Monthly Archives: April 2010

04.16.10
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How does the Digital Economy Act affect your business?

As a social media consultant and an occasional digital rights activist, I paid a lot of attention to the Digital Economy Bill as it was frogmarched through Parliament. Like many, I was disgusted by the ill-informed nature of the debate about key problems with the bill and frustrated at how the politicians seemed to have been entirely captured by the music industry lobbyists, particularly the BPI.

The Bill is now an Act and whilst there are many aspects which are appalling, such as the threats to disconnect accused copyright infringers without any recourse to a proper hearing, I am very concerned about the chilling effect that this legislation is going to have in industry. Not just the internet industry, but all industries that use the internet. If you have a marketing campaign that solicits contributions from your community, if your business model includes any kind of aggregation, if you provide a wifi connection free of charge to visitors or guests, you could be affected by the Act.

Indeed, I’ve already noticed the chilling effect on my own thoughts about social media. What would I advise a client to do to ensure they are as safe as they can be of the unintended consequences of this bill? Is that even possible? What role will encryption now play in day-to-day interactions with the internet? Should I be advising clients against using third party tools that could potentially get taken down because they might possibly be used by others for infringing acts?

I’d very much like to hear your thoughts about how you think the Digital Economy Act might affect your business. Please do leave a comment.

04.16.10
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XMediaLab Sounds Digital: Ken Hertz and the music industry

Here’s some live blogging I did on Twitter and ScribbleLive about the XMediaLab Sounds Digital event in London.

First I’ll give you the ‘raw’ feed from Twitter and then ScribbleLive. After that, I’ll briefly cover some of the major themes. If you want to jump directly to my summary and analysis, just go here.

From my updates on Twitter:

Ken Hertz: In a world of overwhelming choice (in content), filters become important #xmedialab << filters, discovery, relevance

Ken Hertz: Piracy didn’t cause problems in the music industry. Connectivity created problems. #xmedialab

@kenhertz says: Pad and iTunes same model as Sony, why didn’t they win, rather than Apple? Apple sells convenience.#xmedialab

@kenhertz: “Music is the best way to sell other shit.”#xmedialab eg ‘Using Dr Dre to sell headphones’

@kenhertz: Music industry never was good at marketing. In 1998, released 32,000 albums, only 250 sold 10,000 or more#xmedialab

@kenhertz: Copyright act was intended to incentivise access to content by enabling middle men. Artists never made any money. #xmedialab

@kenhertz didn’t know title of the UKDigital Economy Bill. He thought it was called the Digital Enforcement Act. #debill#xmedialab

@kenhertz: Record industry never sold music. Sold plastic discs because it was the most convenient way to sell music.#xmedialab

@kenhertz: People with no resources and no money can become important quickly. That’s never happened in the media industry. #xmedialab

@kenhertz: (Music industry) in a world of unlimited shelf space, marketing is everything.#xmedialab

From ScribbleLive:

  • 6:07 AM: kevglobal @kenhertz: Says that Jill Sobule raised $80k for her next record.
  • 6:07 AM: kevglobal jillsnextrecord.com
  • 6:08 AM: kevglobal Jill Sobule created different levels of support.
  • 6:09 AM: kevglobal The highest level of support for Jill Sobule: $10,000 – Weapons-Grade Plutonium Level: You get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing – we can fix that on our end. Also, you can always play the cowbell.
  • 6:10 AM: kevglobal Ken Hertz mentioning over and over how discovery, filters and marketing are the future of music “in a world with unlimited shelf space”. However, it’s also about trust, emotion and connection.
  • 6:11 AM: kevglobal Ken Hertz says that the CD was “essentially bridge technology”. All the limitations made us think that we were charging for delivery of music.
  • 6:11 AM: kevglobal Ken Hertz commenting on the Digital Economy Bill. “Holding ISPs responsible for peer-to-peer file sharing will not result in a reduction of peer-to-peer file sharing.”
  • 6:13 AM: kevglobal “In a future of unlimited memory, unlimited connectivity, the internet creates a big jukebox in the sky.” Ken Hertz. You can’t build your future on a bridge technology.

