Category Archives: Community

07.06.07
by

Is participation inequality actually a problem?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post over on Conversation Hub about participation inequality and the “1% Rule”, which states that for any community, one per cent of your users will participate fully, nine per cent will participate infrequently, and 90 per cent will lurk. My suspicion is that the numbers are variable, and that you would end up with a higher percentage of people participating within a private or semi-private group, particularly those within business. I currently have no numbers to back that up, but I’m going to look for some.

But despite the actual figures, I think participation inequality is not just inevitable, in some cases it’s actually desirable.

First, the inevitability. Communities have always suffered from participation inequality. Long before the internet came along, we saw participation inequality all over the place. Not everyone in a geographical community, or community of interest, could or would take part in the running of that community – people have been disenfranchised for reasons of gender, class, education, religion, affiliation (or lack of), and pretty much any other reason you can think of. Whether it’s the aristocracy, the Old Boys Network, OxBridge or any other sort of ruling elite, we’ve had inequality in offline communities since the dawn of time.

And this isn’t just about politics, but also about science, the arts, even sports. Every field of human endeavour has suffered some sort of participation inequality, and the definitions of who could take part had little to do with ability.

Online, of course, the playing field is much flatter. Most people just don’t care if you’re an Oxbridge graduate or if you left comprehensive school at 16. Some people – like Andrew Keen – get hung up on models of authority, but generally if your point is valid, it’s valid. Online participation inequality is a lot less about tertiary attributes than offline, although there are still plenty of examples where gender, skin colour and sexuality sadly still play a part in some people’s definition of who is qualified to do what. (The online environment is, after all, a reflection of offline society and we still have prejudices that we’d be better off without.)

The inequality that Jakob Nielsen writes about is, I think, a different one – it’s more about choice than exclusion. Ninety nine per cent of people choose not to participate heavily in social activities available to them and ninety per cent choose not to participate at all, and it’s a legitimate choice for them to make.

It would take some investigation to find out why people make that choice, whether it is disinterest, feelings of exclusion, lack of time, etc., but the deliberate exclusionary tactics used by people offline to bar people from a community just don’t work online. I have plenty of online friends whose skin colour, religion or sexual preferences I have no idea about, and nor should I – it’s entirely irrelevant to the conversations we have. Generally I know people’s gender, but not always.

So, if people are, on the whole, making a choice for themselves not to participate, is participation inequality actually a problem?

The idea goes, for businesses, that if people are participating in a branded website, they become more emotionally (and sometimes, intellectually) involved and therefore more likely to buy. Participation increases traffic, and provides value back to the customer. It also gives people something to talk about, which then provides you with that holy of holies, word of mouth promotion.

For many businesses, a social aspect is a good thing to have, but their businesses run fine without it. And for those who do have some way for people to participate, they don’t actually need everyone to do it for it to be helpful. Only a fraction of Amazon‘s customers write reviews, yet Amazon thrives. Indeed, Amazon thrived before it started doing reviews because it gives people something that they want.

But not all participation is created equal. The quality of participation is far more important than the quantity. Sites like YouTube attract some very poor comments which do nothing to create or cement a community, or inform or entertain the readers. Most of it is, sadly, dross and this is a common problem across high-volume, low-social cohesion participative sites. Indeed, some communities get positively poisonous. Having lots and lots of comments is not a sign of success if those comments are racist, sexist, homophobic, ad hominem, or just generally obnoxious. It doesn’t help your brand, and it doesn’t encourage the ninety percent of lurkers to either participate, or look well upon you.

Furthermore, could sites cope if participation ran at at one hundred per cent? If you are getting 100,000 unique users a month, and each person left, say, 10 comments, could your system really cope with processing a million cgi scripts? That’s 22 cgi scripts a minute. That’s a lot, especially as, for many of the blogging systems used for participative sites, the choke point is cumulative – you’d be ok for a while, then the whole thing would fall over.

(Note: Of course, visitor numbers follow a power law distribution – many sites have low figures, some sites have very high figures, so I picked 100,000 because it’s a nice round figure not because it represents anything.)

Some sites are set up to deal with volume – Flickr deals with about a million photo uploads a day, but it’s designed to. That’s what it’s there for, and they work hard to make sure that they can cope with demand. Most businesses don’t have the infrastructure to deal with all their visitors participating, whether it’s leaving a comment, or uploading photos, video or audio. The tools just aren’t designed for it.

