connecting*the*dots

If you happen to be someone who thinks all this 2.0 hub-bub about social tagging and meta-data is confusing, I’ve found the perfect domain for us to reverse engineer together.

In order to get us on the same page, why don’t you first hop on over to Musicovery — an online radio site with an extremely interesting interface — and play around for a bit (be sure to explore all of the feature found on the controller).

Just don’t forget to come back! I promise that we’ll have some fun and you might even learn some geeky information architecture stuff.

Welcome back.

Okay, so how brilliant was that experience?

I don’t know about you, but discovering music based on my current mood fills a huge void in how I currently listen to music. Before discovering Musicovery, the closest I could come to replicating such a dynamic experience in iTunes was by creating a playlist for a specific genre and shuffling the playback.

And that just doesn’t do it for me. (more on the genesis of genres later)

Essentially, everything that Musicovery is doing is made possible by leveraging the relationships between meta-data applied to discrete information objects. So, are you up for digging further into the underpinnings of this puppy to figure out how it works and possibly come up with a few meta-data driven enhancements to the current user experience?

I’ll take your silence as a yes. Alright, let’s get to it then.

Old School, Structured Meta-Data

Deconstructing music (as an information object) is pretty straight-forward, as each song comes with standardized attributes that neatly fit into industry-wide delivery and marketing mechanisms (which were established well prior to the explosion of the dynamic nature of the web).

Okay, first, let’s list the most commonly exposed and explicit attributes of a song. My top six would be:

• Artist name
• Song Name
• Album name
• Release Date
• Track Length
• Genre

Now, while the first five attributes are all explicitly defined — the artist’s name is the artist’s name, etc. — the sixth attribute (genre) is only explicit when viewed through the lens of the music industry’s nomenclature levers (a song that I consider to be hip-hop, someone else might call rap, while the music industry itself might label it as pop).

By managing the evolution and edification of genre nomenclature, the music industry uses these silos to market acts with a much greater degree of certainty in matching the expectations of the customer because the music industry is creating those very expectations themselves through this process.

Deep, huh?

So back to deconstruction; let’s see how Musicovery is leveraging these primary attributes (if at all):

• Each song displays the artists name
• Album name isn’t exposed
• The controller interface allows the user to narrow results by decade or specific year based on the release date
• Track length isn’t exposed
• Genre is displayed prominently in the controller as the primary filter of returned songs

Two of the six most prominent song attributes aren’t being used, yet there’s a preponderance of controller functionality left to discuss.

Something else is going on.

Meta-Data In The Digital World

The aforementioned attributes of the song object have been around forever; they are the core identifiers for a song and always will be. As I mentioned before, the music industry has become extremely efficient in managing the relationships between these attributes across an expanding universe of songs — it’s their lifeblood. This particular set of meta-data fit the strategy of the analog age of information — where meta-data was constrained to the physical dimensions of the record’s liner notes or the pages of an industry magazine.

Now, in the Information Age, there are truly no limits to the amount or types of meta-data that can be generated; the only limitation — from a practical, business perspective — would be in how these new attributes fit into the domain’s value equation.

So, because the folks behind Musicovery have focused on creating a radio application that exposes music in particular ways (other than shuffled programming or human dj’ing), it’s a solid bet that they’ve expanded upon their meta-data set.

The Nitty-Gritty Attribute Model

In order to return a song by clicking on a specific spot in the mood or dance interfaces, the quadrants need to be explicitly defined to hook up with corresponding attributes applied to songs in the Musicovery universe. So what type of attributes would we need to add to each song? Here’s one approach:

Mood Interface

• Dark to Positive attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Calm to Energetic attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Dance Interface

• Dance (-) to Dance (+) attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Tempo (-) to Tempo (+) attribute scale (-5-,4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The range could be much more refined than 11 data points — theoretically, it could be as refined as equating to the number of pixels that reside in the actual interface — but due to the current size of the song universe (it seems limited, as I get repeat results somewhat often) and the already subjective nature of assigning such attributes to songs, this degree of differentiation would probably suffice.

Now, let’s take the mood interface and chop it up along these lines to visualize how each song could be found in this manner:

That’s pretty much it.