(Sorry about the odd time stamps. I didn’t set it from where I was at. No, this isn’t happening at 6am.)
The Analysis:

On a number of instances, people have drawn parallels between the music industry and its struggles to adapt to digital and the news industry. The music industry has long been fighting against peer-to-peer file sharing and piracy. (Piracy is a very contentious term, but that’s the term the industry uses. It’s not only contentious as a term but also contentious in terms of the data, see a recent US government report asking questions about the data on piracy and its impact on the music industry.)
In the news industry, we have major figures in the industry calling Google and other aggregators parasites and trying to figure out ways to charge for content in a digital age.
Much of what the music has seen and has tried the news industry is now thinking about. Well, more accurately in the news industry the state of play is this: Thinking about, shouting at each other about, thinking some more about, shouting some more just in case one wasn’t understood during the first round of shouting, threatening in case the shouting wasn’t intimidating enough and then mostly waiting for someone else to try it first.
Ken Hertz showed the problem for the music industry switching from selling CDs for $16 to selling digital downloads for 99 cents. Anyone can see how this would affect revenues for the music industry. He quoted Jeff Zucker who said that the entertainment industry was trading analogue dollars for digital dimes. This is pretty well known territory for this discussion.

However, he took the discussion in a different direction. He pointed out that in 1998 (I believe that this is a US number not a global number), that the music industry released 32,000 albums but only 250 sold more than 10,000 copies. “The music industry was never good at marketing,” he said. Copyright is not about protecting content or paying artists but about incentivising access to content by encouraging middle men, he said. “The artists have never made money,” he said.
The CD was essentially a ‘bridge technology’. It was the most convenient way to deliver music up to that point, much more effective than LPs or tapes, which is why many people replaced their collections with this new format. “The music industry never sold music,” he said, adding, “we sold plastic discs because it was the most convenient way to sell music.”

However, the internet proved even more convenient. Asking a rhetorical question, he wondered why Apple with the iPod and iTunes managed to succeed with digital music instead of Sony, which had natural advantages. He said that Apple understood that it wasn’t selling music but rather convenience.
Fundamentally though, Ken talked about a music world with “unlimited shelf space”. This returns to one of the major themes of 2010. Smart content companies are realising that abundance causes more problems than scarcity. “Piracy didn’t cause problems in the music industry. Connectivity created problems,” he said. It created more choice than anyone could possibly handle, and it created an incredibly convenient distribution mechanism.
However, in a world of overwhelming choice, filters become important. Trust, emotional connection and marketing also become important. The future that he sees is one with unlimited storage and unlimited connectivity. That takes the convenience and choice that we have now and makes it look like scarcity. That’s the future that the music industry (and actually any content) industry needs to prepare for.

04.15.10
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Journalism’s loss might be an opportunity for other sectors

It’s no secret that media companies are shedding jobs left, right and centre and it’s unlikely that those jobs will ever be replaced, even once the recession is over. Conservative estimates say that the number of journalists employed by the industry will decrease by 40% – 50% compared to before the crash. Less conservative estimates put that figure at 80%. Journalism schools, on the other hand, are producing more graduates than ever before. So what is going to happen to all these journalists?

The obvious path would be for them to go into PR and certainly many ex-journalists do. But this is an amazing opportunity for businesses in every sector, as Adam Tinworth and David Meerman Scott point out. David says:

[M]any organizations — corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and educational institutions — finally understand the value of what I call “brand journalism,” creating interesting information online that serves to educate and inform consumers. People in companies now realize web marketing success comes from creating content-rich web sites, videos, podcasts, photos, charts, ebooks, white papers and other valuable content.

However, many of the companies I speak with are trying to figure out who will create the content that they need for their online initiatives. Marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs say things like: “David, I need help. If I knew how to create great content, I’d already be doing it.”

At every speech I deliver I say to corporations one of the best ways to create great Web content is to actually hire a journalist, either full- or part-time, to create it. Journalists, both print and broadcast, are great at understanding an audience and creating content that buyers want to consume–it’s the bread and butter of their skill set.

The rise of social media as a community engagement tool – and blogging in particular as a tool for companies to get their own, unedited story out – means that there is an increasing need for talented storytellers and communicators. Writing full time is not as easy as it looks and the skills that journalists bring to the table are valuable and hard to acquire.

Businesses who want to really bump up their social media presence should seriously consider hiring dedicated writers in addition to any evangelist program. Of course, you still have to take care that you’re hiring someone with the right sort of social media nouse (or at least, the right attitude and a willingness to learn about social media), which is not something all journalists have. But nevertheless, there’s a huge pool of talent searching for work right now and businesses would be daft to ignore it.

04.15.10
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links for 2010-04-15

  • Teaching Online Journalism » What you should know about HTML5 today
    Kevin: Mindy McAdams, a journalism educator in the US who has done a lot of work with Flash, looks at HTML5, video and the Canvas javascript library. It's a good post looking at the how soon we can expect HTML5 to be fully implemented in mainstream browsers. I think that we'll see HTML5 move a bit more quickly seeing as it's implemented to some extent already in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. The implementation of video and friction not just over Flash versus H.264 but also with Ogg Theora will mean that agreement on video will take a little longer. Mindy's got a good, clear-headed post here especially from the standpoint of educators.
    (tags: html5 flash journalism webdesign apple html education)
04.14.10
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BBC Backstage five year retrospective

The BBC’s developer community, Backstage, is swiftly approaching five years old and I have been asked by Ian Forrester if I would put together a retrospective. We are, of course, going to do some mash-ups, but we’re not just interested in collecting data, we want people to share with us their stories and memories too.