Beyond the sheer volume of contributions causing technical strain, there’s also the issue of moderation. Libel laws in the UK are very strict, and many online community managers, particularly for commercially-run sites, choose to moderate every comment or item of content. This is expensive, even when you’re only looking at one per cent engagement. Full participation would make the moderation of content functionally impossible and economically impracticable.

And finally, the issues of the breakdown of the community. We’ve all heard of Dunbar’s number, the “theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom [a person] can maintain a social relationship”. Thought to be 150, it has profound implications in just about every walk of life, but it’s especially relevant to online communities where the social ties between participants can be very weak indeed, and prone to breakage. “Communities” of 100,000 people are just not viable – they need to be broken up into much smaller groups in order to really be communities, rather than just a big melee of random strangers.

Inevitably there will be a sweetspot, where you have enough participation to keep the site vibrant, and not so much that the whole thing degenerates into a slanging match. Where that sweetspot is will depends upon the site, the people running the community, the people in the community, the technology, and a host of other things. For some sites, one per cent might be it, for others, ten… or 0.1. I don’t know that there’s any way to predict it.

Yet, there are times when it is incredibly important to be aware of participation inequality, and to actively seek to remove it. When a business website, such as Amazon or YouTube, has only one per cent of its users participating, it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t matter that only a minority of people want to write reviews of books or leave comments on videos. But sometimes it really does matter if only a minority takes part.

The day after I posted on Conversation Hub, Steve Peterson wrote about the same problem on The Bivings Report, citing an example where participation inequality had a detrimental effect:

A recent example of participation inequality side effects is when a Utah school voucher bill was debated on the legislative wiki Politicopia. Utah State Representative Steve Urquhart — and voucher bill sponsor – launched the wiki earlier this year. With great fanfare from publications like the Wall Street Journal’s sister site Opinion Journal, many observers were excited to see how the debate unfolded around the school voucher bill; it faced an uphill battle since similar bills failed during the last several years.

In fact, activity on school vouch[er] bill page on Politicopia is what many consider the reason for its passage. Citizens upset that the school voucher bill succeeded — diverting state money from some of the lowest funded schools in the country — successfully collected enough signatures to have a referendum during a special statewide election in November to potentially overrule the legislature and reject the bill.

Although a group of Utah citizens did participate in the school voucher bill debate on Politicopia, the zeal and excitement surrounding the community was misinformed since participants were a small minority of Utahns. They simply did not accurately represent their fellow citizens.

This problem is one that cannot be ignored. When policy is being created, it is absolutely essential to make sure that it is not based on the opinions of a minority, as happened in Utah. The answer is not necessarily to ensure that every stakeholder should get a say, as this can – managed badly – result in a complete mess. Instead, policy should be based on evidence, and every stakeholder should be able to give evidence.

It’s important to note, however, that the referendum voters in Utah may not have made the best decision, even after the referendum. A process which starts off with one vocal minority and is then changed by a campaign and a popular vote is not an evidence-based process, and there’s plenty of opportunity for bad legislation to be achieved in this manner.

Simply slapping up a wiki and basing your policy on the opinions expressed there is foolhardy and irresponsible. Public debate, e-democracy and the empowerment of the electorate are essential in a modern democracy, but policy cannot be made just by those who have the loudest mouths.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden made a very good point on John Scalzi‘s blog post about his attempts to add details of author Fred Saberhagen’s death to Wikipedia:

What neither Jimmy Wales nor anyone else owns up to is the sheer exhausting corrosiveness of having to fight with obvious psychopaths like “Quatloo”. I’ve joked that Wikipedia’s tagline ought to be “The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so long as they’re willing to devote hundreds of hours of energy to fighting people with autistically long attention spans.” Until Wikipedia can figure out some way of reigning in the rule of its Red Guards, it’s going to be repellent to an enormous swathe of humanity: the people who are put off by authoritarian pricks.

If you want the genuine output of the whole world’s input, you need to stop empowering the volunteer hall monitors over every other kind of human.

Using social software to understand the needs, views and opinions of the community is a valuable tactic, but it must be a part of a wider evidence-gathering process and efforts must be made to involve those who might otherwise stay silent. The dominance of the loudest voices absolutely must not be allowed – they distort the discussion and imply that consensus is all you need. In fact, consensus is not the aim. Good policy based on evidence is the aim.

But when it comes to business, I’ve yet to see a compelling reason why it is inherently a bad thing for only a few per cent of your visitors to engage socially on your site. It is, ultimately, a balancing act between keeping things vibrant and keeping them civil and manageable, and at the moment I think we lack the data to say where the sweetspot is.

