Only Dead Fish

Living In Streams

 

This presentation, about information flow through networked media by Danah Boyd at the Web 2.0 Expo, is so rich with challenging thinking it's difficult to know where to start. The best place is probably to go read it yourself, but I'm writing it up here if for no other reason than to help me get my head around some of the big ideas it contains (it's difficult to do it justice so forgive me if I paraphrase or quote directly more than I usually would).

So, we all know and appreciate how ubiquitous information is whether it's professionally produced, user-generated, social content, 'unsocial' content, news, entertainment, useful information, or useless information. Content, and content streams are everywhere. What Danah talks about is the resultant restructuring of the ways in which information flows in society. She talk about the concept of being "in-flow" with streams of information - a situation that is not so much about perfect attention as it is about being aligned with information:

"The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful. Living with, in, and around information."

She goes on to identify four core issues...

1. Democratisation:

Danah argues that whilst the switch from models that were all about distribution to ones that are all about attention is disruptive, it is far from democratising (as many assume). Anyone can contribute information into the stream, but attention is not divided equally: "Opening up access to the structures of distribution is not democratizing when distribution is no longer the organizing function."

2. Stimulation:

People naturally veer towards content that triggers a reaction or an emotional response - that which stimulates, provokes, delights, entertains, excites - when this is not necessarily the 'best' or most informative content: "If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole".

3. Homophily:

People like people, but naturally connect to others like themselves. Whilst this can be extremely productive, it can also make it easy not to discover different perspectives and act to reinforce social divisions, since a relatively small proportion of people seek out opinions and ideas from outside of their own cultures: "Information can and does flow in ways that create and reinforce social divides. Democratic philosophy depends on shared informational structures, but the combination of self-segmentation and networked information flow means that we lose the common rhetorical ground through which we can converse".

4. Power:

Just as attention is not inherently democratised in a networked world, neither is power, when power is defined as being able to command attention, influence, and broker information. In the old broadcast model, it is easy to understand that power and profit resided with those who controlled the means of distribution but when that means is shared, there is an assumption that the profit goes to the creators: "This is not what's happening. Distribution today is making people aware that they can come and get something, but those who get access to people's attention are still a small, privileged few. Instead, what we're seeing a new type of information broker emerge".

By way of conclusion, Danah highlights some key transformational trends in the information ecosystem:

1. Information spaces getting more niche: "Successful businesses will not be everything to everyone...Instead, they will play a meaningful role to a cohort of committed consumers who give their attention to them because of their relevance".

2. The need to develop a greater understanding of the role of context, popularity and reputation. There are no destinations in the networked era so it will not be about creating distinct destinations around topics - in content streams we consume news alongside gossip alongside status updates - so content producers will not dictate cultural norms by simply making their content available. Instead, they are accountable to those who are trafficking content and need to 'live' in the streams, producing and consuming alongside their 'customers', to better understand, be more relevant, and find ways in which "content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides"

3. The need for further technological innovation. Tools that make it easier for people to segment, reorganise and recontextualise relevant content wherever they are and whatever they're doing. Tools that: "allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they're doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed".

4. New models. The inherent difficulty with advertising is that reaching information flow is not about being interupted, and so advertising does not work when it's part of the flow itself.

I agree with Danah on her closing point, which is to say that it's important not to get all utopian or dystopian about it, but instead to recognise what changes and what stays the same. And for me it's always important to recognise that video generally doesn't kill the radio star. But there are several things which I'd pick out as most important to me:- the significance of the changing role of contexts; the implications for participative and non-participative storytelling (which is why David and Marcus's 'streamtelling' is so interesting); and how, once objects become properly informationally connected and part of the stream, the game will change again. To re-use an apt quote from Russell Davies:

“All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in.”

Danah's full script is here. Go read it.

Remembering To Forget

 

Image courtesy

I went to a talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger at the RSA yesterday about his new book - 'Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In The Digital Age'. The talk focused on how the digital age is one of perfect remembering. A characteristic that empowers, but which can also have unforeseen consequences. Once it's on the web it can be there for good - crawled, cached, traceable, attributable. Google remembers our searches, Facebook remembers, Amazon remembers, places we interact and transact become places where our data is captured, tracked, stored.

Perfect digital remembering has profound implications not only because things which are sometimes best forgotten can be recalled, but because it challenges some very human norms: remembering has always been hard, now its easy; forgetting has always been the biological default, now remembering is the default. And if you've read Nudge, you'll appreciate how powerful defaults can be in affecting human behaviour. Remembering used to be expensive, now it's cheap. The web is undoing our capacity to forget.

