connecting*the*dots

Thanks, Chris & Tara.

Marc’s Voice
Welcome IBM to the corporate world of social networking

[…]

Synchronizing corporate and business data between networks can take on a whole new level of possibilities once IBM gets the corporate world to bite off on this.

I can’t wait to see what the initial implementations of IBM’s Lotus Connections brings. This is the best news Broadband Mechanics has ever had!

‘Cause they’re doing my advertising for me.

Welcome IBM to the world of white labeling social media. Add in widgets or a mobile gateway, mix in some product databases and static propoganda - and you might even have stumbled upon “digital lifestyle aggregation�.

We’ve been betting that this day would come. That corporate social networking (which included blogging) would make it to the big time. Now I get to compete with IBM on price, service, features and brand.

Let’s rock.

I can see Marc salivating from here (hm, maybe that’s drool).

This flavor of passion regarding corporate change reminds me of Cluetrain, 8 years ago.

Please open your bible to Chapter 5, The Hyperlinked Organization:

The Web, in short, has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices. And they expect to be able to find what they need and do what they need without any further help from people who dress better than they do. This has happened not because of a management theory or a bestselling business book but because the Web reaches everyone with a computer and a telephone line on her desk.

So, the gulf opens between those who are connected and those who think an office with a door is a sign of success. The gulf is one of expectations, and expectations always guide perception. As a result, the company thinks it’s doing one thing while accomplishing the direct opposite with its connected employees. For example:

• The company communicates with me through a newsletter and company meetings meant to lift up my morale. In fact, I know from my e-mail pen pals that it’s telling me happy-talk lies, and I find that quite depressing.
• The company org chart shows me who does what so I know how to get things done. In fact, the org chart is an expression of a power structure. It is red tape. It is a map of whom to avoid.
• The company manages my work to make sure that all tasks are coordinated and the company is operating efficiently. In fact, the inflexible goals imposed from on high keep me from following what my craft expertise tells me I really ought to be doing.
• The company provides me with a career path so I’ll see a productive future in the business. In fact, I’ve figured out that because the org chart narrows at the top, most career paths necessarily have to be dead ends.
• The company provides me with all the information I need to make good decisions. In fact, this information is selected to support a decision (or worldview) in which I have no investment. Statistics and industry surveys are lobbed like anti-aircraft fire to disguise the fact that while we have lots of data, we have no understanding.
• The company is goal-oriented so that the path from here to there is broken into small, well-marked steps that can be tracked and managed. In fact, if I keep my head down and accomplish my goals, I won’t add the type of value I’m capable of. I need to browse. I even need to play. Without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens.
• The company gives me deadlines so that we ship product on time, maintaining our integrity. In fact, working to arbitrary deadlines makes me ship poor-quality content. My management doesn’t have to use a club to get me to do my job. Where’s the trust, baby?
• The company looks at customers as adversaries who must be won over. In fact, the ones I’ve been exchanging e-mail with are very cool and enthusiastic about exactly the same thing that got me into this company. You know, I’d rather talk with them than with my manager.
• The company works in an office building in order to bring together all of the things I need to get my job done and to avoid distracting me. In fact, more and more of what I need is outside the corporate walls. And when I really want to get something done, I go home.
• The company rewards me for being a professional who acts and behaves in a, well, professional manner, following certain unwritten rules about the coefficient of permitted variation in dress, politics, shoe style, expression of religion, and the relating of humorous stories. In fact, I learn who to trust — whom I can work with creatively and productively — only by getting past the professional act.

Something’s gone wrong. Or maybe something now is starting to go right.

[…]

Bottom-Up

The Web is undoubtedly a part of your business plans. You’ve got it safely contained, under control, managed. Why, your organization has probably already installed a corporate intranet so it can publish the human resource policies that no one read on paper to people who now won’t read ’em on screen. Excellent!

Yes, your centralized corporate intranet has eliminated some paper and is making management feel vaguely cool. But that’s not the web that’s going to shake the foundations of your fort.