I, for one, am thankful that there’s some asymmetry. I don’t think I could cope if every reader of Strange Attractor decided suddenly to strike up a conversation! (And we’re only a little blog!)

07.06.07
by

Steve Yelvington talks about networked journalism

Steve Yelvington talks about networked journalism

Steve Yelvington, Robb Montgomery and I conducted three days of workshops with journalists from across Asia on ‘citizen journalism’ and other ways to parnter with the audience.

I first met Steve at the Web+10 conference at Poynter in January 2005. He really is a digital journalism pioneer. Over dinner, he talked about writing Usenet clients for his Atari ST in the mid-80s and taking the Minneapolis Star Tribune newsroom onto the internet in 1993, either the first or second newsroom to connect its network to the internet. He has always seen the internet as a communication and community tool and not just as an information, publishing or broadcast tool because of his early experience with online bulletin board systems and early work on the internet. And he takes that sensibility to planning projects for Morris Communications.

I asked him a few questions about why community sites are important for news organistions. The video ends abruptly. Sorry about that, but 1GB is just not enough to hold all of Steve’s great ideas.

07.03.07
by

Communities and constituencies

I’ve had cause just recently to consider in more detail the way that we think about communities, and how we misuse that term to describe groups of people who aren’t actually a community at all.

Last year at Blogtalk, I was having a chat with a friend about how she had a new client who wanted to start some blogs – so far so good – to service their community. The client was a magazine and their mistake was thinking that because they have readers, they have a community. I’m sure there are a gazillion definitions of ‘community’ out there, but it’s clear to me what a community is not: a group of people with no social relationships between each other who have just the reading of a magazine in common does not a community make. The same way that, in cities like London, it is easy to live in a place for years and never become a part of the local community.

To my mind, communities are groups of people bonded by social interactions, which will probably be initiated by and revolve around some sort of shared purpose, activity, value, interest or location. The Open Rights Group, for example, has a mailing list which forms the hub of its online community. Brought together by a shared interest in digital rights, people talk about the issues, exchange views, debate, help each other out, help ORG out, and generally interact in a positive manner. People know each other – either online, or on- and offline – and have formed social relationships, whether weak, strong, or intermediate.

There is, of course, a wider community than that formed by the discussion list. There are people who read the blog and interact via the comments, or who come to ORG events and socialise, but who aren’t on the discussion list. In some cases, their ties to ORG are stronger than their ties to each other, but small subsets of people who know each other well also exist because of some other shared context, e.g. another mailing list or working on the same issue. Others will come to know each via their comments on ORG’s blog as well as posts and comments on their own blogs. Overall, this is a loosely-joined group of people, some of whom will become more involved with ORG, some less so.

Finally, I see a third and very much bigger group, ORG’s constituency – people who may or may not be aware of ORG, are not in touch with either ORG or other ORG supporters, but who are still interested in the issues.

community

The challenge for ORG – and every other non-profit or artist or business that wants to build communities – is how you move people from sitting quietly by themselves in the outer constituency circle through to the central core community. How do you increase engagement, from the passive constituency to the active core community? Whether, like ORG, you need to find people who are going to support your non-profit with donations and voluntary action, or whether you are trying to find new fans or sell your product, moving people along that big red arrow is the hardest thing on your To Do list. Theoretically, it’s all very simple; in practice, not so much.

The first step, and the one I see people stumbling over most often, is to understand who is in your core community, who’s in your loosely-joined community, and who’s in your constituency. If you don’t get this clear, confusing your constituency with your community, then everything that comes after will be built on quicksand. This is a mistake I’ve made in the past, and it’s one I see other people making too. If you don’t understand who your constituency are, and where they are, then you can’t put together effective strategies to communicate with them.

One starting point is to look firstly at the community you do have. What type of people are they? What do they do for a living? For fun? Where do they live? Where do they hang out online?

Then look for communities that overlap yours. What communities do you have something in common with? Something ideological? Practical? Financial? Commercial? Who else is doing something similar to what you do?

Finally, look for communities that don’t overlap yours, but which could if only the people there knew about you.

community2

When you’ve identified these different groups of people, you can start to then think about how you communicate with them. And that’s a whole nother blog post.

06.24.07
by

Newsvine and news as a social object

Thinking back to NMK, Dan Gillmor showed off Newsvine as an example of the transition from the Daily We to the Daily Me. Newsvine user Aine asked me what I thought about the site.

I’ve had an account on Newsvine for more than a year now and visit the site from time to time. I can’t say that I’m a frequent or heavy user. When I first opened the account last year, I found it difficult to understand its purpose. It didn’t have the clarity of sites such as Techmeme, Tailrank, Digg or Reddit, but I’ll be the first to cede that Newsvine was trying to do a lot more than simply recommend and vote on stories.

