Thomas Madsen-Mygdal: Reboot

I’m here at the Moving Images conference in Malmö, Sweden, to talk about email a bit later. My talk and Thomas‘ talk are the only ones in English, so here’s notes from his very good but very brief look at the conference he runs, Reboot.

Basic facts about Reboot – festival that’s run 11 times in the last 12 years. Very young when he started it. Enquiry into what the internet is and what it means to us, and also a personal journey. Currently taking a break because involved in a lot of stuff, but also getting very tired and not sure what would be worth spending 2 days of 600 people’s time.

Something that’s a movement or an event is hard to describe, so three small stories that illustrate journey of Reboot.

2001, post dot.com bubble. In 2000, there were 2400 people during the day, and 4000 people partying at night. Was a huge thing that was out of control. So in 2001 all this social stuff was happening and was sad about how we treated the potential of the net during 1998-2000, and wanted to say that there was more than what we saw during the bubble years. 2001, had 1500 people there. Had some huge speakers, but everyone just wanted to know how to get a job, how to make a living.

Changed the perspective, not just tech as a tool, but look at what people are doing, changing things due to understanding tools, new behaviours, etc. Transformational. Someone complained that it was all ‘one way’, big name speakers, said it all sucked, and this at a time Thomas was very proud of it!

2002 he totally shifted it all around, so it was one big open space, one speaker in the morning one at 8pm, the rest self-organised. Half the people loved it, specially woman. Everyone else wondered why they paid money for it.

The importance of the invitation. Every year the challenge is “Can I write an invitation that gives meaning to myself?” And this year he couldn’t, so taking a year off. Always find it interesting to ask, when do you invite people? So much stuff gets decided before you open up and invite people in. Started looking at academic conferences who have a call to participate. Only thing that’s set is the theme, then the rest is an invitation to come on a journey and figure out what the event is. It’s not that it’s self-organised, but that the purposeful invitation is undervalued.

Why are we doing this? When do we put the invitation out?

In 2007, for some reason, Reboot became international. Website changed from Danish to English, and then a lot of international folks showed up. At one point there were only 15% Danes.

Then in 2008, a big event organiser told him that the stage wasn’t big enough, wasn’t decorated well enough, should be more separation between rooms, and saying ‘It’s not a real conference’. Thought about it, and thought that everything was designed to be on a human scale. It’s about equality: no VIPs, no speakers’ room, everyone is equal, everyone is trying to make a good experience for everyone. Facilitation is doing just little enough that it moves along, but not so much that it turns into a big circus.

Marketing. Ten years ago, had a huge marketing budget, then it became more that they were just doing their thing and the people who want to be a part of it come along. Now they do very little marketing. When you do something that gets the right people in the room with the right attitude, it just happens. Doesn’t really understand what’s happening sometimes, but it works because people know it’s their peers int here. Speakers are much more experimental.

Designing for human scale, something we’re early in trying to understand.

Overall lesson would be, How do you get yourself into it? You’re spending your time on this creation, how do you give it everything you’ve got, but at the same time, that’s what makes it scary to do. Doing something isn’t about the factual stuff you need to do. We use the same venue for the last six years. It’s not about that. It’s more about this mountain of expectations that this is going to be a life-changing two days, and you’re sitting there six months before, wondering how are we going to get the right people? Is it going to be magic or something else? When you’re doing stuff about participation it’s all about What we want to do with them, but i think participation always starts with you, your behaviour, your attitude, what you want to accomplish with it. That’s where all this participation projects go wobbly, they see participation as a small part of traditional process.

Two years ago, we were thrown out of a nightclub for various weird reasons. So outside, on the other side of the street, a street party appears. Some guy had some speakers and they just adopted that party.

So the next year, they searched for this guy with the sound system and they did the street party again. Got shut down by the police twice in a row. But what this was was looking at what the ecosystem was doing, then providing the little bit of magic that let that happen again.

Participation is magic.

links for 2010-06-07

  • Kevin: The Daily Mail 'reveals' how companies such as BT and Carphone Warehouse are 'spying' on customers by monitoring what people are saying about them on social networks. The Daily Mail quotes privacy advocates saying that this could be a breach of data protection legislation. If I publish something publicly on the internet, I have no expectation that this data is private.
    This is a great blog post looking at all of the analytics technology that The Daily Mail uses to monitor traffic and respond to comments. Much of The Daily Mail's moralistic campaigning trade on hypocrisy so this all comes pretty much in line with my expectations. The difference now is that there are a lot more people watching the watchers.

