Times has no choice. They must move to open the proprietary when a juggernaut of open interpretation of history marches at pace. This move seems partial, which leaves open the opportunity for others, but is a test of brand longevity that may serve the mainstream before they realize their opportunity to participate in the movement itself.

Regardless, they should be applauded for the move. It will be a great resource, and it's better than naught.

Balancing Personalization

My post on Personalization and Socialization rustled a few feathers, as intended.  Susan Mernit captured the key point: customized personalization-- smart, self-adjusting, filtered system--limits discovery.

Greg Linden, creator of a great Personalization portal for blogs, Findory, naturally took issue with Socialization.  You can find us both taking sides, but note that all approaches are needed to derive value from the long tail: personalization, customization (how Greg describes My.Yahoo!) and socialization.  Where you lay your bets is another issue.

Christopher Carfi nailed a problem statement (these are the things you pay attention to when looking for opportunities):

Being a customer in the long tail takes work.

Steve Gillmor cracked the code (he also notes I'm filtering myself, sorry Steve):

...attention AND human filtering are the disruptive intersection at which the new Web stands.
...RSS is about time, and RSS will win. Attention is about what we do with our time, and attention will win. Friends and family are about who we do it with, and we will all win.

Andrew Nachison from the API Media Center not only aptly summarizes the thread -- but makes a deeper point:

Will we all win? A lot of thinking and capital flows into the quest for economic winners and losers. But if we wind up with a world no better than the one we have now – war, poverty, hunger, hate or name your social dilemma here – then RSS, social networks and fabulous new tools to create and access information, doesn't really matter.

So my question is: among the "players" scrambling to influence the information systems of the next generation, who among them are thinking about the social outcome - about benefiting humanity? Is this the realm and responsibility of the open source movement? Bloggers and non-profit media? NGOs and governments?

Might this be the calling, the defining quality, of the new Fourth Estate?

This amplifies a point made by Dan Gillmor on the first night of the event.  The grassroots energy of the newest media will undoubtedly triumph in form, but there is a danger that the function doesn't inherit support for the public interest. 

I almost see a new system of checks and balances between personalization (corporate interest, information-centric), customization (personal interest, information-centric) and socialization (social interest, relationship-centric) as memes lobby for attention.

Susan also made a key point:

He's right again, but organic, web-like organizations don't fit corporate structure, so we'll see those networks grow outside and around the new tools as they're fitted into the mainstream--and see additional tools (maybe FOAF?) radiate out from their hub.

Which brings the issue back to business models, unfortunately the topic of a future post.  The difference this time is that if the business model does not account for the production of social goods, users will produce their own hubs.

Personalized Aggregation

At a Yahoo! briefing on Personalization and syndication this week, I had three questions:

1. After the most likely true claim of being the largest, how many aggregator users do they actually have?
2. Given how user testing shows that when people click on an orange RSS button they think their browser is broken, how can we get to a single subscription button for people who don't use My Yahoo?
3. More critically, why doesn't personalization have social discovery available in other Yahoo! silos, or how do we get from personalization to socialization?

Follow that link for a rant on personalization in general.

Media Disintermediation

Media Center session on Next Generation Media: How Do Businesses Change as Disintermediation Nibbles Away at Their Margins?

Scott Rafer, Feedster

Google, Yahoo Local and A9 Yellow Pages as new intermediaries.

Microsoft takes a $10 billion market and crushes it into a $1 billion market they own. Revenue drops by 90%, technology lowers costs by 99% and $90 million is "left over" every year. We are all using open source, cost infrastructure will be based on it.

25% of new eBay auctions posted via eBay web services according to the Pew Study.

In a month jobs.feedster.com will have more job listings than Monster.com. Anyone can build a job site on top of their data. Suggestion to the audience: become part of the problem. Be an intermediary. Use lightweight structure. Be the center of an ecology of content and technology. Specialize and integrate. Use open source.

Sold my Oracle stock a while ago, MySQL provides service on 2% on 7M deployments and are making good money.

Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director of Strategic Planning, The Associated Press

155 year organization has faced these issues before, hired one guy to row a boat, telegraph, etc. Innovator's Dilemma, but want to advance technology. The container is not the thing that we set up and hope people come to it, the net is moving bits where they need to go, balance of power shifted from suppliers to makers of content and they will reassemble it in their own way. Desktop, settop and cell phone as new containers. Have to play and move to platforms -- consumers use our brand needs to attach to the content and not just the container and we have to be okay with people picking up the content and even playing with it in its own way. How can we make it simpler, easier to get the info they want instead of searching through a mess of feeds. All for free and open access, but not free as in doesn't cost anything. There is a continuing value to the journalism we do. Even with tremendous growth rates of online advertising, it doesn't come close to funding a news organization.

Jay Harris, Publisher, Mother Jones magazine

30 years old next year (the magazine). Associated with progressive political values and investigative reporting. Something we try to carry forward. A non-profit. Citation of their stories accrues to their reputation. Got in early and adapted to use the medium for what it was good for (e.g. putting database of campaign donors online). Sell subscriptions, take donations and advertise online. But its a centralized brand. Making the shift means keeping the quality of the journalism intact. Fact checking mechanism. Tapping into the grassroots energy while maintaining the quality is the issue. Grade The News project.

Jeff Clavier is speaking on behalf of BuzzNet (Flickr didn't show)

Jeff worked with Reuters for 10 years, on the VC side, but gets the issues. Simple mobile and web-based mobile communication platform. Demos Buzznet, he has a cool Winoblog. Business model: Buzznet.com has premium services, advertising and sponsorship, e-commerce; but unlike Flickr, they are a Platform for event and artist promotion, brand development (co-branded or white label). Shows the example of the Ventura County Star and a fan site spammed by an independent Goth band.

Discussion

Lingering question for Jim Kennedy is, what's the business model in all this? The expense of covering the news is getting bigger all the time, how to get partners to help fund it, fund the infrastructure (mentions DRM, B2B commerce)? Infrastructure for the user experience is highly advanced, but the infrastructure that helps people get paid is immature. Huge undertaking. What will happen while working on it, the missed opportunities, is like taking the engine out of the plane while in the air. When asked, what if you didn't have the legacy, is there enough audience left? Combination of pieces must be different content, subscription, classifieds has worked well, but now need to rethink the model. Will it be at the scale and margins that big public companies demand?

Dan Gillmor at the Center of Media

Last night Dan Gillmor held a conversation at the Media Center seminar with his former and future peers.  Media executives in attendence were all ears trying to figure out what Dan is up to. 

He provided a framework for how media is transitioning from lecture to conversation, with journalists (the least interesting group, also includes PR/Marketing functions that need to find a new role), newsmakers (now bypass the funnel) and the former audience (who rolls their own media and participates in it).  New tools make it all possible.

Here are some of the outtakes:

• On industry transition: "Worried about the unraveling business model of media.  It needs to be replaced with something that  honors the public interest.  Otherwise you end up with a cacophony instead of a Tower of Babel."
• On doing a startup and market timing: "if you pre-empt everyone else, it will fail...contrary to wildly wildly over the top speculation, I have not 'cracked the code'...getting a business partner to figure out monetization..."
• On best practices: "have to capture the fevor, knowledge, energy and talent of the grassroots that is waiting to have a role"
• On Hyperlocal media: "Local papers have a position in the community and one of authority.  Apply the tools for the community for where you do not have staff and do not vouche for what they produce.  If they do not do these kinds of experiments, there are new startups that will."

The overarching theme was the innovator's delimma that faced the decision makers in the room, one participant even described it as such, "stuck defending standards, practices and infrastructure."  Dan noted media is a high margin conservative business, whose margins are erroding.  He highlighted the role of analysts and capital markets which trickles down to loose the trust of citizens.  Blogs are a "goad to make journalism better" and new competition is "nimble, financed, lower margin and not interested in journalism."  One commenter said there is also an issue of the arrogance of newsroom culture and no-one disagreed.  Dan sees a real role for traditional journalism practices and opportunity for established institutions to leverage more than their brand.

At some point, campaign politics came into the discussion.  What I love about Dan is he doesn't hide or hide behind his politics.