Thinking back to Jyri of Jaiku’s presentation at NMK, initially I thought the site wasn’t clear enough in giving users visual cues as to what to do. As Jyri said:

Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects.

However, the site has come a long way in the last year. The visual cues are stronger. The navigation and purpose seem clearer, and I’ve been impressed with the community building that the Newsvine team has done. There are few news organisations who really demonstrate the understanding of the outreach necessary to boot-strap a community site. News organisations usually focus on the content and not the community. Community doesn’t come free.

Newsvine isn’t like most news community sites, but it has features that more news sites should adopt. To encourage participation and community, news sites need to highlight the participation to encourage participation.

Another thing that has impressed me about Newsvine is how quickly the site iterates. They are constantly pushing forward new features, and for the most part, the features they have launched are focused on driving participation: The groups, the use of attention data showing what topics are hot and the live updates that make the site seem alive.

I still think that the site might be trying to do too much. I think they could do more with less. I still think that the visual cues might be stronger to guide users through the site. Maybe the site itself needs to clarify its focus a little more, but the site is a unique experiment in news as a social object.

As I said, I’m not a heavy Newsvine user. These are observations more as an observer of the Newsvine community than a member of it. I’d be interested in hearing the experience of others have had with the site.

Technorati Tags: , ,

06.13.07
by

NMKForum07: Future Gazing Panel

Matt Locke of Channel 4, recently left the BBC. He suggested reading an essay saying that Content is not King. People are happy to spend money chatting to their friends, more so than on content. How do you take a content object and then let people talk about it, build social interactions about it?

Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. Facebook and their API to make a platform are the next step. Build a social network around a social object. Second Life is like that. You can build social objects. You can build content that can then become the basis of a conversation. A good example is the space flight museum in Second Life where people can go see and talk about space flight.

Jason Calacanis, praised both Jaiku and Twitter. Jaiku has some better features and greater stability. He called Twitter an indispensable business tool. It’s now the number second referral to his blog, after Google. StumbledUpon is now the fourth most common referral to his blog. He mentioned a blog post about how someone mentioned that they heard about Mahalo’s Greenhouse launch on Twitter. (That post might have been Rachel’s There’s no local post.)

Matt Locke: Responded to a question about whether this was about ego. We’re all basically practicing our identity. I’m interested in these technologies because people are practicing their identities.

Jyri of Jaiku: Anyone who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto will know that these services answer our need for attention from other people. These services enable a conversation around your own everyday life.

Umair Haque bubblgeneration.com: Why do so many firms suck so much? Why are so few revolutionary? We have discussed pollution, spam, micro-blogging. We discussed trust and newspapers coming apart. The economic shift is that the cost of information has dropped off the cliff. We’re dealing with an attention scarcity.

One or two principles, we talk about content and context. The next revolution is not content is king but context is king. From an economic point of view, the share of traffic to context providers is exploding.

The cost of context was very high four or five years. Now, we are drowning in context. Context is the stuff that gives economic value to objects. Context is price. Context is the conversations that go on at MySpace.

What is interesting to me is what Jason said about Google being the greatest referral to his blog with Twitter being second.

Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian asks what comes after content? Whether create content professionally at the Guardian or as a labour of love like all the other places I fart around is to create some social value.

For existing or older media business, are we just doomed to be someone else’s bitch?

Dan Gillmor: Advertising is being systematically separated from journalism because there are companies that do advertising better than journalism companies. I don’t know how to solve that problem. I do know that people need good information.

I’m paraphrasing but he said that they will need to target niches, such as information for mothers as one example, to support the information on the macro level.

Jason Calacanis: As more and more mediocre information is dumped online, then quality will become more important. A radical shift has to occur in lowering costs. More verticals and more niche content to compete.

Umair Haque: People need context, more than they need content. What kind of context maximises my content?

The quality question again.

Matt Locke: If you look at the 19th Century, people took newspaper cuttings and made scrapbooks. There has always been an impulse to curate. What interests me is not a new crisis of information, but what are new ways people are curating information. What is the new scrapbook?

Q: Isn’t Twitter just a flash in the plan? Glorified text messaging.

Jason Calacanis: Quite incorrect about Twitter. Simplicity is needed in this space. I can pick as a user. The statistics prove that you’re wrong.

Meg Pickard: The power comes out of the patterns that come out of these actions and interactions. (I’m paraphrasing.) Attention data. Meg has been following the cicadas coming out in the US by the pictures uploaded on Flickr.