While you’ve been hiring consultants to create a slick corporate intranet, establishing policies about who gets to post what, and creating a chain of command to ensure that only appropriate and approved materials show up on your internal corporate home page, your engineers, scientists, researchers — hell even the marketing folks — have been creating little Web sites for their own use.

No one is controlling what’s posted on them except the people doing the posting. No one is making sure that the corporate logo is in the right place. No one is making sure that the writing is official, officious, and as dull as the pencil drawer of a recently downsized middle manager.

The real party got under way while you were still setting up the banners at the corporate prom. (This year’s prom theme: “Responsibility in a Web Age!”)

For example, by the time Sun Microsystems got around to counting, they had eight hundred intranets. And when Texas Instruments put in their corporate intranet, they invited everyone who had one already in place to register with the top-down one. Within a few months, two hundred and fifty internal sites had registered, and no one knows how many unregistered ones there were. Even a top-down intranet can take on a bottom-up feel, as happened at Lucent Technologies, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. After Lucent brought together a product-development team of five hundred engineers across three continents and thirteen time zones, it watched dozens of them insert their own pages into the project intranet. Some of these pages related directly to the project; others were strictly personal, like, “Hey, look at this picture of me and my dog!” Either way, the project took on a human cast that never would have been present otherwise. In the end the team leader attributed the success of the project in no small part to “the ultimate Democracy of the Web.”

Granted, these are technology companies, but you don’t have to be a technical genius to create an intranet. If someone wants to share some information, they can turn their computer into a Web server. It’s free, and it’s getting easier every day.

The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There’s no going back. If a company doesn’t recognize this, the top-down intranet it puts in can breed the type of cynicism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents.

The intranets under the radar screen — and the rest of the Net panoply, including e-mail, mailing lists, and discussion groups — ignore the corporate blather and ass-covering pronouncements. Instead, these new Web conversations are actually being used to get some work done.

And the work continues…

This post is the result of pseudo-live blogging (there was no WiFi access at the N&R). All quotes are paraphrases.

Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at NYU and the driving force behind the Pro-Am journalism experiment, NewAssignment.net. He’s come to Greensboro to meet with the N&R and the active blogging community we have here, to spread the word of his project and hold a discussion regarding its possibilities.

Jay begins by giving a brief history of newspapers/journalism and the internet in three stages:

1. Newspaper ownership began using the web in 1995 by simply re-purposing print content and surrounding it with ads. Why not? The content was already paid for and there wasn’t a need for much development
2. Blogging, citizen journalism hit big from 2004 to 2006; a wake up for people not using the medium to extend conversations and the news.
3. Where we’re heading (and NewAssignment.net is attempting to lead); bringing journalists, web users and citizens together to create dynamic, well-researched and disciplined journalism.

NewAssignment.net will:

• Employ editors to manage resources, the narrative and quality of reporting
• Hire occasional reporters for story development
• Tap into the idea that smart mobs + editors = smart, collaborative, widely-distributed input and richer output

Jay made a point to describe the advantages that a NewAssignment.net has on the traditional world of journalism:

• It’s Not a business; there’s no VC or ownership to demand a particular return
• There’s no production routine to follow; no quota of time to print
• No absolute set of topical coverage; unlike modern news outlets, they can cover anything they feel is relevant
• Local, national, international; there’s no geo-specific coverage
• There are no legacy methods or traditions to change or fight through
• No inertia from old school participants who don’t want change

“Journalism isn’t traditionally innovative; this could be different,� Rosen says.

By operating as a non-profit in academia, NewAssignment becomes R&D for major news operations. Along those lines, Reuters has given a $100k gift for research and Jay is using the gift to hire an editor.

No strings attached, mind you.

Newspapers are aware of citizen journalism, realize that it’s where the future is heading and many from within the industry want to contribute using the enablers of the web and raise the quality of journalism. Or at least that’s what Jay’s hoping for.

