connecting*the*dots

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I’ve lived in 10 different towns within 4 different states over the past 12 years and never has my interest in local politics and community piqued beyond a yawn until I moved to Greensboro, NC.

I swear there’s something in the water.

(via Ed, original video by Tom Lassiter)

originally uploaded by don pedro: course 98, velocity 40.

I Want Change, originally uploaded by davidcharding.

Back in February, NBC made a completely bonehead business move by making YouTube take down the hugely popular video short Lazy Sunday. My instant response was to fire off a salvo at NBC for being old media ogres (NBC: We Get Web 2.0… Sike!) and not working within the limitless parameters of the web to strike a business deal that suits their needs to protect their copyright, while allowing us to continue to enjoy their content when we want and how we want.

Well, today NBC announced that it’s embracing a few of the ideas I previously lobbed into play:

[…]

“Under the deal, YouTube will create a separate channel for NBC video, so that visitors can easily pull up the half-dozen or more items that NBC plans to offer at any given time. It will be similar to channels that other companies, filmmakers and everyday users create.

[…]

NBC and YouTube officials acknowledged the possibility that fans will reject the clips if they appear simply as promotions, but YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said fans would likely embrace the video if it is compelling and not available anywhere else.”

[…]

Promotional video is somewhat of a start — I suppose you can’t expect major change from a major television network without them testing the water first. Give the experiment a few months; if uptake begins across numerous types of unbundled content, I’m sure they’ll be banging on YouTube’s door, attempting more creative ways to “let” people upload their content.

Affecting The Interface

In terms of the user experience, I only ask one thing of YouTube: please refrain from creating a pulldown of “channels” on your interface.

Asking people to assign ripped video to a “media channel” in the upload process makes sense:

• It alerts you (YouTube) to content that needs to be assigned a “shared monetization flag” and
• It automatically assigns network metadata to the video object to help people finding content they desire

Balancing the two-way participation of a user base with the business opportunities of old media is a difficult conversation to manage and execute, for if you transform your main interface too far towards the navigation of paid-for, primary channels, the entire participatory, community vibe will begin to deteriorate.

Remember, your brand is YouTube.

Red state / blue state political maps now have a behavioral map to further support the simplistic notions of a two-party system!

Don’t get me wrong, I find the visceral imprint of this study from the school of information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor fascinating, but I’m hoping that as we further our attempts to understand one another through similar human behavior studies using our interactions on the web, we’ll look to use less obvious attributes than political party affiliations as a control.

(photo by Lasagna Boy)

(click for entire .pdf)

Current independent broadcasting channels, production houses, distribution centers, etc. all sweat to compete with the Big 6 for advertising dollars and market reach. If they are struggling, imagine what would happen to the still-developing ecosystem of independent bloggers if net neutrality isn’t supported in the next phase of legislation on the senate floor.

Dave Winer has expanded on his “It’s the users, dummy!” statement and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s actually a neater solution, especially if you’ve put a piece of software on the user’s desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data — keep a copy of all the data on the user’s desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user’s data (with the user’s permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they’re protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn’t hold water).

Following the Beyond Broadcast conference in May, Nate Aune and I began jamming on a similar concept; something we loosely called myTag.

(click for entire .pdf)

The major difference in our approach is that we’re trying to create a “piece of software” (actually, an online service) that can work across all online services, serving as a meta-data hub for all personally tagged information objects — blog posts, photography, video, audio, social bookmarking and possibly service metadata, such as Amazon tagging.

Unlike Dave’s example, we would scrape external services for newly updated, tagged objects. The goal is to centralize people’s meta-data and provide ownership of said meta-data, not to interfere with people interacting with these decentralized services. The scraping would only occur when a person accesses myTag to review their current tag universe, so the impact on external server CPU cycles would be innocuous at best.

Dave’s idea focuses specifically on the data editing and management issues that exist when users attempt to move their data across existing services:

With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor’s app would run on the user’s desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor’s server (in this case Flickr) wouldn’t even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it’s the user’s data, that’s exactly as it should be.

Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It’s just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user’s machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.

I completely agree with his ownership point regarding meta-data, and his perspective of safeguarding information objects from system or company failure is extremely valid as well.

So how could we extend his concept of locally managing data (both the information object itself and its meta-data) across same-type services (flickr, zooomr, riya, etc.) to include culling meta-data across different-type services that leverage tagging (del.icio.us, YouTube, flickr, WordPress, etc.)?

See, the reason we’re sketching a thin client is because our primary goal is to enable individuals to be able to review and curate various slices of their own concept terminology — meta-data or tags — as they’ve been applied to information objects over various services and periods of time.

The way I look at it, an aggregate of tags can serve as a looking glass into the personal linguistic structure of each of us, as we make explicit choices when applying specific concept terms to our objects. As competition to flickr and YouTube enters the market, our POV’s will undoubtedly become further dispersed across the web, increasing the findability of our objects, yet conversely affecting our own understanding of our perceived output.

If we’re going to arm citizens with media tools, then we need to provide intuitive, smart representational interfaces for accessing and modeling our own strategic output. Why? Well, we need to be on-point, constantly iterating our understanding of our own perspectives and biases as we venture further into producing our own media.

Otherwise we fall into the same trappings of the mainstream media.

An example… take the limited nature of my tag cloud on this blog as an example. Click on a term, such as Greensboro, and a narrative will unfold over the period of time that you choose to explore and read. While it’s useful to understand more about my relationship with and perspective on Greensboro, the cloud doesn’t include my photos tagged with Greensboro, nor my video clips tagged with Greensboro.

Citizen media operatives need an centralized interface to access decentralized information objects. From my perspective, the value of these interfaces is huge — both to the content creators and potentially to the content consumers.

The first two scenarios I mapped out in the above sketch were for searching and browsing ones existing tag library. Any other primary scenarios jump out at you?

The day that AOL/Netscape reduces their decade-long focus on squeezing profits from dial-up deals with web newbies long enough to compete with a niche, early adopter site like Digg, is the day that online, participatory communities will have reached the ROI tipping point.

Eh-hem! That day is here.

Michael Arrington frames the move nicely:

[…]

The fact that AOL is launching the new service under the Netscape brand instead of building out a new property says how serious they are about the space. According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views - far more than Digg today.

Putting this kind of audience in front of a Digg like service could spell trouble for many sites that ultimately make it to the top of the site. A Digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service.

There are a number of other notable features of the new Netscape. Story submissions can be tagged by the submitter along for easier search in the future. Every category, user and group of friends has their own RSS feed. Also, category anchors will follow up on many stories and post their own editorial content on those stories (see below)

With all of the recent moves, one has to be wondering where the participatory news space is heading:

• Newsvine is already an “all category” user-generated article space
• Digg is rumored to be expanding from a niche site to an all-encompassing domain
• Netscape is launching a full-force, broadly targeted, participatory interface into the mix

At first glance, the long-term benefits of this growing industry and competition seem to land in the laps of the end user.

In the real world, industry competition drives quality standards while the invisible hand of the market usually corrects pricing issues (except for oil and other lobbied industries, but that’s a whole other article).

If you follow similar logic within this segment of the internet economy, the domain with the most intoxicating experience design and participatory incentive programs should retain the largest share of the participatory market (and I’m not talking about the bread and circus returns of shiny AJAX widgets and karma points).

Interfaces that are primarily designed for an optimized, ad sales, click-through scheme and not unique, behavioral, user experiences, just won’t survive in the long-run. Domain competition will force top notch user-centered interaction design, reducing opportunities to implement old school, bean counting advertising schemes to piggy-back user behavior.

Even more disruptive; in order to increase sign-ups, retain customers and increase degrees of participation, one would think that revenue generated from these new user-centered, advertising paradigms will have to be efficiently shared with this new workforce of virtual attention laborors.