Nic Brisbourne (theequitykicker.com): You can use those patterns to find out what people are interested in.

Q: How do you create value and a proposition with user generated content?

Jason Calacanis: Fire middle management and fire editors. If you had the top New York Times write whatever they wanted everyday, you’d have a better product.

Dan Gillmor: I couldn’t disagree more. I loathe the term user generated content. Editors have saved my butt more often than I count. Some think UGC will save us. You do the work, and we’ll take your stuff.

One of the reason that I like what Jason is doing is because he is paying people to do stuff.

Jason: You have to cut the costs. Big media companies have to cut the fat.

Jim Purbrick: People now can read all of the information and decide for themselves. (Paraphrasing badly.)

Dan Gillmor: You’re talking about an or not an and. We loathe community input, and I make my work trying to get community input. The idea that the world can be one’s editor is simply unworkable.

The discussion now goes into the role and utility of editors.

Dan Gillmor makes a call for media literacy.

What does it mean to be media literate in a media saturated world? I’m begging for traditional media to take on the role.

I’m going to close this days blogging with a little or my thoughts. Jason Calacanis said that the fat is in the middle management of media companies. I guess I might be called middle management at this point although I tend to do operational work as well. But I think as margins in media firms are squeezed, I think that media companies will have to be a lot more ruthless in defining what it is that they do that is unique and exclusive. They will not be able to scramble for major events that are tangentially relevant to their core audiences. Will they need to go to party conferences? Will they need to send their own reporter to the next major shooting or disaster just to have their own reporter write or ‘face’ it?

I would suggest that they should throw their declining resources into content most relevant to their audience. Relevance and exclusive information will be more important than quibbles over quality. Media companies can’t afford to be all things to all people. Major, generalist metro papers in the US are suffering the most. What can you do, what should you do that no one else can provide?

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

06.13.07
by

NMKForum07: Jyri of Jaiku

I’m going to blog a bit about this talk because he’s going to give a talk about the design of social objects and five guiding principles. Social sites have been around for a while. Firefly. Bought by Microsoft and quickly killed. SixDegrees rises and then fails to gain additional funding after dot.com collapse. Next is Friendster, which is still in the top 100 English-language websites. Is MySpace another butterfly? Will it flutter in and then fizzle out?

Something about sites like Flickr that you will be using these sites for years to come.

The sites that work are built around social objects.

It is a criticism of the idea about social networks. It’s not just about collecting contacts or people connecting to people but connecting around an object. When we’re building services, it’s helpful to think about it from this angle rather than simply social networks. You think about Flickr. What they managed to do was to turn photos into social objects. Flickr with photos. Del.cio.us with bookmarks.

MySpace. What is the real focal object? Music. Once they lose that focus, it is in trouble.

How does one build a useful service around social objects? Five key principles.

  1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around
  2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
  3. How can people share the objects?
  4. Turn invitations into gifts
  5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don’t pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.

What’s next? What’s the future? Principals of disruptive innovation:

  1. Simpler
  2. Cheaper
  3. Frees people from the need to go to an inconvenient place

Here’s the full presentation. More people need to use SlideShare. It makes live blogging so much easier.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

06.13.07
by

NMKForum07: Citizen media innovation Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor: The disruption has never been higher than Web 2.0, but the cost of experimentation has never been lower. The R&D of media will happen everywhere, not just media companies. They will do the bulk of tomorrow’s R&D.

A lot of us have been talking about disruption and the democratistion of media not in the sense of voting but in terms of participation, production and access. The media used to think that we make stuff and distribution. We have a read-write web. People are not just consumers but collaborators.

There is also competition in the business model. eBay and Craigslist compete with classifies. Advertising revenues for Google will soon top television. What is the creative part of this? Data. Podcasts. Pictures. Blog posts. World of Warcraft. Halu hotel. Videos from the tsunami.

Also, data is places, and he showed Placeblogger, a site that aggregates blog posts based on places.

The question is not who is a journalist but what is journalism, and he showed off a professor’s economics blog. He mentioned the mobile phone pictures of the 7 July 2005 bombing in London. NGO’s can do advocacy journalism on their own and amplify their own messages. NGO’s can build trust. Corporations can do newsmaking, not press releases.

Press releases typically sound like a Turing Machine mated with a lawyer, but blogs can sound like human beings and provide useful information for people who care.

Journalism itself is moving from lecture to conversation and that is a great thing. It’s crucial to include the people who before were the audience. The first rule of conversation is to listen, and it’s not something that we do apart from listening to our sources. We listen to our sources.

