How do you get more for less? - The Network effect!

July 30, 2008 at 12:06 pm · Filed under AP, Control, Culture, Michael Rosenblum, Network Effect, Twitter

I was talking with a client the other day and I scared and depressed her - she is already working at more than full stretch. I told here that she would have to find a way to get more for less. I did not know that this is corporate code for more layoffs and the survivors doing more.

What I meant was this.

Many papers and news outlets pay for AP membership. But as these stats from Twitter show - if you want to cover breaking news - Twitter can do it faster. They also do it better in that as a station builds its Twitter gang - as the BPP did - it builds a fanatic membership. Members who do not pay money and get a Coffee Cup - but are true members of the Station Tribe. They work for you but not for money - they work for you because they belong

Imagine your entire state covered in every area - imagine every state connected to every part of the world - now you have a news service. What does it cost? A lot less than AP.

Of course what I am talking about is The Network Effect. This is what I mean by more for less.

I think that this idea can work in every part of a station’s world. Look at me or Mike Rosenblum. Few papers or stations could afford to have Mike or me full time. I can’t speak for mike but I would never be able to restrict myself to one employer anyway - I would learn to little.

But stations can Time Share people like me. This is not transactional consulting. I want to be involved - even when I am not being paid. I worked for NPR for a full year after my contract ended and visited them on my own dime. I still am very attached. There are people with all sorts of skills who want to be attached to you. They want to do more than send a check. They want to be able to say “I work for Public radio and TV” and mean it. These people have tons of skills in all fields.

I am thinking “Tribe” more and more. In your tribe will be people who merely Twitter - they are your news wire and immediate feedback loop. There are regulars who make local content for you - video, audio, call in whtever. There are regulars who find content for you.  There are regulars who help with development.

There are experts in required fields such as media, accounting, legal, and maybe local politics.

I know all of this to be true. So what is in the way?

I think it is organization and culture - oh that again!

I see w new job in media - the Tribal Connector - do you have anyone who hosts the space for the larger Tribe - who looks out and after them? I bet you don’t. In fact many in full time parts of the organization fear the outsider who may know more than them and feel shown up.

In my ancient past I was SVP Marketing for the Investment Bank at CIBC, then the 10th largest bank in North America.  What did I know about marketing? Squat. So I did not build an empire and run it from my pinnacle of ignorance. Instead I hired a person who knew everyone in the field in Toronto. She and our secretary were the only full time people. We attracted and kept a wonderful tribe of the best people in the business. We could turn around anything in any time. All the infrastructure was outsourced but the key members of the tribe were very close. All our budget went on the deliverables.

This worked because we acknowledged that the best people in a creative field would never work full time for a bank. Our job was to get the brief right and to connect to the best people. We did this by creating trust with the inner circle.

No one knows it all. Even less can you know it all when all you do is one thing in one place.

So the way forward I think is to accept that the best people will not work for you full time but that you can get a bit of the best people - if you are nice and if you are straight.

I think that stations can get much more for much less if they were to explore this. Why not try a Twitter Breaking News Tribe First? No risk and you learn how to do this

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Life after Death - BPP Diner?

July 29, 2008 at 12:24 pm · Filed under BPP Diner, Bryant Park Project, NPR, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects

The show Bryant Park Project has been off the air for 2 show days and what is happening?

There are nearly 300 members of the BPP Diner that are assembling at a NIng site that is there to catch the fall out from the show.

This is twice the norms of the Dunbar number of 150 that will assure a healthy self-regulated site. My sense if that the site will grow much larger.

In only a few days I am seeing a number of patterns:

• Grieving - so important to tell the stories of the deceased many are humorous - just like we do after a person has died. In fact part of the site reminds me so much of being with friends and family grieving a loved one. This is so much more than a show being canceled
• Anger - I have set one rule for the site - Just be nice - this is a hard line but most are there but there is a lot of anger
• Relief - one of the parts of BPP that was not there except on Twitter was the ability of the members to interact with each other - many are so happy to be able to do this
• Global - many come from all over the world - we are all a bit stunned by the geography - Russia, France, Israel - so is Public Media really just American anymore?
• Struggle - to learn how the software really works - Ning is very intuitive but now there are a lot of people using it with varied experience - it could be easier - many cant see the Music link and the forum is constrained
• Getting lost - with so many people doing stuff - I can’t keep up any more and I am wondering how we are going to make sense of it all - I am hoping that Groups of interest will form
• It’s a world - the site is so big, so dynamic and so varied already that you can disappear into it for hours - redefines content for me

But I think one of things that we all miss is more structure - a hard core centre of content. I suspect that if we cannot repalce this - the site will die for nostalgia can only supply so much energy

My bottom lne is that the site is a very important experiment - can a community site with only a handful of volunteer admins create enough energy from content to keep us all coming back and to expand the site?