While it’s true that these particular industry domains are already branding the very idea of 2.0 community — essentially “soft-locking” people into committing to a domain as with neighborhoods — without certain concessions (such as revenue sharing) I’d imagine that tactic alone to be short-sighted. I mean, wouldn’t corporate abuse of our participatory nature by these enabling domains drive us to be quick to change our attachment to these particular 2.0 communities?

I have to profess, this is where my faith in the many falters.

Honestly, my “fear” is that the masses of early-adoptor geeks who are driving the emergence of this participatory economy are just as self-centered as the capitalistic drivers of the attention economy itself.

Let me rephrase and explain my thoughts more clearly.

Are we more interested in participating as authentic medic creators and information contextualizers from afar, while being left alone to receive our timely, customized, community-centered, topical information? Or do we believe in standing together as a workforce of developers of this information revolution and as personal, information contextualizers to create change in our overarching financial system itself, ensuring a greater diversity of fiscal opportunities for people living on the other side of numerous socio-economic divides?

This is where the rubber hits the road, just before the fork.

We Don’t Have To Follow The Same Path We Used To Get Here

Big business is just beginning to view participatory systems as an obvious line extension of the profit vehicles that mass production provided in the industrial age through financial capitalism. If you understand the underlying principals of the first go-around, the evolutionary patterns of the second pass make themselves quite obvious:

• In the 20th century, capitalists leveraged cookie-cutter product design, simplified mass production assembly lines, ensured low-wage labor systems and implemented hardcore, mass marketing and psychological advertising within an imbedded entertainment mass media to drive product consumption
• In the 21st century, capitalists have the advent of collaborative filtering and personalized interfaces, running on the movement, interactions and contextualization of data and perspectives of the people who use them, driving contextualized ad placement, resulting in both revenue and product consumption with much less overhead

VC’s drool over the possibilities of the attention economy, because they see exactly how to take advantage of the situation, turning passionate information junkies and connectors into ad sales generators, which is fine, because it’s in their nature.

(photo by illmatic)

The question I desperately want to ask “the masses” is do we, the designers, the developers, the content creators and authentic media generators, care about this pure, capitalistic leeching or is it truely in our nature to provide a free ride, no matter the potential for being used as residual generators of capital?

For if we do care, we — the schitzophrenic creators and consumers of this new economy — are in a unique position to take a slice of the proverbial pie, whether through better positioning in a buyer’s market or as compensated content creators in a participatory, user-generated, contextualized media system. Either way, we can completely alter the model of managed capitalism and move one-step closer to to realizing Doc Searls’ intention economy.

Let the capitalists finance the infrastructure and reap their fair, residual returns, but let the people drive the costs of the market based on our desires while sharing in the residual profits that we generate via digital forms of word of mouth advertising.

In today’s parameter-passing, unique-identifier, permalink world, both notions are completely feasible. The only question is whether or not they will take this revolutionary change lying down.

On Tuesday night, Lex Alexander held a Citizen Journalism meeting at the News & Record. Eighteen-months into the paper’s internet community-centered initiative, Lex is looking for suggestions as to how the N&R can extend farther into the community and develop stronger relationships with residents, giving them a platform for community reporting.

I’ve spoken with Lex a few times regarding possible ways to advance citizen journalism within the walled garden of the N&R and to be honest with you, I’m feeling like the conversation is going in circles.

I don’t blame Lex. I completely realize that his hands are tied by a small technology budget and limited development resources, but I do think there’s more to it than these constraints.

Once our conversation went beyond the really progressive ideas (read: costly) — such as participatory interfaces and scraping domains for repurposing topically tagged content — we ended up discussing simple, community building concepts, like linking out into the existing blogging community or designing a homepage (Town Square) module to automatically display recent, local blogger post titles. Yet even that conversation downshifted, as Greensboro101 was brought up as the existing local model covering linking out to local bloggers and a partnership seemed out of bounds (just my impression).