As long as salaries can be sustained, I’m thinking it’s a pretty solid bet.

Tell ‘em Stephen. Get to blogging!

(generator)

That great statement was captured in the front room of the elsewhere artist collaborative, right next door to The Scene on South Elm.

I just started going through some of their writings… interesting stuff. From organizational thoughts 2:

[…]

Politics is inherently artful and art is a manipulation of medium. To combine art and politics is to make the medium people and the property medium. Elsewhere’s political notion of collaboration is the balance of individual and community, where the individual is given full rights to application of the common property so long as use of such property is not distructive[1] to the community. The individual is the depleater[2], abuser, and the one to be feared, thus the community must protect itself from abuse. Abuse is about individual disregarding the needs of other individuals and disregarding the community needs as defined by the individual perception. However, in the jumbled state that this iterates, the individuals are disregarding and subjecting the environment by their ill perceptions of its maximus[3] capability. A fully applied concept does not insure that the individuals will produce great art as individuals, but a community governed by a thoughtful populace, an informed and informing populace, is partaking in the conceptual framework that directs the space. If there is constant flux in conceptual ideology issued by well-expressed discussion and submission of idea then everyone is participating in collaborative art.

[…]

I’m diggin’ my new neighborhood.

It’s been a while since my last update on the progress of The People, Yes!, so here’s my May report (yes, that’s me trying to become more organized):

Legal
Yesterday, Jordan Nance sent me the paperwork to apply for non-profit status in North Carolina. There’s one last thing I need to do before I file; put together a small staff of officers and directors.

Identity
Anthony Piraino is knee deep in round three of designing the identity for The People, Yes! Here are a few versions from round two:

I’m digging the gritty contrast, but we’re going to play with the typography a bit more. I think it’s coming along nicely. I’m going to head out into town this weekend and take some photographs that might work with the identity in the header. Down the road, all imagery on the site will be people-generated.

Platform
Sue Polinsky (of TechTriad) is now hosting the domain, while Jonathan Daniel and Nate Aune have expressed interest in helping me develop the actual platform. Phase One will concentrate on simply implementing a collaborative WP blog with an overly simplified publishing interface. Phase Two is classified information, unless I decide to leak it to the blogosphere. ;)

Grassroots
Cara Michele and I haven’t had a meeting in a few weeks, but she has already introduced the concept to a handful of her friends in the homeless community and apparently there is solid interest to participate in the project. Once we get the platform running, both Ed Cone and Jay Ovittore have offered their services to run a blogging 101 workshop in order to help acclimate the people to the technology and the pro’s and con’s of transparent blogging.

We’re still a ways away from operating on all cylinders, but we’re getting there a bit more each day. I can’t fully express how overwhelmed I’ve been by the outpouring of support within this community and across the country, friends both new and old.

The People, Yes! is about the people. Yes, it truly is.

Blogger gal vs. Newspaper guy!

Well, not quite, but it makes a great lede, eh?

Sue, Lex and I met over lunch yesterday to discuss potential strategies for evolving the News & Record’s citizen journalism efforts. And no, we didn’t have a stare off.

Man… Lex is in a tough position; he’s completely open to forward-thinking ideas (I mean, his title is Citizen Journalism Coordinator), but he also seems to be up against a bottom line business that’s very adverse to risk. Apparently, changing the approach to meeting a historically profitable bottom line is a tough sell, even within an industry that’s on shaky ground.

It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times.

That’s not to say that the N&R hasn’t been progressive with their citizen journalism efforts to date — they have — but Lex knows that in just a few years the N&R (both print and online) will have to directly compete with new forms of dynamic, community-based, participatory, online news applications (e.g. Newsvine), which will be free of legacy organizational overhead and be able to react with agility.

And you can’t forget those pesky bloggers.

The N&R needs to step up their game.