Mayer-Schonberger argues that this comes with some inherent dangers. Those with control over historical data will have disporportionate power. Old information can be extracted without the benefit of its contemporary context, and recontextualised in new and inappropriate ways. Perfect remembering is a burden that humans were not made to carry - we could be tethered to a complex past, become lost in detail, unforgiving, overdependent. Human's natural ability to forget has enabled us to make decisions relatively unencumbered by the detail of the past, and to be filled with the possibility of second chances.

So the solution, argues Mayer-Schonberger, is to reintroduce forgetting. And he suggests doing this by allowing a prompted option for an expiration date on data. It may not be a perfect solution, he says, making binary decisions (you either remember it or you forget it) about data when human forgetting is a gradual process, but he hopes to at least change the default and to cause us to reflect and to make a choice. "Let's remember to forget", he says.

It was a challenging presentation, and all the better for it IMHO. I've found a version of it given by Mayer-Schonberger to Google (oh, the irony) last month which I've posted below, so I recommend you take a look. So do I think he's right? Hmmm, well. I think he touches on some issues that we haven't even begun to properly think through yet. And a lot of his concerns seem extremely valid. But I wonder about his solution. And rather than thinking about what we might gain, I found myself reflecting on what we might lose. Natural enough I suppose, but creating new combinations and contexts is one of the foundations of contemporary digital culture. This could dilute. But perhaps I'll reserve final judgement until I've read the book.

Convenience And Experience

 

There's a pretty insightful but controversial column written by David Hepworth in the latest issue of The Word suggesting that in spite of all the hype, the current crop of e-readers ain't all that. And he gives some compelling, human-centred arguments why not.

E-readers are of-course, full of promise - we love new gadgets, and these feel like the text based equivalent of the ipod, a gadget that rapidly became as indispensible as it was ubiquitous. But, says David, if e-readers like the kindle are to mirror the success of the ipod they will have to confront something all too real - the inherent irrationality of reading. Like the fact that we often buy books we don't read (or at least don't read the whole of) and "we do this because we believe even showing the inclination to read a book is a virtuous act, like cooking. It shows a willingness to become absorbed, further prized in an era when most entertainment only asks to be distracted".

Magazines and books are often read on public transport, and in doing so the cover is a form of self-advertising about who we are. A badge, if you like. A subtle, complex, but powerful form of sign language. With books, people have an emotional investment in them in that we value them as much as objects as for their contents. We even decorate our rooms with them. Magazines, he points out, are all about content and context at the same time. Content which is curated, signposted, designed to be appealing, attractive, stimulating, provocative, efficient to read. Both are their own unique and compelling form of content packaging. So, whilst ereaders in their current form may work for some forms of content, it is difficult for them to do justice to the luxuriousness of a glossy colour magazine. "It would", says David,"be like putting velvet behind glass".

Of-course, ereaders will improve, and the rumoured Apple tablet with its prospect of a large color touchscreen, high-end graphics, and a wireless connection may well provide the real leap in user experience so who knows, perhaps it will change the game in the same way that the iphone has changed our experience of the mobile web (although the point at which an iphone or a netbook stops and an ereader starts is likely to be pretty blurry). If it does, it will be an exciting prospect for publishers who are already used to provisioning content specifically for different digital devices.

In his seminal post from last year, Better Than Free, Kevin Kelly argued that the internet was the great copy machine, at its most foundational level copying every action, character and thought we make on it. And it was this ubiquity that so undermined the traditional models built on scarcity. So it was incumbent for those attempting to establish, create and draw value to focus on the intangible generatives - the list of things which can't be copied. There are things in the list which are synonymous with digital functionality - immediacy, personalisation, accessibility, findability. But there are also things which are far more intangible - like the embodiment of content (the packaging, the context of delivery), patronage, authenticity, interpretation, trust. These are the things that provide uniqueness, differentiation, distinctiveness, personality, singularity.

My point is that in the rush toward technological progress, we shouldn't forget about the value of experience. Magazines are a paid-for, self-selecting, inherently tribal medium. Reading a book, and for that matter a magazine, can be an extremely personal and intimate experience. It's one of the reasons why I believe that both mediums will around for some time to come. Don't get me wrong. The way in which people consume content is undoubtedly changing. But it is a mistake to completely dismiss or ignore the value behind some of the more subtle but powerful attributes of consuming media. Convenience doesn't always trump experience.