Today, John Robinson announced a new editorial feature — a page called Blogging The News, with semi-daily updated links out to local bloggers that are extending the conversation from N&R articles and linking back. But the current feature is completely manual, as it’s an editorial feature — someone is deciding which posts are worthy to show up within the N&R.

It’s a step forward, but a conservative one, focused more on retaining an authoritative N&R voice than supporting active, dynamic, community discussion (such as with Greensboro101 or with Newsweek’s Blog Talk module and blog page). Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati jumped into John’s comment thread, offering a dynamic solution that could even make the N&R money, so I guess we’ll wait and see where it goes from here.

Here’s a short video I took of the Tuesday night meeting. You might need headphones to hear the audio and a heads up: the second half of the video is much more on point than the first (I think I told Sue Polinsky that I’d moon her community webcam concept ;).

(that’s not John)

John Ford — founder of the local software development firm Aldenta and former kidnapper of my The Inmates Are Running The Asylum book — is running tomorrow night’s free Web Design Meetup to help us hacks with our HTML and CSS techniques.

And I gotta tell you folks, after looking at some of the templates of the blogsboro community, I’d say that we all could use some help (disclosure — John has tweaked the presentation of this blog, as well as the Greensboro’s Child theme).

From John:

A number of our meetup members have requested a more detailed look at HTML and CSS. I’ve decided to do a multipart series on HTML & CSS to help everyone get a better grasp.

People who will benefit:

• Those totally new to HTML/CSS
• Someone using Dreamweaver, GoLive or other web page design tools who want a better understanding of the website code that is being created
• Current developers wanting a better understanding of proper web page creation and coding standards (these concepts are helpful for search engine optimization)
• Bloggers wanting to learn how to tweak their site template code
• Anyone wanting to brush up on their HTML and CSS skills

When:
Thursday, June 8, 2006, 7:00 PM (sharp)

Where:
The Scene on South Elm
604 South Elm St
Greensboro , NC 27406
336 510 1472

RSVP & Questions:
info@aldenta.com
336 547 9004

Hope to see you there!

Bruce Burch, Mental Floss (feed | page)
Why? I met Bruce last week at one of the screenings for Greensboro’s Child. We chatted long enough for me to know he’s a like-minded progressive soul. His site (and radio show) is good local / national fodder.

David Hoggard, Hogg’s Blog (feed | page)
Why? I’ve stumbled across David’s blog a few times since I’ve been down here, and he’s really solid with his perspectives. I met him at last week’s screening as well.

John Robinson, The Editor’s Log (feed | page)
Why? JR is the Managing Editor of the News & Record, the local newspaper. His blog is a useful resource in understanding the goings on within the paper.

Lex Alexander, The Lex Files (feed | page)
Why? Lex and I have talked shop in person on more than one occasion. He’s the Citizen Journalism Dude at the News & Record, and a really personable guy.

Chris Nolan, Spot-On (feed | page)
Why? Ed Cone pointed to a story she wrote earlier today and I liked what I read. Simple enough. I’ll consider her on a trial run.

Talk To Action (feed | page)
Why? Ben Hwang tipped me off to a post there earlier today about a religious right video game. I skimmed through a number of other posts and found the diverse perspectives to be quite interesting.

Radio Open Source (feed | page)
Why? I met Christopher Lydon at Beyond Broadcast two weeks back and we chatted for a minute about The People, Yes. I don’t know how I missed stumbling across his site until now. Really interesting posts and podcasts…

Follow the story at greensboroschild.com

Apparently, the paper reported a 9pm showing of the documentary tonight, so Dale and Lowell at The Scene on South Elm are obliging.

Showtimes are for both 7pm and 9pm and tickets are only $3. As he did last night, Andy will be there to field Q&A after each screening.

If you’re busy trying to digest the 400 page Truth and Reconciliation Commision report, come on out and see the documentary. The film didn’t win Best Researched Documentary at the 2002 Chicago Film Festival for nothing.