So while there are numerous choices one could make in the presentation (depending on the size of the song universe, the visualization would span out to neighboring squares to present a full return, etc.), in order for a song to be accessible by any aspect of the Musicovery interface, each song object would simply need to have the following structured data applied to it:

• Artist name
• Song Name
• Release Date
• Genre
• Dark to Positive attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Calm to Energetic attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Dance (-) to Dance (+) attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Tempo (-) to Tempo (+) attribute scale (-5-,4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• A Billboard ranking (0,1) in order to display whether the song was a hit or not

Most of these data points could be data entry for a trained monkey, but the scaled meta-data is such a subjective determination that the resulting experience will vary from person to person.

Aside from scouring for top, authoritative talent like Kennedy (eh, for early 90’s music) and pay her thousands upon thousands of dollars to “moodize” and “dancize” each song and then splash her grill on the interface to pimp the brand, what else could we do to improve the resulting experience?

If you know me at all, you know where I’m going with this.

Why have only one person or team from one domain attributing mood or dance settings to all music, when the openness of the web has already proven models for empowering each user with the ability to add their own meta-data to the mix if they should chose to do so?

Open Up The Gates

Way back in the day, Launch.com (now Yahoo! Music) was the king of the internet radio scene. And while I dug being able to subscribe to other user’s services through their social network, my favorite feature, by far, was the ability to rate my music on a 0 (never play again) to 100 scale, in increments of 1.

Sure, maybe 101 levels was over the top, but future playback of my favorite music was amazingly accurate. Now, what if Musicovery allowed this same type of two-way interaction?

Here’s an example scenario:

I just clicked on the mood interface between the energetic and dark nomenclature. The first song that returned was Joe Cocker, With A Little Help From My Friends.

Really? Dark and energetic? I don’t think so. But as it is, I can’t affect the centralized intelligence of Musicovery. I just have to take their recommendations at face value.

Now, what if we were to add user input into the song interface?

Once we added our perspective on mood, the system could return the results to the information object and use the input in two ways.

• The meta-data could be lumped into all user feedback to present a more representative mood interface — the wisdom of the crowd if you will
• It could also be used to present personal mood results, from a toggle setting in the interface

If the song universe was large enough, we could add a similar rating control that Launch employed, so not only would our mood expectations be met, we’d hear our favorite songs more often as well.

Fun stuff.

I had a meeting yesterday over lunch with a client of mine — Louis Bowles of locally based Louis’ Healthy Breads. Louis, John Ford and I are in the midst of planning a web strategy for his small business; an execution that will include the implementation of a blog and a redesign of his e-commerce enabled site.

At first glance, the scope of the project seemed extremely manageable and somewhat simplistic — essentially, it’s a blog with a product template and a tie-in to PayPal’s fulfillment processing. Over the past few months, though, I’ve come to recognize that the challenge of the project isn’t in its technical complexity or feature set, rather, it’s in pulling off the personable nature of the brand.

When Shiny, Shiny Design Doesn’t Work

Louis didn’t start his company to make short-term killer profits (though, I’m sure he wouldn’t turn them away); Louis took his creation to market because, quite honestly, it saved his life and he feels that people need great tasting, healthy aternatives in their diet.

My challenge is translating that degree of authenticity into the experience design of his web site.

Chris Fahey just posted the sixth installment of a brilliantly focused series entitled Class and Web Design. The ensuing conversation regarding the impact of class on the output of design is fascinating (read the posts and comment threads; I could never do it justice here). While I doubt “class” is the proper signifier for categorizing Louis’ concerns about coming off like a cold, mass-produced food industry giant, to Chris’ point, a company’s outwardly focused brand position is intrinsically tied to their target (and if they’re responsive, their actual) market.

Just take a look at the redesign of (and the conversation surrounding) the New York Post for an example:

As The Post shoots for local readers with specific desires of sports, entertainment and gossip coverage (all big type desires), Louis’ brand needs to register as if he’s your next-door neighbor — someone who deeply cares about your health and just so happens to have a busy kitchen at work to help you make sensible, delectable choices.