If we can find the answer, then we will have found the holy grail I think

So my friends - what to do - how do we put a sun into the centre of this system that will act as both the gravity pull and the energy push?

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Cloud Computing: Uh Oh, Now It’s Getting Serious

July 29, 2008 at 11:12 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Barriers, Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Social Computing

The beauty of cloud computing was that it was something you just did without having to think too hard about it. Now, apparently, some people are trying to think very hard about it.

HP, Intel, and Yahoo! have just announced the creation of a “global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.”

What is the purpose of having a test bed?  I mean, isn’t the Internet and its user base the test bed for such things? (This is said partially tongue in cheek…) According to the joint press release, the “official” Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a testing environment to study cloud computing issues “on at a larger scale than ever before.”

The institutions supporting the test bed include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. HP, Intel, and Yahoo! will also host centers.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational later this year. Parties interested in using the test beds for their own budding cloud applications will need to go through a selection process, however.

This initiative is another sign — a very high-level one at that — of the tectonic shift taking place beneath the feet of the entire computer and software industry. End users are increasingly looking to the network to take advantage of applications, services, and utilities, versus installing and maintaining these artifacts at their own sites.

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It Used to Be All ‘1’s and ‘0’s… Now It’s Social, Too

July 29, 2008 at 10:52 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In the simple old days, being a software developer meant simply writing some code and figuring out a way to sell it. Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder has been poking fun at today’s brave new world of social computing.

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IBM Images in 1975 – How Far Have We Come?

July 27, 2008 at 2:41 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

What were you doing in 1975? The ISO50 blog, aka – The visual World of Scott Hansen - has displayed some great slides from a 1975 IBM presentation. Thanks to the Marktd people for pointing this out. In 1975 I was doing research for my doctorate at the University of Toronto and using equipment that looked a bit like some of these slides. It was punch cards and long waits for batch processing turnarounds. They did have a new Wang machine that would do a limited set of stats in real time. Here is an image from the larger collection in Square America that they did not show.

The ISO50 blog used the images to indicate the excellence in graphics prior to the getting locked into the limits of powerpoint. While I agree that these are more visually appealing, they required specialists and much bigger budgets than putting image making tools, like powerpoint, into the hands of regular user. I think that pre-powerpoint images like these can be inspirations for us to think more creatively with our graphics. We also have digital photography that can be integrated into our images and out blogs.

While I think the images are bolder, they do depict a world where both IT and image making were in the hands of specialists. You can argue that using powerpoint in a session takes away from a more direct connection with the audience. That would apply with these high-powered images also and perhaps they might even create an even greater distance. Here is one more that presents a very different image of what online means than we think today.

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Where I get queasy with the Wisdom of Crowds . . .

July 25, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Isn’t the whole premise a little off?

I have seen a dozen or so Digg-like decision making systems inside of organizations right now and every time I look at them I get a heavy feeling in my stomach. I see hundred, and thousands of individuals, thousands of smart people all reduced to one cumulative number mashed on to the side of the screen.

You, me, everyone. Just a number.

Lumping a mass of people in to an aggregate is not what Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is about. I believe more than ever that the excitement of the gospel of the Wisdom of Crowds was a mistake in judgment by many of us.

I also know why it has been successful in being piloted inside of organizations.

The idea of compiling all of the thoughts, emotions and aspirations of your workforce or customers in to one simple, easy to digest number is something that appeals to people who don’t want to deal with the messy thing we call humanity.

This is about the Wisdom of Me. The Wisdom of You. The Wisdom of Us.

I’m sorry, but this whole thing about being social is really messy. Messy like children, messy like love, messy like business. Messy like life.