I’ve got two proto-mash-ups in progress that I’d love anyone who took part in Backstage, even if only briefly, to consider contributing to. The first is image-based: We are looking for your favourite photos and images of Backstage and the stories behind them. The images might be a photo from a Backstage event that you really enjoyed, or a screenshot of a prototype you developed or a visualisation of BBC data that you put together. We don’t mind what type of image it is, just so long as it’s online and you can tell us a bit about it.

Our second project is map-based: We’d like you to tell us what your favourite experiences of Backstage were. Perhaps a prototype you put together, an event you went to, or something else completely. We’d also like to know where you are based (at whatever level of detail you feel comfortable) so that we can see how far Backstage reached.

Both mash-ups are based on Google Docs so the two forms are embedded below. In both cases, if you add info to the spreadsheets we take that to mean that you’re happy for us to reuse your contribution.

Right, here are the forms!

Or go here for the Images mash-up form!

Or go here for the Mapping Backstage form!

04.14.10
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Leopards don’t change their spots

Angela Connor points out that, just because you’ve built a lovely new community doesn’t mean that people will change their habits and visit yours over their existing networks:

Your new community, no matter how great will not change habits. What I mean by this is you will not be able to stop potential members from posting on Facebook or twitter or their favorite Ning community. If you are assuming that your new community will become the new gathering place for those belonging to the niche, I think you will be disappointed.

Whatever your community is, whether it’s a brand community or an internal social network, people will only create a new habit around your offering if it consistently gives them something really valuable. Communities take an awful long time to build. Like everything else in social media, there’s just no ‘quick win’.

04.13.10
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links for 2010-04-13

  • Fry pay adds heat to Johnston Press dispute
    Kevin: Forget the banks. Old media is paying for failure. Johnston Press CEO John Fry took home almost £1m in compensation last year as the group saw pre-tax profits decline by 56%. Granted he was in a new position and entered in the middle of the terrible recession and the ongoing decline of the print sector. However, compensation at this level is indefensible especially considering the lack of living wages in local journalism.
    (tags: UK local journalism executivecompensation failure)
  • Marc Reeves on the perpetual new media revolution and the challenges facing the old guard
    Kevin: Jon Slattery writes: "Former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, now launch editor of online business news service TheBusinessDesk West Midlands has good insights into old and new media."
    Reeves writes about the pension commitmens and high capital costs of established media. It reminds me of speaking to a former Xerox executive talking about how expensive it would have been for them to bring a GUI-based computer like the Mac to market, even though they had developed most of the technology at PARC. Established media companies have resources that no small digital entrant can match, but most of those resources are already committed to ongoing costs. Meanwhile, the costs of entry for digital start-ups has radically declined over the last decade. Disruption will continue.
    (tags: newmedia economics disruption)
  • Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video
    Kevin: Interesting move by Google. They acquired the VP8 video codec with their acquistion of On2 Technologies in February, and now they plan to release it as open-source. Good post looking at new video codec issues around HTML5 and H.264 versus completely open-source Ogg Theora.
    (tags: 2010 adobe apple opensource html5 video web google flash h.264 codec)
  • 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winners
    Kevin: Great to see Sheri Fink of new investigative news organisation ProPublica winning a Pulitzer for their work with the Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine. Collaboration will be key on big projects like this as individual news budgets won't support the costs of expensive investigations.
    (tags: journalism investigative pulitzer propublica)
04.13.10
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Collecting behaviours

Christian Crumlish write a too-brief post on tags as collecting behaviour and says:

Tagging and other forms of collecting are also an example of social design patterns that mimic game dynamics. Collecting objects is a core “easy fun” activity in many games, and similarly these extremely lightweight social interactions around gathering or tagging objects enable a form of self-interested behavior that creates aggregate value and potentially richer forms of engagement.

Tagging is one of those incredibly flexible ideas that can be implemented in a multitude of ways and contexts. What innovative uses of tagging and collecting behavoiurs in enterprise are you witnessing?

04.12.10
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Why I’m a fan of small talk in business

Derek Sivers reminds us that on the other end of our keyboard there lies a real person, someone who has real feelings, who will have real reactions to what we say.

When we yell at our car or coffee machine, it’s fine because they’re just mechanical appliances.