We love readers, plural, but we’re kind of freaked out about reader, singular, who may call us out.

They are building converged newsrooms and adding staff blogs. But it still is freaking out journalists because people are saying things that they can’t control.

Adrian Holovaty who recently left the Washington Post to create EveryBlock.com. He pioneered using databases for journalism. It’s helping to record history, something that journalists should do but many don’t do. Los Angeles Times got a hold of a property database with foreclosures or possible foreclosures in California. People can simply add their zip code and find out foreclosures in their area.

Dan also showed a mashup of homes sold, plotted on a map, showing homes that sold for less than local governments thought they were worth. It was posted not by a journalist but created by a real estate agent who thought it was important. Why don’t media people do this?

I call this journalism just not done by someone who calls themselves a journalist. He showed a map of bombings in Iraq using a site called Platial. His students at Berkeley created this. No newspaper that Dan knows of has done this.

In Bakersfield, they created a pothole map. People could put a pin on the map showing potholes. They could add pictures. They could list potholes that have been fixed.

He also showed video mashups, an important new form of video commentary. Young people know to mix-up culture, but not journalists.

Journalists have changed from oracles to guides. No news organisations can cover everything. They should point to other stuff that they don’t do. AftenBlat in Sweden has a blog portal. If you send people away for good stuff, they will come back for more.

It’s a good start, but the next level is to get people deeper into the process beyond comments. That includes something like a Fort Meyers Florida newspaper did. They saw a rise in water utility rates. The readers responded to a terrific amount of information. The readers helped them investigate the story.

The BBC was early in asking for pictures from the audience. It is now routine. We should be careful about asking people to take risks.

He gives a few examples iconic photos from stories including the London bombings, the Thai coup and bombings in Jakarta. He said that authenticity is important, possibly more than traditional measures of quality.

He also points to SourceForge, a place for Open Source projects. The top projects get thousands of downloads. He takes a look at the long tail of downloads on the site. Most of the downloads are so low that they are approaching zero.

Clay Shirky says the cost of trying things is approaching zero. “There are few institutional barriers between thought and action.” That most of the projects fail is not a bug. It’s so cheap to fail, but the important thing is to learn. That is one of the hidden strengths of Silicon Valley.

He highlighted Dopplr, a project that he is involved in. It allows you to know about

People can focus on niche subjects or go hyperlocal. Newspaper project can lead to software development – see the Bakotopia project. This wasn’t done by a big media company but by a small, family-owned newspaper.

Trust and reliability need a lot of work. Too much data. We can move from the Daily me to the Daily Us, and he showed off Newsvine.

To approach distributed R&D, be open, don’t reinvent wheels, collaborate and take risks. Companies must give their employees the ability to fail creatively. That is why a lot of people strike out on their own to do it.

Martin Stabe of the Press Gazette’s Fleet Street 2.0 has uploaded the audio of the full talk (with a little help from his friends ; )

Technorati Tags: , , ,

06.13.07
by

NMKForum07: Old Guard, New Tricks

  • Jem Stone, BBC New Media
  • Tom Bureau, Managing Director, CNET Networks
  • Meg Pickard, Head of Communities and User Experience, Guardian Unlimited
  • Adam Gee, New Media Commissioner, Channel 4
  • Paul Pod, TIOTI
  • Ashley Norris, Shiny Media
  • Nico Macdonlad, Spy.co.uk
  • Jeff Revoy, VP of Search and Social Media, Yahoo! Europe
  • Mike Butcher, moderator

I think I agree with Euan Semple sitting next to me. This isn’t a panel, it’s the Last Summer.

Nico: (In response to question about his criticism about the Guardian’s Comment is Free) I met Georgina Henry recently on a panel about social media, and I’m going to start writing for Comment is Free because it’s a great platform.

He says he has seen fads come and go. Media need to understand the trends. Disaggregation is going on. Many social institutions are losing their credibility. These trends are real. It needs to take an objective and rational view about them.

Mike: Can media win back trust?

Meg: Big media need to know that they have something to learn from our audiences. Gaining trust is not end. It’s a means. We need to learn from these social environments. Big media organisations don’t need to be all things to all people. We shouldn’t be trying to replace but embrace social media. Is creating a Twitter or Blogspot clone the business that we are in?

Adam: I think that traditional media are in a good place to achieve public tasks by putting participation in place. The project that I just launched is going to create the first map of public art in the UK in partnership with Moblog.co.uk. There is an underlying public task.