Put on your rubber boots and an old pair of jeans. You are going to have to learn some names, you’ll make some mistakes and I can promise that it will hurt at times, but you can do this. It has already gotten started.

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Portals or Content Service - The Future of Newspapers?

July 23, 2008 at 5:13 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing

We have been hearing about the imminent collapse of the newspaper business for the past few years. Various reasons are often cited, including: declining revenue from subscriptions and newsstand sales; declining revenue from ad sales in the print editions; and declining revenue from classifieds. In a nutshell, declining revenue from all things print related as reading habits shift from the print medium to digital. And of course the capper—online readers expect content to be free. With a few exceptions, newspaper sites follow a free ad-supported model. The big question now is how will newspapers grow their online revenue (and it is growing) fast enough to offset the declining revenue on the print side.

In some ways the imperative for online newspapers is deceptively obvious—grow your audience and you grow your ad dollars. It is interesting to look at how some newspapers are beginning to tackle this problem. One approach is to become a portal—utilize strong brand recognition and a focus on being the authority around a particular locality. The Boston Globe has taken the portal approach with Boston.com. Boston.com utilizes its brand recognition and content to be the authority on all things Boston. But it does not rely on Boston Globe content exclusively—to do so would make the site just an online version of the newspaper. Instead, they provide a local search feature where they aggregate content from external sources, even competitors.

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The goal is to grow their audience by providing the best service possible. The Boston Globe content and brand may be the centerpiece, but providing the audience with whatever content they need keeps them coming back. The washingtonpost.com has followed a similar model with their city guide feature.

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The New York Times, on the other hand, appears to be moving in a different direction. They recently announced that they were developing a set of APIs to make their content available for consumption outside of NYTimes.com. The strategy here is to disseminate the content as widely as possible and to make it as useful as possible. The thinking seems to be to allow the content to go out and find the audience for the site. As more and more developers build mashups around New York Times content, their audience grows. If the content is mashed up in interesting and creative ways, all the better. Presumably there will be a monetization strategy which will involve driving the audience back to NYTimes.com or perhaps advertising will be delivered as part of the content service.

These two models are hardly mutually exclusive and I think it’s likely that the most successful newspapers will become both a portal and a content service. It will be very interesting to watch this evolve over the next two years or so. Clearly, some newspapers are not going to adapt and will not survive. Others, however, will move into new business models and begin leveraging both technology and their brand equity to become something entirely new.

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FAST

Luis Suarez’s E-Mail Liberation – An Inspiration to the Rest of Us

July 20, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I briefly talked about this issue on my own blog and am expanding on it here. I finally met my long time virtual friend, Luis Suarez at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June. He talked to me about getting rid of much of his email. A few days later I found out that he had an article on his adventures in the New York Times, I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip. Here is more about it on his blog, Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. Kudos to Luis. Here is Luis and myself at the Enterprise 2.0 conference when he told about his email liberation.

Luis wrote in the NYT article, “Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others.” He added however, “I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.” Luis uses a lot of the IBM Connections tools that I recently covered in the App Gap (see Comprehensive Tour of Lotus Connections).

He said on his own blog that it was ironic for a good number of hours that his anti-email he published in the NYT was on the list of the Top 10 Most Popular e-mailed items. More importantly he added that he was not saying that email should be abolished. He is “just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute! Notice that I am differentiating quite clearly between communication and collaboration, because they are not the same, no matter what people say about it!”

I could not agree more. Well done.

I have not been able to cut into email as much as Luis but I am offloading a lot of email around a small startup I am involved with by using GroupSwim, an online collaboration tool. It has taken out a lot of inefficient email threads as we discuss issues around our launch. However, I found myself at first needing to prod my partners to keep going back to the collaboration tool, instead of using the more familiar communication tool, email. Sometimes, I took their emails and posted them in the collaboration tool so we could more easily move beyond communication to collaboration and have an accessible record of this collaboration. Now they are getting more into using the tool and posting things themselves.  I think that everyone is starting to see the benefit. It will increase as we get more information and have to refer back to prior discussions.