So we chatted. And ate. And chatted some more. And by the time our conversation came to a close, we had a number of interesting ideas on the table:

• Personal Relationships - Lex is looking to develop relationships with members of the Greensboro community, offering them the opportunity to use N&R resources (legal, photography, journalist feedback, etc.) to craft substantive citizen journalism. To me, this approach perfectly fits the future of print newspapers, as time-based news is dead on paper. They’ll have to compete as daily magazines (more depth, less coverage).

• Real-time Blogging Input - I suggested promoting a tagging schema that matched the classification structure of both the paper and the site:

  For example, identify and promote a unique set of “greensboro[xxxx]” tags, for anyone to use on blog posts, flickr images, etc. when generating Greensboro specific news, events, opinions, etc.

  Internally, the N&R editorial staff would then set up RSS aggregators with subscriptions of each tag search result.

  The real-time input of potential stories and assets would increase exponentially, while the N&R would continue to have editorial control, as the aggregator would serve as the queue into the publishing process

• Representation Across The Community - Sue focused on the concept of encouraging participation along the lines of community diversity (her connections with Uplifter is right along the lines of my focus with The People, Yes!). We talked about ideas ranging from developing blogging 101 material to share with a non-computer literate demographic to grass roots representation within sub-communities (e.g. school board meetings) to encourage live-blogging with the unique tag identifiers

An interesting start, but there’s still one major component that we’re skirting: Revenue incentives.

Lex made it clear that creating a participatory revenue model doesn’t fall under his charge, but the N&R is open to ideas. My perspective is that without incentive, participation will be lighter, with less quality and dedication. Any revenue generated out of these relationships should be viewed as found money, so share and share alike:

• To tap into the wisdom of the blogosphere by republishing the original post or an edited version, a buisness needs to develop a revenue model that fairly represents such a relationship.
• To partner with individuals from the community to generate community-based journalism, a business needs to develop a revenue model to encourage such a partnership.

It comes down to this: Pony up or we, the citizens, will simply get together and form collaborative blogs, creating relevant identities, gain a better footprint in Google over a 3 month period of time and, eventually, sign up with BlogAds to support our own voice.

That’s not a threat. ;-) I’m looking forward to our next conversation, folks.

UPDATE: Six months after the fact, in the NORG session at ConvergeSouth, Ed Cone backs up my philosophy regarding partnering with local bloggers/writers in a revenue share program.

Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon are Rocketboom.

“We are in an interesting time, as production tools for mass communication are dirt cheap and accessible.”

Rocketboom: “An interesting intersection of blogging, TV over IP, radical advertising, etc.”… “The art of the possible.”

• Personal filters (media, people they meet, events, etc.) - always on the lookout for more information.
• Design - “One of the most important aspects of Rocketboom is… interface design; making the interface comfortable and easy to use.” The simplicity of the interface equals the experience for all viewers/users.
• Global - “Audience is scattered all around the world. Correspondants are in Kenya, Prague, all over the States.” Very interested in global stories. Rocketboom.jp just launched to communicate from Japan, presenting video stories which isn’t language-centric.



• Time - “Time is power.” Whoever has information before another will have a huge advantage. Large organizations cannot be agile enough to move fast. Rocketboom is daily, so it becomes habit-forming. “Simple concepts, but so important to us and our success. It’s worth considering them in-depth.”
• Consequence - Unlike other business models built on one, two year business plans, Rocketboom deals with consequences in the moment. They’re able to shift their approaches in the moment to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Being open to change is huge.
• Interactive - 25% of Rocketboom stories are user-generated. Then there are comments, emails with viewers, etc. They feel very strongly about the communities this interaction with viewers build. This medium is interactive, so even though a user is digesting video, it’s not TV.

The show is already available on cell phones (thanks to a fan hack), TiVo viewers, PSP and iTunes.

Just the other day I found myself on a 10 hour trip home from New Jersey. Normally, the drive kills me, but thankfully, I had hours upon hours of Echo Chamber Project podcasts sitting to my right. When I made it home at 3:00am (I missed the damn turn at 85-440), I plopped on the couch and fired off a note to Kent Bye, thanking him for the virtual company.

