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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
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Kevin: A good roundup of basic internet technology. Lisa Williams, the founder of Placeblogger, says that news entrepreneurs must understand the technology in order to make necessary business decisions.
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Kevin: A great roundup of apps that you can load onto a flash drive and carry with you if you need web tools including GIMP, a powerful image editor (that suffers from a confusing interface), XAMPP and Inkscape, a powerful vector graphics tool
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Kevin: UK advertising is predicted to rise sharply for TV, according to Group M, and the decline in 2010 for national newspapers has been cut from 6.6% to only a 2% drop. However, regional newspapers (which includes small local papers here) has been revised downward from a drop of 3.8% to a decline of almost double that, 7% in 2010. This is horrible news for a market that has already seen preciptious falls in 2009.
links for 2010-06-04
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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
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The Sunlight Foundation in the US announces winners of its digital design competition. "Submissions ranged from an impressive redesign of the IRS to a brilliant infographic showing how a bill becomes a law, to scrollable guide to the Senate, to an inspired UI redesign of the Social Security Administration."
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Kevin: Mark Sweeney of The Guardian writes: "The tie-up with Facebook and Twitter, which will allow iPlayer users to recommend programming to their friends as long as they log into the BBC website first, forms part of a strategy to make the service more social.
However, users will have to sign up to the BBC's own website ID service, already used for posting comments on the site, so that the corporation can maintain a "complete social eco-system" with iPlayer users. The corporation has more than one million users already signed up to BBC ID." -
Kevin: A Dubai-based public relations agency, Spot On PR, says that there are more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers. There are 15m Facebook users and newspapers have a circulation of 14m.
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Kevin: The amazing data viz people at Gapminder release an Adobe Air app to explore the data and visualisations at Gapminder.
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Kevin: A good overview of a report by business and technology analysts Ovum by Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk. "News and magazine publishers should instead be developing products and a workflow that caters for the iPad as just one of a range of digital and non-digital readers, says the Reformatting News & Magazine Media report." The iPad is part of a multi-platform strategy, not a single solution for all that ails traditional publishers.
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Kevin: A very clear post on how to use Processing both to gather data and to create simple visualisations. This is an excellent tutorial walking you through the data collection and also the visualisation of the data. Highly recommended. I've tried Processing before, but this will help me understand it much more.
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Kevin: Mark Potts writes about the porous paywall at the Wall Street Journal. He also wonders why it would have been cheaper for him to subscribe both to the website and to the print edition. (My guess is that print ads are still far more lucrative to the Journal than online advertising.) This is an interesting post that covers a lot of issues about paywalls, pricing and also the relaxed attitude that newspaper sales teams have towards subscribers. Well worth a read.
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Kevin: Excellent piece from Patrick Smith comparing the nascent market for media apps with RSS feeds and either online or application-based readers. He doesn't have a lot to say positively about smartphone and iPad apps. RSS is an invisible technology for mot news consumers. They aren't even aware of it but use it in a number of applications. I think Patrick's point at the end is intelligent and nuanced: "Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match."
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Kevin: What I call the 'war for the living room' is definitely getting more interesting. With so much video shifting to IP-based delivery, it's suddenly addressable, findable and sharable in a way that TV hasn't been before. Definitely worth watching these videos to see what kind of features these startups are pursuing. They are definitely the 'Davids' in this battle with the likes of Sony, Intel, Logitech and Google teaming up for GoogleTV and Yahoo already having a presence on other connected sets, but features tend to be poached from these startups. Look to the edges for the innovation.
Life is not a marathon, it’s a series of sprints
If you can get past the slightly rambling intro, this conversation between Jonathan Fields and Tony Schwartz is a fascinating look at what’s wrong with the way we currently tend to work. It really starts to get interesting about 8 minutes in.
Although very focused on American business and culture, pretty much everything they say relates to British and European work culture.
One important idea they discuss, and something I’ve found essential myself, is the idea of pulsing or sprinting when working: to focus for a while and then relax for a bit. This idea is common in athletics, where it’s called the work-rest ratio: “It’s as important to renew energy as it is to spend energy if [you] want to be a consistently great [athletics] performer.”
We forget too easily that the brain is an organ that requires periods of replenishment as much as muscles do. If you work your muscles too hard, they ache, so we learn very early on not to overdo it. Yet we expect our brain to perform at maximum capacity, consistently, throughout our workday. It’s just not possible, yet we don’t allow for this fact in the way that we work.
Schwartz also says, “It’s not the number of hours people work that matters, it’s the value they produce during the hours they work, so stop worrying about how many hours that person spends at their desk, and start figuring out, What can I do to help this person design his life so that when he’s working or she’s working, she’s really working?”
To me this is the essence of what social media is in business is all about. We, as humans, work better when we are socially connected. It fulfils a fundamental human need to be part of a group whose whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. Social media also provides ways to communicate and collaborate more effectively and more easily, to benefit from the wisdom in the crowd. As we become more enmeshed in our community, so our ability to solve problems by drawing upon the resources of that community increases.
Social media is, at the moment, only doing a fraction of what it could for business. It’s an area full of potential and as we start to marry technology, psychology, business and human nature together, we are beginning to find ways to unlock our potential, not just as individuals but as members of a huge social gestalt.
Most businesses using social media at the moment are dabbling, going for the easy, obvious wins like marketing or some internal Wikipedia clone. We need more business executives to be brave, to think about their business as a multi-human organism that has its own needs and that isn’t being properly fed by current business practices and cultures.
When I look at what could be done, how we could use social media to really change our work environments in to something more effective, more enjoyable, I really do think we have a long, long road ahead of us. Change is often slow and incremental. We need some businesses to take a deep breath and leap, to remake their internal culture, to be more human, using social media as the agent of change.
But ultimately, I think what we’ll see is the old cultures dying off as new, nimble, socially aware businesses rise up in their stead. This new era of socially capable business is only just now dawning.