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Content in a world where it is infinite - Dr Horrible

July 19, 2008 at 7:08 am · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, Dr Horrible, Hulu.com, Movie Making, iTunes

We are all struggling to find a way of making content valuable again. When it was scarce and you could only see it on a big screen or on your TV on a certain channel in a certain place at a certain time - the content had the value of scarcity. But now….? With as much content being posted on the web in a week that was on the air in a year back on the TV times of the 1970’s, where is the value?

Dr Horrible may be showing us one way.

This amazing film was launched this week for free in the 3 installments on the web. Come next week it will no longer be available - at least for free.

In the few days it has been available, it has caused a firestorm. First of all - it is very well done indeed. So there is the essential quality.

The makers are using all the rules of the 2.0 world.

• The have not negotiated with the 1.0 world for distribution
• They are using Hulu to show the web version
• They will be using iTunes to distribute the paid version
• And marketing? Of course they are using me and you - the early adopters who have some influence - I had to see this because of Laura at BPP - you might see it because of me - a friend of your might see it because of you and so on.
• They have used another form of scarcity - a very limited time of “free”
• They have used another form of scarcity - 3 installments built expectations and hope for the resolution.

And how does it end - Does Dr Horrible get the Girl? Does he deal with his Nemisis, Captain Hammer? Is he accepted into the A List of Evil Doers? Does it end happily? - Well you will have to watch it to find out.

Is it well made? Yes - very tight, great cast, great plotting and ideas, the music is exceptional - it kept me rapt all along and the end….. brilliant.

Will Dr Horrible do well? What do you think? Is this a model - yes

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KETC - The emerging role for Pub Media - The Social Convener

July 18, 2008 at 7:35 am · Filed under KETC, Politics, Public Media, Public TV, Public radio, Relationships, Social Media, TV, Trust, Trusted Space

Social Media for what? As the shadows lengthen, I am seeing that the new role for public media is not simply to bring you Jane Austen on Sundays - though that is worthy - but to use the trust evoked in a generation public TV and radio to help us as citizens help each other face terrible times.

The mortgage crisis is now clearly not just about a few people who should have known better, as many like to see it, but is a crisis so deep and wide that it has the power to doom not only individuals but cities. As houses fall, so do streets, the blocks then neighborhoods and then entire cities. Loss of taxes will shutter schools, loss of taxes will neuter governments, loss of mobility and loss of value will shut down people. So the financial cancer spreads until maybe America comes to a halt.

So what to do? This is where social media will I think play it’s most important role - that of empowering people to come together and to help each other. This is I think where the history books will tell the story - not that Facebook or My Space were cool, not that business finally got it. No I think the story will be that Social Media enabled the rise of Community Power and that it was Community Power that helped America through these times. That it was Community Power that replaced machine Democracy and restored the Republic.

Big claim! So here are some early signs - you can see this great power stir before your eyes

KETC, a client of mine, the Public TV Channel in St Louis, has been chosen by CPB to test how well a public TV station can be in Convening the wider community of its city to come together and help each other cope with a giant crisis. Here is a link to the background.

I am writing today to offer up an early report. This week we held the first on air/web town hall meeting.

For the first time St Louisans could see that they were not alone. The room was full of all sorts of people. St Louisans could see the enormous amount of help that was there for them. They could hear stories of all the things that could happen for bad or good. They could feel hope.

The show (links part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4) was masterful. First of all it set the context - it gave the whole story. Then the full range of risks and remedies were explored.

As I watched this show, I felt as I had after Robin’s cancer diagnosis when we met the wonderful team of people who saved her life. I felt that while the situation was dire, that I might lose not my home but my wife, that we had the benefit of a great team and of the best that medicine could offer - we knew what we were up against. We knew that we had a chance. We had hope whereas before we had only fear.

I thought that I knew it all before the show. But I didn’t. In an hour, Ruth had covered the full story. No sound bites here. The full story!

The last segment was for me the most gripping. Here the show is opened up to the audience, to callers and those on the web. Here the voice of the community spoke. The dignity of the people and the panel was something to behold. The barriers between the helpers and the helped were eliminated. Something important happened.

The full impact was also revealed.

This is much more than a person losing their home. This is about the ripple effect that kills blocks, kills communities and in the end can doom the city. The ripple effect affects us all.

Next week we have a second show. This time we will focus on the the ripple effect - how can St Louisans work together to protect their communities? How can the people save their city?