The commodification of the uncommodifiable

Earlier this year Lottie Lodge knitted a pair of socks and put them up for sale on Coriandr. As any craftsperson should, she worked out the costs of her materials and time and set that as her list price. They socks worked out to be £208.70.

The disparity between the cost of creation and the price that punters are willing to pay is a significant problem for crafters. I learnt this through my jewellery making, which I had hoped would be a self-sustaining hobby rather than a new career, although it was nigh on impossible to sell enough to even be that. I still have a stock of necklaces sitting about that I just haven’t been able to sell.

The same problem affects content creators too. I have a number of friends who are professional authors. All bar one get paid less for their books than the time it takes them to write them. Most authors I know don’t even get paid that.

I suffered the same problem when I was a music journalist. Whilst I was writing for the now defunct Melody Maker, freelancers had the first pay rise the paper had enacted for ten years. Cunningly, however, they counteracted the pay rise by reducing the word count, meaning that I went from earning just over £200 per article, on average, to around £180. The music press didn’t need to pay more. Behind every eager young journalist was a long, long queue of younger, more eager journalists willing to work for less.

Whenever you have a popular activity where the number of people who want to do it exceeds the number of professional opportunities you create this imbalance. This means that the price of the socks or books or articles gets driven down even though the cost of production is going up, at the least, in line with the cost of living.

In an industrialised environment, this is what unions are good at stopping. A good union forces those who act as intermediaries between producer and consumer to pay a fair amount to the producer, which ultimately means higher costs to the consumer. (A bad union, on the other than, just goes on strike at the first sign of change and wastes everyone’s time and money.)

The internet facilitates disintermediation but that is itself a double-edged sword. Whilst a direct relationship with your buyers can result in higher quality sales, it also removes the protection from abuse that numbers, e.g. belonging to a guild or union, can (sometimes) provide.

The combination of a disintermediation of the production cycle alongside the industrialisation and commodification of that same production cycle creates two production pipelines:

  • hand-crafted objects, often very high quality, that cost a lot to produce, but which few are willing to buy at that price
  • industrially produced objects, sometimes very low quality, that cost very little to produce but which many are happy to buy at that price

I think this is a significant cultural problem, but not because I think that industrial processes necessarily produce inferior goods. That’s clearly not true as industrial processes often allow us to create things that are impossible any other way, and that is of massive value to society. So this isn’t an anti-industrialism rant. But what we as a society risk by expecting hand-crafted objects to be sold at the same price as mass produced goods is the squeezing out of the crafter and the resultant loss of skills. Culturally, the loss of skills such as bobbin lace making or stained glass making is a cause for concern.

The same isn’t true of content. The industrialised processes of Demand Media do not achieve something that a more considered, better paid process can’t do. The Huffington Post’s model of relying on writers willing to work for free ‘for the exposure’ is more exploitative than the music press was when I was a hack, and it puts no bread on the workers’ tables.

We need to start messing with the business models of creation. The ones we have clearly aren’t working very well and the cynical exploitation of people’s passion is turning the internet into a tool of oppression instead of freedom. Publishers need to get away from this idea that the only way to be profitable is to drive down the cost of content production by driving down their wages bill by exploiting writers.

We need to examine the role of the ad sales departments and ask whether they are doing everything they really can to place appropriate ads on the appropriate pages. Twice recently I have heard of commercial departments throwing up their hands and abandoning blogs and social media content because they ‘don’t have relationships’ with the right vendors. Well, surely it’s your job to go and create those relationships?

Now, it’s a simple repost to say that there are no successful business models for online and that there’s no way to have an online content business that isn’t predicated on making the cost of that content as close to free as possible. That too easily ignores companies like Federated Media or the specialist blogs that aggregate passionate and focused readers whose clicks are worth more to advertisers than those of a generalist publication. Sure, it’s hard work, but it is possible.

But stil,l we need to start looking outside of the traditional models that are based on mass sales and mass audiences. Good content takes time to create – and I’m not just talking about investigative journalism either! Whether it’s a well considered blog post, a feature article or a novel, the key cost to writing is time, and if we don’t start to understand and value that, we risk turning our written culture into mass-produced schlock.