Well, Kent got back in touch the next day and asked if I’d like to chat over Skype. Here’s the result (part of the audio becomes scrambled for 30 seconds, twice).

The reviews are in: We, the people, are in the drivers seat.

Newspapers are already hemoraging readership, as the web has created an extremely rich bazaar, allowing us to shop for unbundled content at every turn, while unbundled advertising models begin to sprout up to support this evolution. Well, get ready for the online replicas of the print world to begin to sweat even more. Following on the heals of the mass appeal of social wisdom sites such as slashdot and digg comes a revolutionary hybrid of mainstream media, citizen journalism and participatory editing: Newsvine.

Taking the aggregation features of a Yahoo! News, the collaborative properties of a digg and the citizen media aspects of blogging, Newsvine is staged to completely redefine the news. Why? Because the common man now has stake in the game.

Old School

Top/down delivery of content, beginning with organized knowledge, is a modern construct. Since the advent of television, these organized silos of knowledge have been optimized over the years for advertising to take advantage of explicit media buys — matching business audience demographics, psychographics and geographics to channeled, programed, bundled content. Great for advertisers and the networks/publications, lousy for the “consumer,” as we end up consuming more messaging and less news or interests which match *our* needs and desires.

These constructed, mechanical relationships define false, explicit edges of our culture, which in turn raises the value proposition of media and news organizations simply by standardizing on such lexicon. This standardization of topical interests — unknowingly bought into by the public as what is *real* — enables a sussinct universe of sales and stories, broadcast on television news and pumped through newspapers, serving as the ying to the entertainment media’s yang.

A metaphor: Is it easier to entertain and pacify a child within a theme park or the natural environment of a forest?

Somewhere between the crafted, paced, 4/4 movement of greased industry palms rubbing against one another, lies our percept of reality, consistently bombarded by messaging and it’s representative experience. So while we struggle with this understanding of our surroundings, back in the news room, editors — the field managers of this construct — find themselves under the thumb of the financial steerings and pressures of this propped reality. Their indoctrinated intuition places reactionary constraints on the types of stories generated, the depth of coverage, even the language the writer chooses to employ.

The innovators and early adopters of the web… we’re basically saying, “Fuck that noise.”

New School

Bottom/up constructs, enabled by the personal publishing revolution, delivered with flexible subscription technology such as RSS, have empowered individuals to publish cheaply within our own crafted domains.

• RSS allows us to digest information passively (in a centralized location), instead of actively (surfing the decentalized web), which greatly increases our level of input and conversely, fine tunes our understanding of the world, which is represented by our output (blogging, conversations, actions, etc.)
• Those of us who publish our own information objects, apply meta-data to increase the potential of findability, both now and in future interfaces
• Many of us participate with folksonomies, helping make our POV of all information semantically rich and contextual to our neighbors interests, our future grandchildern’s recollections of us, even the desires of a family on the other side of the planet
• We create multimedia objects to compete with elite vehicles of capital, and fuel them through the same tactical approaches

This participatory environment is one aspect of the Web 2.0 phrase that gets tossed about. It’s enabling us humans to share our creative impulses with others, helping to constantly define and then redefine the world around us through our personal representations of both explicit and implicit lexicon.

This is an open paradigm, a transparent journey, based in accelerated trust and faith in one another.

So when these two worlds meet — old school vs. new school or modernism vs. post-modernism or proprietary vs. open source — the truth of hierarchy and the truth of individual POV’s collide. Guess what remains?

A truthier truth.

Newsvine has taken a position of mixing mainstream feeds with user submitted, tagged and collaboratively greenlit content. Even more revolutionary, they’re mixing the standardized embedded lexicon of our culture — topical categories — with the co-occurance generated wisdom of the people creating relevant content living within such silos (see below)

The secondary navigation points are all dynamic, altering over time as the co-occurance of tagged objects within a topical category shifts. This is how I think — how I search, discover, build my own archive in this blog — so in and of itself, the concept doesn’t blow me away. What does blow me away is that by simply placing this paradigm next to, say, The New York Times, Yahoo! News, my pseudo-innovative hometown Greensboro News & Record and a blog aggregator like Greensboro101 (disclosure: I’m on the advisory panel), none of these domains can compete if Newsvine gains a participatory, critical mass audience.

