Portability is the new pointworthy: Why links won't matter

I often advise teams creating content to focus on doing what is worth pointing at - the pointworthy.What I mean by this is that the web is awash with repeated press releases.

They don't stand out so you're less likely to have your half-heartedly re-written and rushed-out version pointed at by the fickle citizens of the web than something they find genuinely, stand-out, useful (and relevant).

Do loads of what everyone is doing and you're lost in the blur. Do the right stuff and other people will point you out.

But, with the shift towards portability in rss, widgets, gadgets, apps (etc) distribution becomes more complex; less about a central destination from which to broadcast (and to which to be pointed) and more about networks of people looking at and sharing among each other.

In the world of user as destination we have to think about a web in which links don't matter.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Links perform a fantastic task in extending networks of trust. They point people who are interested in one piece of content, or one person's view, at another they might find useful.

They did a great job at discovering people through content.

But we're entering a world in which content is discovered through people.

Here being pointed at is less important than being taken with.

Of course you still have to have something useful and relevant for someone to choose to take your service or content with them.

And your service or message should be adaptable by the receiver so they can better shape it to be relevant to the community of purpose they are currently interacting with.

The rules that make something pointworthy remain true. You can't just make your press releases into an rss, for example.

But portability is the new linking.

It's how we share stuff with each other, through our connections with and to each other.Users are off on their own journeys and if you aren't ready or useful enough to be taken with them and shared among them, you'll be left on your own.

By the way, you can take FasterFuture with you (latest posts and tweets) in the widget you'll find at the bottom of the left column.

Twitter vs FriendFeed: Conversation vs Convenience?

Twitter has been suffering growing pains in recent days and weeks. Outages aplenty.

I noticed they are trying to control things by switching off some functionality from time to time. And what they choose to switch off indicates what they see of least value.

When times are hard, it is the archive, of previous posts, and direct messaging which get booted out.

Turning off the archive shows that they recognise the primary importance of synchronous communication. You might be interested in what someone said in the past, or what they were asking about in the past, but you can respond less effectively now than you could at the time the request or share was made. Twitter gets that; being prepared to drop anything to assist with a community of purpose is high on the list of useful value creating stuff.
Dropping IM's indicates they also understand that closed communications have less value than open.

This thinking pervades twitter and drips from its architecture.
They are all about the current, right now conversation and connecting people.

Blogs were described by Doc Searls as the best example of the sovereign self. Twitter (distributed microblogging), imho is the best example of our communal selves.

FriendFeed, surely makes that conversation even more communal, with its aggregation and friend-of-a-friend/fuzzy-edged groups form of sharing and distribution?

No wonder some tout it as the next-gen twitter. But I wonder if it is more about convenience than conversation?

Some have described FriendFeed (and I'll add links when I have more time - sorry) as distributed conversation.
I'm not clear that's delivered. At least it isn't delivered in the right-now and in one place synchronous way that twitter values so highly.

What FriendFeed does deliver is the convenience of compiling and redistributing huge amounts of an individual's metadata.

Not only do you get to see what I'm 'doing' on twitter, you also see the feeds I'm reading on googlereader, or videos I post on youtube, or images on flickr etc etc.

So now there's even more reasons for conversations to start.
More metadata on show to each other means more opportunities for us to find we share a right-now purpose and act on it. (Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21s century).

All good. But there's a risk in distributing the conversation. Where ever you follow the flag to, that's where the conversation risks being taken - and silo'd.

Twitter's value is in keeping the conversation open, visible, synchronous and consistent.

Friendfeed is a useful broadcast of our metadata - and potentially a step towards us becoming the url. The key will be connecting the conversations in a coherent human-focused way.

Right now the conversation is at risk of being disrupted more than distributed.

So I'll happily broadcast my metadata through FriendFeed, and have others broadcast their metadata at me, but when the conversation flags are raised where will the conversation be hosted which creates most value for all parties.

For this post, I'm hoping it'll be right here. If FriendFeed were to offer me that control...

More questions than answers I'm afraid.

Build a widget! Experience the disruption of distribution

I made my very own widget last night. It's very simple, made up of drag and drop elements and click-to-add bits from Sprout.
It's the orange box in the left hand col of my blog; Signature Posts.
I find it useful because it tidies up a bit of my blog and means if (and it's a big if, I'll grant) someone wants the 10 posts I currently select as representations of my thinking, they can display it on their own page/space (rather than take my latest which anyone of course can select using rss feeds).

