connecting*the*dots

Lisa turned me onto the group a few months back, so I’ve been dropping landscape shots into the group here and there ever since. This week my number came up:

If you’re in NC and want to contribute shots to NPR’s The State of Things, join their flickr group and follow the minimal instructions.

Enjoy!

dragonflysky took the shot and flickr’s patented interestingness algorithm decided that her photo is the most interesting photo tagged with “Greensboro” out of more than 9,000 images.

Lisa Scheer and I spent a few hours over at M’Coul’s Pub yesterday, melding minds over how to best use the web to expose her amazing eye to a larger audience and start a conversation about her passion.

Enter tagging.

After a few hours of exchanging philosophical approaches and dissecting interfaces, Lisa left with laptop in tow to start exploring her new sandbox.

Her castle is going to be dope.

Angela’s mother married her beau this past Saturday in a beautiful ceremony held in their backyard. Pictures of the day have been uploaded to flickr.

FAMILY & FRIENDS: If you’d like to order prints of specific pictures (either having them sent to you or picking them up at a local Target) simply click on the “Order Prints” link found above the picture you want and follow the directions. Voila!

(originally uploaded by veen)

No, not some crappy ceramic mug, I’m talking about a digital SRL camera with built-in geotagging.

Yeah, I know there’s no such thing… so, HP, Nikon, Sony and the rest of the bunch need to get busy.

Chop, chop!

Here are the only two features that are essential to making me happy:

• Automatic geotagging of digital images for instant goodness when I upload to flickr
• Y-axis geotagging for shots taken above ground (to support hobbyists like Doc)

‘Tis the season in… two months and 8 days. I hope to have this on my wishlist by then.

Can flickr be any more fun without spinning in circles before exploding into fiery, shimmering glitter dust?

For those of you not in the know, geo-tagging is when you apply specific (or general) geographical tags to an object in order to identify its location. flickr has done an amazing job out the gate with this puppy, as the drag and drop interface is so good, so very easy to use.

(click here for a full-sized interface screenshot)

I’ve spent this entire evening digging back through my photostream, eyeballing maps and looking up the addresses of specific places where I took my shots. Some are easy to find (my house, M’Coul’s), while others are a bit of a challenge (wedding pictures, scenic shots), but it’s a fun exercise either way.

My question to Stuart and crew: This is going to become socialized at some point, right? (UPDATE: The map just appeared in my Explore tab! More here.)

I mean, how fresh would it be to be working your map and easily flip from how you’ve experienced a location to how someone else has? Essentially, take the concept behind the tag globe icon and apply it as a metaphor within the map interface, opening it up as another exploration tool? (I realize that I’ve just described a lot of the functionality of Plazes, but it already relies on people uploading geo-specific flickr images of hot-spot locations to their interface… hm, another Yahoo! acquisition, possibly?)

The Business Of Mashups

When I interviewed/presented at A9 last June, they were in the midst of that highly publicized “send a college student around in a van to take pictures of every block of every city” campaign. The idea being that seamless visual context of a business location on a Yellow Page business interface could be both useful and fun.

Well, sure, but the most useful? I approached the interface challenge from a bit of a different angle.

My presentation ended up clashing with what I perceived to be their primary context scenario for the product (people finding particular businesses with city block pictures). I argued instead, focus first and foremost on improving Yellow Pages search results and try to get businesses to “tag” their particular inventories to expose their goods to the A9 engine. Simply put, lead with the most useful user scenario, not with the eye candy of street scenes, which can always come later.

Now, flickr is, and should be, all about enhancing eye candy (finding it, sharing it, etc.); enabling people to find geo-specific businesses that have what they need is someone else’s business model.

See where I’m going with all of this?

Imagine how sick of an API this geo-tagging feature would be for a Yellow Pages product — one completely optimized to the teeth with a killer business tagging interface, providing exponentially more degrees of findability than simply scraping language from the business name, description and reviews found on the business interface itself?