Jem: Lee Bryant talked about Comment is Free and the BBC and problem of social sites and news. He talked about ‘drive-by commenting’. I think that’s a fair criticism of what the BBC has done over the last 10 years. We haven’t been focused enough of why we are getting in touch with you. He quoted Maplin & Webb making fun of the BBC. “Do you reckon? What do you reckon? Get in touch with the BBC?”

He talked about sites like Flickr and YouTube. Should we get in there and moderate that? What are the rules? If we get involved, what are the risks? What are the risks to our brand?

Paul: One of the things with the BBC putting stuff out on the internet, out on YouTube, you have another layer of community. It’s getting quite complicated. Where does this stuff sit? We’re quite open to cooperation.

Jem: It’s a platform for discussion about content we produce. We’re comfortable with that. Is CBS, ITV or Channel 4 comfortable with that? I don’t know.

Tom CNET: Obviously, trusted content is our main business. A small group of users want to discuss the content. We call it an architecture of participation. We invite them to contribute the best quality content. We raise the bar quite high.

Jeff Yahoo: Two trends driving this. Broadband and technology. Anyone with iPod can be a DJ. Anyone with a computer and the internet can become a blogger.

It could centre around areas of passion like photos with Flickr. It could be about socialising with MySpace. It could be about information like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers. It’s about providing the user the best experience.

Mike: Is Comment is Free it? Is Have Your Say it?

Meg: We’re looking to a more granular approach. People consume things. Casual users might rate or recommend. Interaction adding their comments, and then curation being the heaviest level of activity. Right now, we’re seeing one level of that. How do people move from consumers to creators on our site? How do fund that proposition? How do we encourage people to become catalysts? Certainly, this is not it.

It goes back to trust, but it’s less about being trust and more about creating relationships.

Mike: Where does the journalist sit in this?

Tom CNET: Great question. On Silicon.com, specialist site for CIOs. With a cross section of our audience, there will be members of the audience who know more. They might not have presentation skills like journalist, but they have specialist knowledge. But maybe they don’t have the story telling skills.

Users as a broad-based community are setting the agenda.

Mike: XFM has switched to user-generated programming. Does anyone want to talk to that.

Ashley: I think we’re a long way from that. I think a lot of journalists despise new media. They still believe that they are delivering the truth. New media are bolting it on. They are asking people for user-generated content.

From Shiny Media’s point of view, from the blogosphere, big media has very little respect for bloggers. Daily Mail or Sun very rarely link out. There is a thriving British blogosphere but they very rarely get linked to by big media. There has to be training of journalists.

(Yes, I’m working on that at the day job, getting more training for our journalists at the Guardian.)

Nico: Publishing tools for print don’t support links to content outside their sites.

Let’s not over-state what we can do with social media. Government is working to get back to us. They will use these tools in a real instrumentalist way.

I’m interested in a real high-level discussion. No publication make it easy for people to post. People need to see related content. People need to see content filtered through people through a few degrees of separation from you on social networks.

There was a question from the audience about whether big media saw UGC as a cheap replacement for content.

Meg quoted me in what I often say that not all content should have comments, meaning that a blog post is different from a news article. I think it’s better to make it simple to people to blog about, recommend or share traditional content than simply throw comments on everything. Meg quotes me in that a work of journalism is meant to tie together as many threads as possible, whereas a blog post teases out a thread for discussion or debate.

I also wanted to tease out my tongue-in-cheek post from last week. I wasn’t saying that journalists can’t be trained to be good bloggers but rather that many times, in the obsession with big names and branding, news organisations rush their most prominent writers to blog instead of looking for passionate niche writers who love the interaction to blog. I give props to the NYTimes for getting their wine critic Eric Asimov to blog on The Pour. It’s a brilliant blog, a great virtual tasting room.

Technorati Tags: , ,

06.13.07
by

Mahalo Greenhouse to crowdsource search

At the NMK Forum in London, Jason Calacanis has just announced Mahalo Greenhouse, part of the recently launched Mahalo human-assisted search directory. The Greenhouse will allow the public to add search results and, if accepted by the site’s guides, get paid for them.

Mahalo launched on 30 May at the D5 conference. It’s been billed as a human-powered search engine, but it’s more of a ‘human-powered wiki’ listing search topics and links instead of encyclopedia entries like Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, Wired called it “a version of Wikipedia with advertisements“. The launch was met with much fanfare and a fair number of questions. Would it scale? Could it beat Google and its voracious algorithms? Why would it work better than Ask Jeeves or ChaCha?