Think about it: Newsvine provides AP feeds (like a Yahoo! News), yet allows anyone to seed *any* story, from *any* site (like digging or del.icio.us tagging). Let me try to clearly paint how disruptive of a strategy this is.

• With only the AP feed, Newsvine could potentially evolve to become a successful News aggregator
• The addition of the digg and del.icio.us features completely change the game. Newsvine now becomes populated by the very content from the news sites (New York Times, News & Record, etc.) that it’s competing against for advertising
• The better the content, say, a New York Times produces, the more likely it’ll end up in Newsvine, but with more context (meta-data) and a thriving, participatory readership.
• Content will begin to be valued differently at a New York Times — as prices might become reduced at the domain, while new, shared models will be created at sites like Newsvine. Good for the Times, as they have a new market for revenue, but it will effect their organizational structure. The big advantage for Newsvine: they don’t have to completely readjust due to their recent entry into the arena and their nimble stature (compared to large news organizations)
• Community blog aggregators could possibly fall to the wayside, simply due to the fact that people can seed their own local posts, as well as their neighbors, and leverage unbundled advertising services. The very concept of “community” will be redefined on much more granular levels, moving towards a flickr existence, as explicit tags begin to define groups of interest

The Final Touch

Mike Davidson obviously knows what he has here; not only an opportunity to provide a rich, participatory environment for the redefinition of what news means to us as a collective, a community and as individuals, but this service could very well challenge the embedded constructs of media and the contradictions of Adam Smith capitalism.

Heavy.

In the final analysis, if Newswire succeeds, it’ll be because of the participatory nature of people. So if Davidson really wants to make his mark on this planet, he’ll not only decide to share advertising revenue with the organizations and the content creators themselves, but the swarms of participating editors — editors removed from the burden and balancing act of management, reduced simply to individual citizens focused on making our communities that much more aware, educated and inclusive. If an incentive program can be devised along these lines– some type of a micro-payment structure based on Karma points and click-throughs for both editors *and* authors– he’ll be responsible for creating the Mechanical Turk of the media world.

If he heads in this direction, or others evolve his concept down this line, media as we know it could absolutely cease to exist. Reputable journalists will become more enabled by freelance opportunities, as news organizations will need to drastically reduce their overhead because advertising money won’t be channeled into one out of six corporate funnels.

Then we’ll more easily find the opportunities to 2.0 the hell out of government.

———-

(Big ups to Kent Bye over at The Echo Chamber Project for refueling my tank last night on the way home. 5 hours of ECP podcasts will get you into this type of groove. Go check out his amazing project)

We’re now a month away from the public launch of Krugle; a service that has positioned itself as the one-stop shop for developers to find open source code. If they can pull this off — provide an organized and retrievable library of structured code snippets — they’re bound to fast-track open source development, both within traditionally closed domains and innovative, freelance environments alike.

A snippet from Dylan Tweney’s Wired article:

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the “technical web” — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)

“This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world,” said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing “PHP registration system.”

If Krugle can be as intelligent as they claim, providing the capability to reduce gloms of source code into retrievable objects, not only by language, but by micro-functions as well, this could be the beginning of something huge.

The Contract And The Ammunition

No, I’m not talking about a professional hit. Well, kinda. Let me explain.

For the past three months, I’ve been volunteering part-time with the Participatory Culture Foundation, managing their Bounty County blog. In essence, I post submissions from organizations or funded individuals who are looking to pay individuals from the development community to complete specific open source bounty projects. I also cull the web for existing bounties, posting them within the Bounty County realm for one stop shopping.

One-stop shopping is becoming a theme in this post.

