Making the new more relevant

April 29, 2008 at 8:13 am · Filed under ABC News, CBS, Information Management, Interview, Messy World, Michael Skoler, News, Politics, Public Insight Journalism, Public Media, Public TV, Social Networking, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution

It’s ironic isn’t it, that at a time when the problems that confront us, such as the end of cheap oil, a war that we cannot get out of, an education system that fails 40% of Americans, a healthcare system that serves only a few, that our news is so awful.

CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.

News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.

How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?

I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.

Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience - how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.

This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.

The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.

What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?

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Size Matters - When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics, barriers, metadata

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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ThoughtFarmer- a Canadian Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform Start-up

March 3, 2008 at 10:33 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Information Management, Interview, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews

I sat down recently for lunch with Darren Gibbons and Gordon Ross of OpenRoad Communications, a small Vancouver firm focusing on the design and implementation of corporate intranets and internal communications strategy.

As part of their work with clients over the past several years and their experiences in designing and adapting intranets, they developed a hybrid wiki, blog and CMS platform called ThoughtFarmer.

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ThoughtFarmer

Beyond wikis - Knowledge Sharing for the new enterprise

ThoughtFarmer combines structure and social networking with easy wiki authoring, helping companies share knowledge and strengthen community.

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ThoughtFarmer has gained some significant clients over the past year or so, including NESTA (National Endowment for the Sciences, Technology and Arts - the largest single endowment devoted exclusively to supporting talent, innovation and creativity in the UK), IDEO (the globally renowned industrial design firm) and most recently eHarmony.

I’ve known about ThoughtFarmer since its early days, and wrote up a descriptive entry in the recent book "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of web 2.0", published by the ARK Group (UK).

I wanted to delve a bit further into the why’s, what’s and how’s of ThoughtFarmer, to find out more about the appeal it held for client organizations who are serious about tackling the issues and dynamics of Enterprise 2.0.

I ran through the following 4 questions with Darren and Gordon in a question-and-answer interview format.
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1. I understand that ThoughtFarmer is an hybrid collaborative platform comprised of a wiki, social networking capabilities and various modular elements that traditionally have formed part of an enterprise’s intranet platform. Is that correct, and can you offer us a more concise description ?

D & G - Yes, it’s a hybrid, which is actually becoming a fairly standard architecture or configuration for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.

Our conception of ThoughtFarmer and its initial design came out of our work with clients helping them implement intranet publishing tools. As Web 2.0 tools and services became more prevalent, we realized that it would be natural to incorporate these into an intranet publishing and knowledge-sharing application, and so we set about designing and building what became ThoughtFarmer 1.0, a platform to support easy user publishing and the sharing of pertinent information and knowledge in an intranet environment.

Our first client, IntraWest (at that time owner of Whistler Blackcomb and other ski resort properties), essentially provided us with the design principles. They wanted a platform that would make it easy to:

- publish and maintain current, up to date and relevant content
- create and sustain a content repository that would also serve as the company’s central knowledge repository
- strengthen workplace community by bringing forward and exposing the relationships amongst colleagues who were spread out geographically, and
- minimize any additional work (the "thing" would have to be self-sustaining and create no additional employee headcount).

Interestingly, these design principles came out of the (admittedly progressive) HR function, who insisted that we focus on the needs of both the organization AND the users. Initially, IT said "Use Sharepoint" but that involved some fairly significant customization and user training efforts.  HR said "that’s a non-starter", and so off we went.
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2. In your opinion, what most clearly differentiates ThoughtFarmer from the other recent arrivals on the Enterprise 2.0 scene that combine wikis, blogs, social networking, enterprise search, etc. ?

 D & G - We think that the answer to that question has to be "ease-of-use".  The core design principles can be summarized as "Simple" and “Social”

Simple - we got rid of as much jargon as we knew how - for example, everything a user posts is a "page" -  and we provide the users with a fair bit of simple but clear structure.  There are lots of simple "tools" that help users re-structure and shuffle around the content, such as by re-labeling or sorting the content,  through the use of easy-to-manage tagging.