A week ago, Jason asked on Facebook and LinkedIn:

What would you do next if you were CEO of Mahalo? … Wondering if you guys were me, what would you do next with Mahalo.

In response to the suggestions, they will now allow the public to submit search results on the Mahalo Greenhouse site to be evaluated by the full-time guides that site employs. Right now, they’ve got 40 full-time guides, but they expect that to increase eventually to 100.

Jason’s thinking is that Reuters, AP and DowJones employ hundreds of people to write editorial content, why not employ 100 people to curate search.

He’s not trying to compete with Google and Yahoo on ‘long-tail search’ but rather focus on curated results for the top one-third of search. This is not about being broad and deep but about being relevant and providing results for the most lucrative search terms. Right now, they have about 5,000 search terms, but they plan to eventually reach 25,000.

To scale to that number faster, they decided to use the Greenhouse to crowdsource the best links, paying $10 to $15 per accepted submission. The more submissions a part-time guide submits, the more money they make per submission.

But what is the business model, and how will it scale to paying all of those guides? The business model is advertising. Search ads are the most desired ads for a reason, Calacanis said because people are indicating an interest at a particular point in time. They have entered something that they are looking for in a search box. It is not passive and wasteful, he said, like display advertising at a bus stop or on a billboard.

In many ways, it mirrors a commercial Wikipedia. Calacanis and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have clashed over whether to include advertising to support Wikipedia, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say that Calacanis is out to prove a point with Mahalo. In a not unsubtle rebuttal to Wales, Calacanis said that if part-time guides don’t want their payment because they believe in the concept of free culture, they can donate their payment to Wikipedia. Mahalo has already earmarked up to $250,000 this year to donate to Wikipedia in lieu of pay for guides who request it.

Mahalo may sell their own ads in one to two years’ time, Calacanis said, but right now, he believes it would be a waste of time and money trying to sell ads on the site before it reaches critical mass, a lesson he learned at AOL.

But he knows that this will take time to build out the number of search terms and also to build the traffic necessary to attract advertising. “This is a big project like building the Brooklyn Bridge or Central Park,” he said, adding that he’s committed to the long term and has enough money to fund the site for five to six years. Backers include, Sequoia Capital (where Calacanis is an entrepreneur in action), Mark Cuban, Ted Leonsis of AOL, CBS, News Corp and Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and SpaceX.

Calacanis believes that Mahalo is needed because:

the internet faces an environmental crisis of spam, (search engine optimisation), phishing, adware and spyware.

The internet is becoming polluted, he said. The amount of bad information as well as good information is exploding. The internet needs curation. If nothing is done, he worries that in a few years the internet will become too difficult to navigate.

Some have questioned the value of subjective choices made by the Mahalo guides. Calacanis responds:

I would rather have a little bit of bias and debate and refine rather than have the machine get it wrong and not to get to talk back to the machine

Also, on controversial issues such as abortion or George W Bush, the site will list general information but also provide search results showing different points of view, such as pro and con, for and against.

Will they have Digg-like voting? No. Calacanis says that voting is meaningless because people often vote before visiting a site in Digg not after they have gone to the site to evaluate it.

Calacanis also wants to build in accountability for search terms submitted. People should own their words. Part time guides will have to use their real names if they want to be paid. In general, he believes that anonymity is useful in limited cases such as whistle-blowers.

Jimmy Wales is also working on a new search project possibly with some human element. The details remain vague, although Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a good interview with Wales about the project from last December. Like Wikipedia, many expect to have some human element in the search project, but all Wales said was:

Exactly how people can be involved is not yet certain. If I had to speculate about it, I would say it’s several of those things, not just community involved with rating URLs but also community rating for whole web sites, what to include or not to include and also the whole algorithm … That’s a human type process that we can empower people to guide the spider

Calacanis doesn’t see Wales’ project as a competitor. “I know that will be a disappointment for the media. It’s not a battle royale.”

In the interest of disclosure, I conducted this interview the day before the NMK forum in my role as blogs editor at the Guardian, not simply as an independent blogger. In as much, I agreed to abide by an embargo this post until the announcement at NMK.

05.25.07
by

Ian Forrester interviews us at XTech

Ian Forrester, of BBC Backstage and cubicgarden, interviewed Suw and me at XTech last week. We talked about what we took note of at XTech including Gavin Bell’s talk about online identity and the presentation by Blaine Cook (Obvious Corp.) and Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr (Yahoo)) about Jabber: Social Software for Robots.


Click To Play

Ian did quite a bit of video blogging from the conference including some of the presentations that we discussed. The other videos are along the right hand side of this page.