With the percept of open source evolving beyond the realm of specific code or pure ideology into an actual infrastructure for developers to find usable code and then smartly reshare structured, organized code snippets (Krugle), opportunities are beginning to reveal themselves; opportunities beyond just increased productivity within corporate or home offices.

Bounty County is a centralized location for developers to find open source bounties — a much more forward thinking concept than it’s current static execution. If Krugle can harness the energy of the open source development community, it only makes sense to develop a dynamic marketplace for sponsors to:

• post project bounties
• provide pointers to source material
• update project status

Well, I’ll be damned. That short list just happens to be the core features of the static Bounty County site.

Hey, Chris! Getting Nick and Ken together might not be a bad idea, no?

We who blog, incessantly rave about the progressive attributes of transparency. It’s not a beckon call that we own; political activists have been screaming for transparency in government since, well, forever. Transparency provides credibility. The truth shall set you free. You pick the cliche, they’re all spot on.

Well, in this Web 2.0 world that we live in (whether we realize we’re living in it or not), transparency is beginning to take root in interesting ways. Take the age old process of writing non-fiction; I’m starting to see authors not only openly talking about their books in gestation, but reaching out to Joe Q. Public for participation in the writing process itself.

Since April of last year, Chris Anderson has been publicly blogging his thoughts about The Long Tail, the term he coined proper in 2004. His blog tagline describes his transparent approach as, “A public diary on the way to a book.” One of his recent posts, Death of the Blockbuster, is a perfect example of the transparent methodology I’m talking about:

I’ve been collecting data on just how bad it’s getting in the music industry, and this useful list of the 100 all-time bestselling albums offered another lens on the meltdown. I looked up the release dates of each and grouped them in half-decade bins. The data speaks for itself:

If you want to do your own analysis, the underlying data is in this spreadsheet.

Anderson engages with his audience, invites them to participate in his thesis and provides the underlying data behind his perspective. The above post has generated a link from USA Today, numerous comments and two follow-up posts that further this particular aspect of Anderson’s thesis. Aside from his trademarked phrase, “The Long Tail,” the entire blog is registered under a Creative Commons license, a copyright permission which allows anyone to replicate his content (as I did above), as well as to use his research finding for their own use (as long as they give proper attribution to Chris wherever they publish).

Share and share alike and build a better world.

No, I’m not a hippie, that’s just how open, collaborative, iterative development works. Chris is writing a book, one which he’ll profit from, but his open-thinking and shared research and knowledge will undoubtedly influence others to progressively impact industry in various degrees.

David Weinberger, who is knee-deep in the process of writing his latest book, “Everything is Miscellaneous,” employs a similar approach to writing.

Joho the Blog isn’t a 100% topical slave to the complexities of data, information and knowledge (I rather enjoy his political and cultural posts), but when David does dive in, you can sense where his head is in the writing process. With some posts, he’ll directly reach out for assistance and perspective, while other posts are less direct with explicit ties, but steeped in organizational memes. David blogged before he took on his latest book, so he understands the value of releasing ideas out into the ether. Hell, he co-wrote the book on it.

Ideas out, ideas in. Links out, links in.

Now, this approach is far from widespread, as the majority of books still hit “the shelf” with guarded marketing plans as the only touchpoint into the potential reader community. Authorship equates with authority in many circles — circles which seem to care more about ownership of a thesis, rather than the conversation surrounding the subject matter and the avenues newfound knowledge takes once digested. But since the shelves themselves are changing and mainstream journalists and authors are beginning to blog themselves, this just might catch on and become SOP.

What would be the ramifications of such transparent collaboration beyond the target of binding particular pages?

David hosted an interesting thread about hyperlinks subverting hierarchies a few weeks back where the conversation shifted between the lines of power, organization and connections between people. Following that premise within the context of this post, imagine if authors who write life and death non-fiction (say, covering the war in Iraq) opened up to allow for community participation… Could the impact be greater than the explosion of citizen media alone?

Methinks so.