ThoughtFarmer offers full text search, making it easy to find all sorts of content, and the newer version (2.5) incorporates such useful features as activity tracking whereby everything that takes place is logged for easy future reference.

Social - we also focused on "Social" as a design principle, which essentially means that every feature and the pages on which the activity takes place follow the axiom "simple rules for complex spaces".  We’re big fans of Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and worked to introduce attention filters that allow for the customization based on the cognitive capacity of individual users.  ThoughtFarmer features something we call activity tracking, which is based on Hall’s theory of proxemics (the study of the human use of space within the context of culture).  We implemented a sllder-based attention filter that enables zooming in and / or out and lets a user see all the projects in which she or he is a member and all of the related project content and activity on the intranet. 

We believe that his is a deeply humanistic design principle for knowledge work in social settings.

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3. I understand that for a small not-Silicon-Valley-based Canadian Enterprise 2.0 startup, you have had some impressive initial client wins. What is the implementation of ThoughtFarmer you are most proud of, and why ?

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D & G - We’re proud of the fact that some very innovative and innovation-oriented companies have chosen to use this application designed by a small Canadian communications firm. We’ve only just recently been able to talk about the fact that IDEO (designers of the Palm V, the Swiffer, the Apple Mouse and many other innovative products) chose ThoughtFarmer.  IDEO evaluated every Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform they could find, and chose ours. They are currently using it on their main intranet and are rolling it out to their offices around the world..

4. Is it plug-and-play, or does it’s implementation involve customization and set-up depending upon a given enterprise’s overall information systems architecture .. or is this even the right question ?

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D& G - Yes, it’s essentially plug and play, although of course every organization will have different requirements and a different IT architecture with which ThoughtFarmer must operate. But to offer an example, a recent installation of ThoughtFarmer at eHarmony (involving more than 250 employees) required only 5 days to install the platform, train the employees and migrate all the pertinent content.
ThoughtFarmer is Microsoft-based (SQL server and .Net), and is "IT-shop" friendly. OpenRoad is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and ThoughtFarmer was recently certified for Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 by Microsoft’s product testing labs.
Even though we like to consider it "plug-and-play" the design does not preclude customization and specialized integration with complex corporate IT architectures. ThoughtFarmer can also be used as a collaboration-oriented module within larger-scale intranets, and of course a wide range of other business applications can be integrated into the core ThoughtFarmer platform.

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Tags: ThoughtFarmer, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IDEO, eHarmony, Microsoft, Sharepoint

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Radio as TV? - The Bryant Park team show the way

February 7, 2008 at 7:23 am · Filed under Bryant Park Project, Social Media, Social Objects, Trust, Trusted Space, Video

Not only can I get Bryant Park streamed or podcasted to me in Canada. Not only can I banter back and forth with the team and other listeners on Twitter - NOW I can see them eating what looks like a dead python and coughing their lungs out on video.

The point?

Makes the connection more human - this is not the Radio of my youth when the BBC announcers would wear a dinner jacket on air to get the right sound. Here is Alvar Lidell announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor - gives you a sense of the “sound” of the time.

BPP is evolving a deep human connection with their audience - all local stations can and should do this.

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Decentralized Co-Creation of Value … and Meaning

January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising

A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence - Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.

Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.

There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.

We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?

David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.

He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew.   Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.

It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.

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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted.  But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.

It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment.  I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people).  While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression. 

That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.

But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.

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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook

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Public Radio and TV - More than a Mashup

January 16, 2008 at 8:17 am · Filed under Andy Carvin, CPB, Emergent, NPR, NPR Music, PBS, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, TV, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds

Wouldn’t it be something if Public TV and Radio got together to cover the election? Would it be great if the local stations got together with the big producers to cover the election?