links for 2010-06-05

links for 2010-06-04

  • Kevin: Mark Davis has a brilliantly brief but insightful post. As he points out, survival of newspapers still will depend on what it always has "connecting businesses to consumers". I tend to think more of this will be transactional rather than simple branding, but I agree with him.
  • Kevin: Another insightful and critical article looking at iPad 'app' design. I'd have to agree that the first generation of magazine apps is little more than multimedia brochure-ware. It really is as many predicted a throw-back to the CD-ROM era of the early 1990s. I still am completely amazed that Wired charges you $5 for a deck of image files. The articles aren't text but images of pages. It's a ridiculous retrograde step, and frankly, I think the market will punish them, as well it should. The print fundamentalists are hijacking digital. They might make some money in the short term, but it will be a brief victory.
  • Kevin: A good overview of how to geotag your photos. The author uses a Eye-Fi Explorer SD card tethered to his Android phone to automatically tag photos. I have a geotagger from GiSTeq, and frankly, I think that solution is a bit easier and overall less expensive than a special purpose SD card and an Android phone. It also isn't reliant on a data connection, just GPS. However, this article is chock full of good details on how to geo-tag photos.
  • Kevin: My former colleague Charles Arthur has an interesting post looking at how Digg just lost a third of its visitors in a month. A blip or a sign of decline? Charles' quote form webmagazine provides a bit more critical detail. They imply that it was a bit of a traffic ponzi scheme with Diggers sending traffic to each others' sites. I guess we'll have to wait for next months's figures to see if we have the two data points that make up a trend in the minds of most journalists.
  • Kevin: The Austin-American Statesman in Texas is working with location based network Gowalla (also based in Austin). The project aims to help locals "explore the city and discover new spots of interest". Users collect pins to show where they have been, and if they complete a 'trip', they earn a special badge. The paper has created a set of eight trips that will highlight local attractions based on content from the newspaper

links for 2010-06-03

  • Kevin: Mathew Ingram takes issue with Steve Jobs of Apple who has said that he believes that creating an iTunes marketplace for news is possible. This might work in terms of selling news applications, but it's not going to work for individual news stories. As Mathew points (and several others before him), news is not the same as music or movies. People don't buy a news story to read over and over again as they listen to a song over and over again. People have free options, which they have said they would choose over paid options. The market supportable price would most like be "pennies, or even fractions of pennies, instead of dollars". News orgs would also be handing over control to Apple. It is an act of delusion, desperation or probably both.

links for 2010-06-02

  • Kevin: Daniel Bennett looks at some of the problems with traditional content analysis in terms of blogs and their use of content from traditional media, and vice versa. Daniel also refers to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism suggesting that blogs did very little original reporting, but he quotes Amy Gahran in highlighting flaws with the analysis because it focused on a part of the blogosphere that discussed mainstream news organisations. Other studies have suffered from selection bias and a very narrow definition of news such that they defined news as what newspapers cover. If you looked at other blogs, especially ones focused on niche coverage areas, blogs do often carry original information and analysis. It's one of the problems in defining the blogosphere in a monolithic way. Blogs cover a range of topics, not just traditional news. Focusing on that misses a lot of the complexity in the content published on blogs.
  • Kevin: Lots of fuzzy thinking from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. To accuse web 'evangelists' of dogmatic, monolithic thinking and then lob grendades at the 'information wants to be free' brigade shows how polarised this discussion has become. The New Yorker is not a general news publication. It is a very high production value magazine. It is premium content, and I have gladly paid for it in the past. (I'm less willing to pay for its price here in the UK.) Comparing The New Yorker to almost any newspaper is like comparing a Porsche to mass produced family sedan. They are two entirely different beasts, and the economic models that sustain them will be different.
  • Kevin: Responding to an article by New York Times' journalist Nicholas Carr, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb looks at inline links. Are they a detriment, a distraction, a problem for comprehension? Marshall says: "aybe links could be added tastefully and well to the footer of posts. It might not be as good for machines, but it could be better for the human brain. Linking may be what blogging is largely about – but let's be honest: if links to read more where always found and well-placed at the end of articles, wouldn't you get used to it as a reader?"
  • Kevin: Onnik Krikorian looks at how mobile phones, especially ones with multimedia capabilities, are being used for reporting. He highlights the Nokia N82, the phone I have, and the work of Guy Degen in Africa and the Caucasus with such a phone.
  • Kevin: An article looking at the global trends in mobile TV. "Free, on-the-go viewing is common just about everywhere except the United States and Europe, where operator resistance and a maze of conflicting technical standards and program licensing hurdles have kept the technology out of the global mainstream." It looks like it is gaining some critical mass in terms of key players in the US market to begin a roll out with major operators in that space coming together to pool spectrum (a major issue in developed markets) to provide mobile TV.
  • Kevin: Andy Carvin talks about an app for the iPhone and Android phones that allows people to upload reports about the oil washing ashore from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. The app was developed by the CrisisCommons coalition of volunteer software developers. "Oil Reporter lets you to snap a picture of the oil or tar ball, describe the context and offer additional details regarding wildlife and wetlands impact. When you submit your report, the app detects your location using your phone’s GPS, so your report can be pinpointed on a map."
  • Kevin: I don't want to focus on the politics of this piece but rather a good overview of the use of free media tools by activists trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. There are a lot of low-cost and no-cost tools here that could easily be used by media organisations. It is really surprising to me that media organisations, especially ones struggling with their finances, continue to favour high-cost, proprietary solutions. Five years ago I might have understood because low-cost tools lacked the ease of use of some proprietary solutions. Now, the competitive advantage of proprietary solutions is much less compelling, especially on cost.
  • Kevin: Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, pulls out another slide from Google Chief Economist Hal Varian's recent presentation about media economics. This one looks at the US advertising market and compares the share of total spend of US advertising. Fred says that the slide showing the internet growing from zero to 5% of US advertising spend in a decade is bullish.
    I see other interesting elements of this graph. Look at how the growth in TV and cable ad share almost mirrors the steady decline of newspaper advertising since 1949. What is really interesting is how the decline in newspaper advertising plateaus in the first part of the 1970s only to accelerate in the latter 70s and early 80s, which was the arrival of cable TV in the US. Again, it's another sign that the internet isn't solely responsible for papers' woes.