Of course what you see on TV is merely the surface. If you look at the video, you will see The Swan - You will see the show but behind the scenes the feet are paddling hard under the surface.

The guys at KETC are paddling like fury all over the city and the state connecting people to help and more important connecting the help to the help. Have a look at the credits at the end of part 4.

This is the hard graft - many organizations, I call them Nodes of Trust, are meeting each other for the first time and seeing how much they can do to help each other do a better job.

Many are also seeing that the mortgage crisis itself is only part of a much more dangerous threat, the Ripple, that has the power to take the entire city down.

This is why I make the claim I do. I can think of only one way to dig our way out of this mess - to connect the people so that they can take charge themselves. Social Media and stations like KETC are the way to make these connections.

Many are starting to see that many who got caught were not foolish but unfortunate or worse exploited.

St Louisan are starting to feel that they might have a chance of beating this - a chance not because of false hope or exhortation but hope drawn from meeting other good men and women and seeing that together they can make an impact. Seeing that they are not helpless.

I think that KETC is on its way to prove out the hopes of CPB - that Public Media can be seen as a powerful force for good in their community. For who else can do this work? Who else can act as the convenor in these tough times?

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Social Media and Search: Where We Are Now and Where We Could Be

July 16, 2008 at 3:34 pm · Filed under Community, Search, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Social Work-net-ing, Socialprise, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

Search has not been at the forefront for many social media sites. They’ve focused on drawing traffic, building a brand, and looking for a business model. But, there is a great opportunity for social media sites to leverage search in new ways. I decided to take a look at a few top social media sites to examine how they’re using search and what’s missing.

The sites I selected were drawn from top site lists on Web2Center and Technorati. (Interestingly, I had difficulty finding the top 100 blog list on Technorati through its site search. I had to resort to a web search.)

What Can We Learn

The common denominator across these sites is to have a standard search box with a results list showing basic information about an item, and in most cases, some teaser text. Beyond that there is variation, with some sites not doing much more than the basics.

1. Old News is Old News

Freshness is an important factor in search. Social media often becomes a sequential feed. Allowing users to sort and view by date gives them a reference point from their last visit.

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Squidoo provides sort by recently updated	Digg lets you narrow by timeline and anchors on how long something has been popular

2. Show Me What’s Popular and What’s Authoritative

Social media volume is growing. Providing insight into popularity and authority helps users make a decision to explore or not.

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lifehacker shows # of views and comments	Digg shows # of diggs and comments and top across all topics
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Technorati gives an authority ranking based on “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”

3. Categorize To Help Me Navigate

The cloud navigation feature started with “most popular” lists. But what about most interesting to me? Enter tag clouds.

Categorization, both predefined and user-defined, is an important way to help users digest content, find related information, and navigate directly to what they like.

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Technorati provides a tag cloud that is dynamic and changes constantly while you’re sitting on a page (while it’s interesting to see this, I don’t know if the value outweighs the distraction it creates)	Engadget provides static categories, but they’re buried below the fold
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TechCrunch allows you to navigation by company or product

4. Connect Me to the Community

Social media sites expand connections to link users to users. Not only does this allow users to build a community and find experts, it also helps them uncover new content by exploring what others are viewing.

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Digg lets you see a contributor’s favorites, recent activity, history, friends and their activities, and digg stats – great insight into a contributor’s behavior and likes	StumbleUpon shows recent “stumblers” and provides “people who like” front and center at the top of search results
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Technorati links you to a contributor’s blogs and exposes how popular each blog is

What’s the Opportunity

Through social media, search teams have a new source of input. With this they can build new practices around “social search” taking all the clues provided to uncover user behavior, intent and preferences. Social search is not limited to externally-facing sites. It also can be applied to sites behind the firewall that employ social media techniques.

Some additional ways search teams might use this input include:

• Making use of comments. Core content is searched against and exposed, but comments provide an additional source of content.
• Interpreting and exposing sentiment. Sentiment gives us great insight into opinions and preferences (see A Certain Sentiment in the Air).
• Using behavior as a feedback loop. Social media is a rich source of user interaction with content and it is captured in a real day-to-day situation. This behavior can be used as input to user experience design supplementing what is gathered through simulated tests or surveys.

We are just starting to tap the value of this source and the ways in which we use the input will expand.