Farming On Facebook

 

So, gaming is huge. $50Bn huge. And it just gets bigger. This week's release of Modern Warfare 2 sold almost 5m copies (or $310m dollars worth) on it's first day. The producers are saying that it's the biggest entertainment launch of all time.

But apart from MW2, the big story this week was about EA's acquisition of the social gaming company Playfish which produces games like Pet Society and Restaurant City, that sit on social networking platforms - in a deal that could be worth a cool $400m. It's the first time that the realms of social and video gaming have truly come together - Mashable said it could be 'a watershed moment'.

Social and gaming work. Facebook has effectively become a huge gaming platform. The biggest social gaming company, Zynga, is estimated to have annual revenues around $200m. The Top 3 make an estimated $335m. Virtual goods and transactions have been around for a good while (the US market for virtual goods is believed to be worth $1Bn, the Asian market $7Bn) but Zynga claims that a third of its revenue comes from them. It's biggest social game, Farmville, allows you to manage a virtual farm on Facebook. Since being released in June, 60 million (yes, that's 60 million) people have downloaded the app. Over 21m people play it daily.

 
The secret of Farmville's success, apart from the fact that it's pretty addictive, is that it's the kind of game that you can dip into for short periods of time meaning that, as The Guardian says, "it isn't really a game at all...it's an online hobby". To progress quickly in the game and accessorise your farm, you invite other people to join the community. So whilst there's been some griping of late about some of the ways in which Farmville makes its cash, there's no doubt that it is an excellent example of spreadable media.

I can't help but think: How many content and brand owners would fall over themselves to acquire the kind of reach and engagement that a simple virtual farm game on Facebook has achieved?

The Socialisation Of TV

 

Image courtesy

Predicting the future of media is a bit like herding cats but like Faris, I believe that a key trend for communications is/will be the socialisation of 'mainstream' media. Simon wrote a rationally-minded post last week with 5 predictions about the future of TV including how the majority of viewing will remain passively consumed, linear-scheduled broadcast television and how simultaneous social media activity will remain niche.

In the comments, Graeme responded with the thought that scheduling will likely become more socially enabled and survive by being more like movie releases ("an opening weekend, a couple of weeks of cultural relevance, and a long tail"). Tess Alps followed up with some good points that in DTR homes (as a reasonable surrogate for on-demand), DTR's still only account for somewhere between 15% and 20% of viewing (in both the UK and the US), and that BARB data showed a relatively high level of time proximity for on demand to point of broadcast and that social media was enhancing the desire to watch at point of broadcast scheduling.

It was kind of ironic that on the same day as reading all this, twitter went into complete overdrive over the X-Factor with 8 out of the top 10 (and at one point 9) Twitter trending topics being X-Factor related.

 

X-Factor is a great example of socially enhanced TV - the Facebook fan page has over 850,000 fans and the wall posts generate thousands of comments each both whilst the show is on and off air (Nick has done a great run down of just how socialised the X-Factor is). Whilst people's primary social interaction around programming will likely always be with those in the room with them at the time, it'll be no surprise to anyone who's watched TV and been on twitter at the same time that social backchannels can add a lot of value in enhancing the viewing experience.

The success of the Facebook/CNN Obama inauguration coverage showed that combining compelling content with platforms that make it easy for people to comment and share with their established networks works well, particularly for event TV. The BBC are developing an iplayer app for Facebook , Hulu are streaming TV shows directly to their Facebook page using the Watch Now application, and Channel 4 are doing deals with You Tube to host full length Channel 4 content and experimenting with Test Tube TV (a service that "lets Facebook and Twitter friends watch, talk about, rate and recommend their favourite TV from 4oD and You Tube" - HT to Simon for reminding me of it).

So my question is this:- I believe it's inevitable that scheduling and viewing will increasingly be influenced by the shared interests of networks of friends - but by how much?

Post Of The Month - October '09 - The Winner

 
Well, this months vote rather turned into an AKQA / BBH face off but after a spirited race I'm delighted to announce that the winner of Post Of The Month for October '09 is Ben Malbon and Greg Anderson for their post on Adaptive Brand Marketing for BBH Labs. Well done both. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the ThinkTank Hall of Fame. Thanks again to everyone for taking part and don't forget to bookmark your good reads to nominate for next months vote.