Participatory media: Encouraging people to ‘level up’

Derek Powazek has an interesting analysis of the quirky quiz show on US public radio (NPR) called Wait, Wait Don’t Tell me and looks at the lessons the show provides in developing participatory media projects. What I like about this post is that he’s looking at a relatively traditional media format, the radio quiz show, through a different lens, from the point of view not of radio but of social media and gaming. I like from the start how he re-defines the term “crowdsourcing”.

For my purposes, it means collaborating with the people who used to be the silent audience to make something better than you could make alone.

I’m going to focus on two of his points and let you read the rest of the post to get the full monty. I couldn’t agree more with his second point about structuring input. You have to give crowds a goal, something to aim for.

Too many crowdsourced projects create a blank canvas and have a rather utopian view that the crowd will create a masterpiece. It just doesn’t work like that. You’ll most likely get obscene graffiti rather than a Van Gogh because not a lot of people engage with something when it isn’t clear what they are engaging with. A vacuum encourages vandals. They assume that no one is looking after your particular corner of the internet and will usually start trying to sell Viagra if you’re lucky. I still hear Field of Dreams strategies at conferences, a “build it and they will come” ethos that was discredited by anyone with credibility a decade ago. (If someone espouses such a strategy and dresses up with a lot of buzzwords stressed to impress, run away. They really are just snake oil salesman.)

I think Derek makes another good point when he says “Encourage the audience to level up”. Again, this is taking a concept from gaming and applying it to participatory media. Most people still passively consume media (although many more people are sharing and recommending media). It’s often referred to as the user-generated content pyramid or the 1-9-90 rule (although this might be changing). A participatory media project or service should give “new users a clear path, limited tools, and an awareness of that those on the next level can do”, Derek says.

Too often, media create crowdsourced projects that are akin to bad dates, they are all about us. It’s focused on what we, the media, not what we, the people, get out of it. As I’ve been saying for several years now, if user-generated content plays actually provide value to users, not just media outlets, then more people will participate. Creating levels for users and clear benefits for them as they contribute more is one solid strategy for achieving greater participation and better results.

Saying goodbye to Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise blog

Last week, my discussions with Computer Weekly’s new editor ground to a halt and the decision was made to close the blog. This was my last blog post there.

I’m sad to say that this will be my last post here on Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise. The sums, apparently, no longer add up, so I’m afraid I must bid you farewell. I don’t know what’s going to happen here, whether someone else will take over or whether the archives will be preserved in aspic. But I do know that I’m sad to see the blog go and will miss it.

It’s been a really great time writing here. I’ve read a lot, learnt a lot, written a lot, and met some lovely people. So thank you for reading, for being a part of this experience with me. If you want to carry on reading my stuff, I’ll now go back to writing regularly on my own blog, Strange Attractor so please do feel free to join myself and co-author Kevin Anderson over there. And if any of you fancy hiring me, feel free to get in touch.

There’s more to say about all this, particularly as it pertains to wider industry trends, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

Luckily for you, oh Strange Attractor reader, this does now mean that I’ll be back blogging here much more often. Kev will be pleased! (I think he’s been feeling a little lonely here the last few months…!)

links for 2010-05-27