Does that mean the design of the site needs to be overly pedestrian? Not at all, but as with the example of The Post redesign, it needs to remain true to its core principles of Louis being Louis. The visual language of the site needs to reflect his engaging personality, while presenting a strong enough degree of credibility for people to latch onto.

The beauty of this project is that there’s enough room to play and enough leeway to iterate.

Design Basics

Subtraction is the standard approach to good design and focused communication — particularly within the interactive medium — so it’s essential that we reduce the brand to a distinct visual language and behavioral model that clearly communicates with the people who benefit the most from the product.

And because we’re adding the communicative element of the blog to the mix — somethat that will improve our responsiveness in meeting customer needs and steering the direction of the brand — the last thing we want to do is bury the product behind a conversation about the product.

With a brand as personal as LHB, we’re going to have to tow the line between authenticity and credibility. Prioritized simplicity, both visual and organizational, is key in making a step in that direction.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Sometimes the biggest challenges come wrapped in the smallest packages.

Over the years, I’ve spent a bit of my time writing about Amazon.com — ranging from posts critiquing their interaction model and interface design to propping their innovative, explorative iterations that have changed both online commerce and the web in general in extremely positive ways.

So someone, anyone, please explain to me what they’re thinking with this Unbox service model?

Cory Doctorow absolutely dissected their user agreement today, so I won’t spend any energy on that front. Read his article for the lowdown on their attempts of intrusion into your computer and your ownership rights.

After I read his post, I jumped over to Amazon to see for myself what all the bitching was about. Below is a sample Unbox product screen-shot:

(click for larger image)

The first thing I looked for was the user agreement that Cory tore to shreds, and in finding it next to the 1-Click button, something seemed odd.

1-Click isn’t enabled on my Amazon account.

Not jumping to conclusions, I figured that maybe I turned on 1-Click during one of my many visits to Amazon over the past few months, so I navigated over to my 1-Click settings.

Hm, turned off like I thought.

Thinking that there had to be some explanation about this default switch, I dove into their (well designed) help section and pulled up the 1-Click page. Guess what? Not a mention of Unbox anywhere.

So let me get this straight:

• Amazon unleashes Unbox, which installs what is essentially spyware on my computer in order to manage the DRM of the product
• Average users who are used to clicking on the Add to Shopping Cart button and backing out of the sales process if they’d like, are surprised with a no turnaround 1-Click setting
• Once the user buys media from Unbox, they are automatically stuck with abiding by the user agreement, which details how the spyware/DRM software is added to the host computer

Forget tricking people into making a purchase they don’t want — that’s easy to deal with — if I didn’t know any better, I’d venture to say that Amazon initiated the default 1-Click setting in order to get as many people as possible to engage in their crazy ass user agreement and initiate the installation of their software on our machines.

Tell us otherwise, Amazon, or I imagine that you’re about to feel the fury of a bunch of early adopters. And that goes much deeper in affecting your brand than a temporary drop of sales.

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.

Bill Readings introduced me to linguistics back in my undergraduate days at Syracuse University. It was a low-level Critical Theory class, not enough knowledge to rest a proper degree upon, but that wasn’t Bills concern. He just wanted us to listen and think.

Bill had a wonderful way of illustrating his teachings — placing our 19 year-old minds into comfortable arenas where we could casually move towards comprehension, eventually grasping the core concepts of deconstructionalism and linguistics he tossed about with ease.

After choosing Blade Runner as an explicit assignment for visual deconstruction, and his daily, illustrative call-outs of us numskulls to apply a “bit more apperception to your day-to-day existence,” I’d have to say the strongest, most visceral lesson that stuck with me was his conversation around the English word “tree” and the Spanish word “arbol.”

An Attempt To Share Knowledge

To monolingual, English speaking folk first exposed to the authority of the Spanish translation, the inherent belief is that the two terms (English and Spanish) are perfect representations of the signifier, “tree”… which is wrong.

The signifier of “tree” is more akin to your personal mental model of the physical representation of:

original photos by icathing and Melete

Viewed through the lens of semiology and linguistics, we cannot absolutely assert that tree = arbol, because the signifier of “tree” has a unique representative interface to each of us, as does the percept of the translation of “arbol.”