So when we yell at a website or company, using our computer or phone appliance, we forget it’s not an appliance, but a person that’s affected.

It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if they were sitting next to us.

He’s right. I’ve recently had an experience with someone suffering a total empathy failure, who didn’t seem able to put himself in my shoes and ask himself, “So, how would I feel about this situation?” It wasn’t very pleasant. This chap seemed to have entirely forgotten that their was another human being, with real feelings, who was being directly affected by his poor behaviour.

But I think we can do something about the dehumanising aspect of device-mediated interactions, and that something is to use more social media, particularly the tools that encourage small talk and phatic communication. In 2004, David Weinberger said in his JOHO newsletter:

[…] Art expresses something big in something small. (If it expresses something small in something big, you leave during the intermission.) Likewise, in small talk, we express ourselves in the details of what we talk about, the words we use, the ones we don’t, how far we lean forward, how tentatively or aggressively we probe for shared ground. Because all of this is implicitly presented, it tends to give a more accurate picture of who we are and what we care about than big, explicit conversations.

[…] I’m more of a constructivist than an archaeologist when it comes to social relationships. My aim isn’t to expose my buried self to you. It’s to build a conversation and then a relationship that eventually is so deep that we can’t disentangle the roots. For that, we need lots and lots of ambiguity.

He is still spot on. I responded to him in a post on Headshift’s blog, where I was writing at the time, and said:

What are the best aspects of conferences? The bits inbetween the panels and Q&A sessions where we get to chat with our peers. What is the best bit of the working day? Those watercooler conversations or lunch down the pub. Why do smokers have an advantage in the workplace? Because they take regular smoke breaks where they get the opportunities to chat and exchange scraps of information that become important later on.

Small talk is part of the ‘social grooming’ that is required to create and maintain social bonds. Through small talk, people reveal contextual information that they couldn’t otherwise share, particularly in a business setting. It’s around the coffee machine that you’re most likely to find out that your colleague was up all night with their sick child, which is why they looked like they were nodding off in a meeting. This extra nugget of information allows you to sympathise with them instead of getting annoyed – the context turns a negative reaction into a positive one, and helps keep the team working together instead of fostering mistrust and other destructive emotions.

Yet small talk is often despised, particularly in a work environment where one ‘should’ be concentrating on the task in hand, not chatting. But without small talk, without those bonds and the trust that they engender, teams fragment and become inefficient. The strong work ethic that has become prevalent since the industrial revolution has lessened tolerance for the social grooming activities upon which a sense of community depends, yet some companies spend a lot of money on team-building exercises which are really nothing more than formalised (and therefore often ineffective) opportunities for small talk.

The demise of the communal teabreak in offices has probably done more harm that good. The habit in many offices is that people work through their breaks, including lunch, and the idea of taking a short break mid-morning and mid-afternoon is very much frowned upon. People also have a tendency not to take breaks communally anymore except for the odd lunch or drinks after work. These trends decrease the opportunity for face-to-face small talk in the workplace.

Instead, people use email, instant messaging programme or external blogs or bulletin boards in order to get their fix of chitchat. The social requirement for small talk hasn’t gone away, it’s just moved online.

At the Social Tools for Enterprise Symposium, Euan Semple talked about his experiences implementing social software internally at the BBC. He found that a significant fraction of posts on the bulletin boards were not overtly to do with work, but either passing on experiences gained outside of work or the sort of small talk that glues communities together. But, as Euan says, “People get to trust each other through small talk, and I actively defend it against those who say it is not work related.”

It’s as true now as it was then.

04.10.10
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links for 2010-04-10

  • cnewmark: Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence
    Kevin: Craig Newmark of Craig's List has been talking about trust for a while now, including trust in how it relates to news and journalism. He recently spoke at the Reynolds Institute at the University of Missouri. His basic thesis is this: "By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power."
    I think we will see a shift, but I think that money and nominal power will still play a huge role in our societies and in our politics, sadly.
    (tags: craignewmark influence networking recommendation reputation social trust)
  • The Fool's Gold At The End Of The iPad Rainbow | Techdirt
    Kevin: On Techdirt, some more critical comments about the iPad and the hopes and dreams of media companies. This one really struck me, and it's a question that I've had as well. "A few months back, I tried to ask a simple question that we still haven't received a good answer to: all of these media companies, thinking that iPad apps are somehow revolutionary, don't explain why they never put that same functionality online. They could. But didn't." The one issue I would say is that the iPad's gestural interface does change what's possible, both in new opportunities and new limits. I definitely agree that many in the media look at the iPad as yet another way to create artificial scarcity. I doubt that it will work, especially because the media in its apps madness seem to forget that the iPad has a web browser.
    (tags: ipad media publishing economics)