Say a kid, fresh on campus, is looking for a local Chinese food restaurant and stumbles across the smartly exposed collection of quarter-mile range of images on the business interface of a Yellow Pages service. I can imagine the following conversation busting out:

Dude, check this out! ‘Swallow Balls‘ Haha. I’m getting that for Joe, he’s such a ball swallower. Ha! Oh man… they even serve scorpion? Okay, we have no choice, grab your chopsticks, we’re so there!”

Viral goodness of flickr madness; good for you, me and Mr. Chen.

Gnar, dude.

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?

Photos from spcoon’s contacts (feed | page)

Why? I find pictures just as interesting as words (actually, 1000x interesting). Sign up on flickr to get your own feed of friend’s pictures.

(This is the first post of an endless stream of posts that will document my RSS additions and subtractions moving forward — I’m already 101 deep. If you’re a regular reader of mine, you’ll get to see my interests evolve over time. If you’ve landed here from Google, well, maybe you’ll glean some ideas for using RSS in the information age.)

Citizen media is an authentic media.

The amateur (Etymology: French, from Latin amator lover, from amare to love) doesn’t create out of a responsibility to a deadline or a paycheck; the amateur creates out of a love for the process, the output, the feedback, the very notion of creativity itself. And in this new world of interconnectivity, the availibility of our tangibly crafted desires and dreams has increased exponentially.

We are connected.

photo by Mexicanwave

And entrepreneurs are taking notice.

We’re quickly moving towards a period where a good chunk of the web will be explicitly designed (or re-designed) to take advantage of such authentic creativity. The old 1.0 slogan “Content is king” didn’t die off — it simply redefined itself through the lens of the passionate, authentic amateur.

YouTube and flickr have captured the very essence of what makes video and photography communities, respectively, thrive.

• Instantaneous feedback and discourse
• The ability to shelve favorites
• Discovery of new objects based on meshed interests with other community members
• Being able to add friends and join/start groups to extend the conversation

Between the commitment to upload massive amounts of media and the amount of time and effort one invests participating in these communities, the “throwaway” gap that previously existed for most web services (think about web analytic services or even a blogging platform) has practically disappeared. These particular domains aren’t ripe for member disengagement anymore based on a single bad experience, as they’ve progressed to becoming a part of our psyche, partially defining us through the connections our authentic media creates with others and vice-versa.

Though, as much as I believe in the potential of interconnected authentic media to inform, inspire, entertain and generate new communities, I equally believe that our media should not be leveraged from afar to pay someone else’s bills without explicit financial returns from the ecosystem. So if this perspective became a reality, would it cause authentic media to cease being authentic? Is this perspective just an excuse for a low entry point into the mainstream media ecosystem? I don’t think so.

From Kevin Kelly and The New York Times, Scan This Book:

[…]

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another.

[…]

Scientists “are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own.” If we were to view authentic media creations as nodes of input, for which entrepreneurs can generate beyond-hyperlink synapses of interconnectivity, the difference between the goals of science and the intrinsic behavior of the web would be rather slim.

This is where the conversation shifts to the concerns of the elite to the desire of the commons.

What side of the aisle do you sit?

UPDATE: Can we do this together?

Click to view current proposal

Lex and I have been chatting about the N&R’s Citizen Journalism program over the last few weeks, focusing on exploring possibilities to improve both the quality and quantity of incoming stories by Greensboro residents (and articles about Greensboro itself).

I’m a huge proponent of editorial groups diving directly into the information mechanisms of the web — actively participating by monitoring concept feeds, reviewing authentic media, commenting on blogs in the community, basically, engaging potential news & entertainment sources in a smart and authentic manner.

Quite simply, if the press wants to be considered authentic with their interest in citizen media (read: people), they can’t just launch editorialized blogs; they need to become a part of the conversation itself.

Along these lines, mainstream news organizations must also develop additional revenue sharing programs for citizens that contribute to their bottom lines.

Sites like flickr and YouTube provide free bandwidth to store media clips (which, based on Moore’s Law, will be an obsolete model as well in the next 5 to 10 years), but news sites can’t offer that value proposition in a trade for content.

If sites like the N&R don’t develop fair revenue sharing programs, legacy-free aggregators will… and already have.

Along these lines, Lex asked me to expound on my previous ideas for how N&R editorial could leverage citizen tagging in their daily editorial processes. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far…

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)