Post Of The Month - October '09 - The Vote

Thanks everyone for some great nominations this month. Couple of notes:- thanks very much to Michael for nominating one of my posts, but I've not included it in the shortlist this month solely because we had such a long list of nominations - this is not done out of false modesty, but only because I'd like to keep some kind of cap on the number I shortlist to keep it manageable - but thanks anyway - I'm flattered. And Pratap, I (usually) don't allow people to nominate their own posts so haven't included your nomination I'm afraid. OK, so our shortlist this month is:

So What Exactly Might 'Adaptive Brand Marketing' Be? Ben Malbon and Greg Anderson for BBH Labs

Stop Buying Customers by Helge Tenno

The Myth of Social Media Monitoring from Sean Howard

Behaviour Change, Revisited from Johnnie Moore

Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job by Tim Malbon

Branding Landmarks from Mark Hadfield

Ten Signs That You're The problem by Neil Charles

AKQA internal beliefs by Nicholas Moerman

The 11 Fundamentals of Online Communities from Richard Millington

And you can vote below:

Post Of The Month - October '09 - Nominations

 

More great reading to be had in the month of October, evidenced by my starting five nominations below - please do nominate any good posts that you've read that were posted in October in the comments and I'll stick them all up for a vote in a few days. A nomination from Charles (thanks Charles) for Johnnie's excellent post has been carried over from last month so I've included it below. OK, so my starting five are:

So What Exactly Might 'Adaptive Brand Marketing' Be? Ben Malbon and Greg Anderson for BBH Labs

Stop Buying Customers by Helge Tenno

The Myth of Social Media Monitoring from Sean Howard

Behaviour Change, Revisited from Johnnie Moore

Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job by Tim Malbon

Please nominate your favourites in the comments below.

Making Content Pay

 

Image courtesy

"We're not going from a world of Business Model A to one of Business Model B, we're going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z." Clay Shirky

Every now and then you read a post that really stays with you. In early January last year, Ian Rogers (ex Head of Music at Yahoo and now CEO at Topspin media) gave an account of his talk to the CAA music industry conference in Aspen. It was one of those 'wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee' kind of presentations, but it contained loads of nuggets that I've referred to again and again ever since. 

Like Ian, my view of the future of media is an optimistic one. Like him, I think that what's happening in media (and music) is full of change but is also full of opportunity. Ian talks a lot about ubiquity and scarcity, and refers to a deck that Umair Haque put up on Bubblegeneration all the way back in 2005 in which he writes about how mass media captures value from scarcity - particularly scarcity of distribution (costs of broadcasting, transportation, inventory) and retail (limited shelf/screen space, spectrum scarcity) - and how if old media was about 'blockbusters', then new media is about 'snowballs'.

In the Blockbuster world, says Ian (and Umair), there’s a point where investing more in quality delivers diminishing returns and marketing delivers the audience:

"If you are making Pirates of the Carribean 12, do you spend $2M extra dollars on that actress or on getting Johnny Depp’s face on the cups at Burger King? Burger King, of course, you’re not trying to make the best movie in the world, you’re just trying to get people to go to theatre A instead of theatre B this week"

In the Snowball world however the opposite is the case - there's a point at which you get diminishing returns from spending more on marketing, especially when attention is the scarcity, but quality is "hyper-efficient". If something is good enough, people will see it.

The relevance of all this to making money from content is right there in that balance between ubiquity and scarcity. Quality and relevance have never been more important - as Ian says: "Our jobs are still the same...making stuff people love". Making content ubiqitous - making it easy to find, scalable, portable - enables it to be spreadable (as opposed to 'viral') and act as cultural material for people's own conversations. The sweet spot is where content meets context.

Ubiquity gives you the platform from which you can create a new kind scarcity, and creating scarcity is important because when something is scarce it has value. Ian talks about the 'digital packaging' of music. Scott Karp talks about how media owners need to be experimenting with new ways of packaging content:

"An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero - and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package."

This is not about applying print subscription models to digital content. It's likely not putting up pay-walls around existing content either (at least not without adding other value of some kind). Its a new kind of scarcity. The kind that adds value, rather than subtracting it. The kind that is more enabling than it is restricting. What I'm talking about is turning content into a service. About how you apply producer expertise in new ways. About making content useful as well as entertaining. If it is of sufficient value, people will pay for it.

As Gareth has pointed out before, culture is what we all compete with for people's time. Which is partly why, I suspect, a lot of focus is going on trying to crack THE model, or THE idea that will change the world. But to quote Clay Shirky "Culture is a huge thing to be worried about...there's only one thing that you can posit as almost universal: Start small and experiment from there...you can affect culture in a small way". What Mark calls 'lighting lots of fires'. One thing's for sure though - it ain't nothing without the platform.