Well it’s more than a dream now - CPB is funding just such a Mashup - The beginning I think of the key new force in public media - a Real Network of Many to Many.

Many of us had had a problem wit the term “Network” in Radio and TV. What it really means is one powerful producer using a system to distribute its product. Of course a real network is a diverse multi node system that where many nodes add value to the whole.

This is what is being “born” in Public radio and TV. Our hope a year ago was that the Election would be a powerful enough incentive to help the current large players to grit their teeth and really share and work with each other. This is working.

Here is Andy Carvin with the story.

Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.

“By pooling content produced locally and nationally — for radio, television, and online — we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public,” said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. “We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting.”

“This grant underscores CPB’s support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are,” added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. “This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms.”

The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality - many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn’t have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.

The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR’s annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn’t take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn’t get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work……….

Now with NPR Music - we are seeing a real network emerging. With a real network, there will come the network effects for all concerned.

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The New NPR Music Site - A Model for Social Media

November 6, 2007 at 8:18 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, NPR, NPR Music, New Realities, Public Media, Social Media, Trust, Trusted Space

NPR launched its new Music site yesterday. I spent much of yesterday walking around and playing in it - yes it’s a complex world not a “site”.

I am really impressed as I hope that you will be too. It really does allow for an informed “discovery” for instance when I listened to a new recording of Elgar’s cello concerto, it took me to the incomparable Jacqueline Du Pre, to articles on Elgar and to many other pieces. All can easily be played and put onto my own playback list with an exceptional Flash Player - no more WMF!!!!!

Most musical tastes are met. As are many different “views” - Not only can you listen to recordings but also concerts and view video. Not only can you establish a personal playlist but you can buy music too. You can also tap into the streams of up to 12 stations - many of whom have a global reputation in the field

Not only can you hear music but you can hear informed discussion about music.

For me the site offers the current ideal in a social media site

• It’s a complex world but with intuitive navigation that not only allows you to find what you are looking for but also to discover things that you were not! So you tend to spend hours there. As the site builds - so will its complexity and your ability to hang about there for long times
• It’s a personal world - you can shape it to meet your own needs both in terms of taste and time and control
• It’s interactive with many open and informative blogs
• It can grow as more stations join and has the potential to become the major music site in the world - it demonstrates the mutual value of cooperation that exceeds the early coop venture in podcasting - for here each new addition adds to the over complexity and hence life of the system.

So how did this come about? That is itself a story.

I think that the key was a decision by a few brave NPR folks over 2 years ago that they did not know what to do.  I am finding the the most inviting and most successful beginning to find the new way is to accept ignorance.

Not only did they accept that they did not know, but that intuitively understood that maybe most did not know either BUT that if they genuinely asked the stations, an answer might emerge.

They also knew that they had to get some help to enable them to do this - they needed a few (They got 3) people who were not selling a solution either but who could help build the conditions of trust to have a huuuuge conversation so that the “Wisdom of Crowd” could be heard.
In later posts, I would like to talk a bit about what happened. For look at the results:

• The NPR Music site is truly a child of the process
• It is truly cooperative
• It hits a bullseye for design and outcome
• It is the new standard for a social media site and very importantly supporting organization

For me the key to any organization seeking to do the same is to build the requisite trust with some of the parties.
I have found that building trust is dependent on building a shared context, a shared language and a shared understanding of that is going on. This includes getting the elephants out into the open. Just talking does not do this - we found that people had to do things with each other to create this trust.

Then some key ideas emerge - they literally float up. They do not belong to anyone - that is their power. But they are seen as being true by many. By being owned by all, there is no owner barrier to the idea and this seems a precondition to joint action.
Then it takes more hard work still than anyone could imagine - I had hoped that the music site would have been ready a year ago. I was naive. Even with the best preconditions, moving to the new reality is exceptionally hard to do.

The product is all about technology. But the process to getting there is not. More later

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