Our individuality is too explicit to absolutely relate to explicit terminology.

Or put into political terms, in this society of modern constructs — one that consistently nudges us towards silos of absolute knowledge, relationships and definition — we are presupposed to assign relative constructs of our world to get by, based on what, in essence, is an aggregate misunderstanding of our own individual cognitive processing.

Back to the tree example; Roland Barthes on Saussure:

Until he found the words signifier and signified, however, sign remained ambiguous, for it tended to become identified with the signifier only, which Saussure wanted at all costs to avoid; after having hesitated between some and seme, form and idea, image and concept, Saussure settled upon signifier and signified, the union of which forms the sign.

Nowadays, whenever I stumble upon a conversation about knowledge and structure — such as Are trees natural? over at David Weinberger’s blog — the information architect within me rests in a state of nirvana, coaxed into releasing control by his neighbor, the experience designer.

Each day we rely on our own trees of knowledge — branches of immeasurable directions and depth, overlapping and crossing one another to form meshed nests of position. The common faith we tend to hold regarding knowledge, is in the strength to overlap our individual trees with one another; the more the overlap, the more the homogenous culture, driving civil movement within this complex ecosystem and jungle we’ve created for ourselves.

Well, some people seem to prescribe to such theories.

In the midst of this information revolution, when we engage in the practice of tagging our information objects, we’re not only engaging in an activity to increase the discovery of our position via the use of common signifiers, we’re implicitly participating in a form of expression — painting our personal mental model of our signified constructs onto the sign itself.

In turn, the degree of shared context an individual holds on the receiving end, determines the degree to which her reception of the sign becomes explicit communication.

Enabled by technology, we can now easily add descriptive tags to the aggregate objects of words, colors, sounds and movement delivered more directly to the branches of each other’s trees. In this flip scenario of retrieval, we now rapidly stumble across these additions, assigning them as variants of welcome or disruptive bits of information.

In any case, our common trees of knowledge are being affected… they are evolving.

To this day, these particular words of Ferdinad de Saussure cannot escape my purview:

In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain soley the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is of some degree or other the concern of everyone.

photo by heather allison

If Bill hadn’t stepped into the wrong plane at the wrong time in the fall of 1994, he would’ve witnessed rapid advancements of the inner-workings of the web — specifically the participatory meshing of topics, interests, desires and perspectives via individual and social tagging through citizen blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc.

The post-modern, knowledge craving, subversive side of Bill would be beaming right about now… just about as brightly as the multinational, career for-hire professor.

In the name of knowledge, and a hat-tip to my mentor, I think I’ll be busy late into the evening this October 30th.

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.

Building a successful UX team — the right mix of roles, responsibilities, method, etc. — isn’t an easy task. It really does depend on the DNA of the organization (size, politics, legacy issues, etc.) and the type of domain (application, information centric site, desktop software, etc.).

Here’s a visual outline that I tried to follow at Ameritrade — an extremely secure, authenticated trading platform, with unique opportunities for collaborative filtering, interface customization, sussinct client messaging and knowledge management (both on the unauthenticated and authenticated areas of the site).

If I had to do it all over again, here are the top three things I would’ve done differently:

Reduced the emphasis on methodology
Due to the placement of the team in the org, the legacy of design within the domain and the lack of designer input in modeling requirement documents, I pushed to implement a flexible, yet smart, IxD Goal-Directed methodology. I probably would’ve still sought to implement a similar methodology, but I wouldn’t have pushed so hard to get it.

Introduced blogging as a means for knowledge sharing
KM is such a terrible term. In essence, an outward facing blog with a solid search engine and a rich tag approach could’ve served as both a conversation point for speaking with clients and providing answers to non-client account related questions. Internally, we could’ve dropped our stiff, architected KM tool with central controls and replaced it with internal blogs for every employee.

Focused on research, behavior, information contextuality, design and presentation
Editorial is *such* a complience issue within the financial industry, collaboration with designers on interfaces was beyond difficult to manage. I probably would’ve traded that card for the client-side team, where the rubber of behavior and design explicitly hits the road of server-side code.

Live and learn ;-)

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.

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(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)