The process of DIY reinforced something very important for me, as it so often does.
Just as I learn so much about the simple fact we are all content creators now by writing this blog, so I learn, from first hand experience, that we are all distributors now by creating a widget.
As I often say, don't just witness the power of the network – if you want to evolve to survive in this world then you have to live in its environment.

The mass distribution model found at the heart of mass media does not work here.
Build a widget for yourself to find out why.

I'd worked this out before now. But creating my own widget and trying to guess who might choose to share it, to pass it on, reveals the new challenges and opportunities for media.
Our old model is based on building destinations and harvesting eyeballs.

Think about this in the context of traditional advertising (and by association we'll realise we face the same issues with content, because as we discover over and over again, in this world they are heading towards becoming the same thing).

My first thought, on discovering that I can build my own basic widget (I don't code) and publish it, and all for free, was to consider ways the media company I work for could take advantage of this for low risk experiments in widget making.

Quick easy option: RSS feeds gathered into an easy-grab widget users can place where they choose. In other words disaggregation of our content for those who find the technical barrier of RSS still a little high.

This extends our reach and (if we limit the rss character count) it calls those interested in particular content back to our sites where they could be fed in-context related ads. All good.

But what about revenue models that integrate with the widget itself?

When I choose to distribute a widget that's been made on Sprout every iteration carries a link back to Sprout. Want to make your own? Click here?

Every youtube video functions in a similar way.

And if you have adsense on your page there's even a straightforward ad model to go with that.

But at the end of the day the ad and the content are regarded as separate entities. The distribution of the ad message is reliant upon users choosing to view and to participate in the distribution of editorial content.

What if the advert was the content the user chose to distribute? That suddenly raises the bar, doesn't it?

Would anyone choose to place 95% of 30-second slot TV, banner ads and the usual 'creative' solutions on their own (user-generated) content? Would they choose to grab it from where they see it and share it with others?

Oddly enough they kind of do in the Itsmy.com model. Users get to choose if they would like ads on their UGC and if they do, then they can choose which ads. It neatly turns the who-wishes-to-be-associated-with-whom model on its head.

But it could be stronger still if the marketing industry played its part. The majority of advertising isn't meant for individual selection. It is mud slung at a wall to see what sticks.

The ad industry can't make an ad to suit every individual though, can it? That would be mad, wouldn't it? Except that it can with widgets.

Chris Cunningham's point made at Widgety Goodness (Chris is speaking at WidgetWebExpo in NYC in June, an event I've advised on) was that personal outcome is all important.

Sprout's tools are great for those of us seeking to extend reach, to broadcast through a series of niche channels with the intention of a mass result, but unless you allow each receipient to create their own iteration it remains a broadcast solution, not a networked one.

Take my simple widget (please!); it is an editorialised version of how widgets should be. First – I've decided the content. I have edited your choice, I've been the filter on the way in.

And that's hardly enabling a personalised outcome.

I would have preferred to make it a 'my favourite faster future post chooser' in which you could make up your personal outcome from the full selection. Maybe ones that get chosen more often would rise to the top of the list the community of users is then offered? You get the general idea.

The widget should allow you to make the choice. That which we create we embrace. If you participate in the process you're more likely to share the outcome and to actively promote it.

This is obviously true of the marketing too. I am more likely to choose to display the results of my personal choice of content and my personalised version of that content (ad message).

Its worth noting that this works because we live digitally in a community context. It's what the network is all about. There would be little point in me sharing what I think is cool unless I expect you might, too. We do this sharing within our networks of trust. Just as we share links in twitter or thoughts on blogposts. If you've found this it is because we share some interests.

There is residual mass media thinking in the notion that you should create a place on the web for people to show off what they have done (all those personal outcomes) as if just anyone, any old set of eyeballs, might be interested.

The real value is in the sharing of results with friends, who will be interested because that personal outcome involves a friend - in whom they are personally interested.

Then if they take the results and create their own personalised iteration, they'll have friends they may choose to share with, and so the iterations repeat, amplifying the original.

The outcome relies heavily on three things:
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

Kind of different from mass marketing, huh?

2 and 3 are in place. Are you ready for No1?

Has media forgotten what it does?

It goes without saying (but I'm going to say it anyway) that paper has had a huge influence on the way print media developed. But I wonder if we take for granted the huge influence the medium we have grown up with has had on how we are viewing our digital future?

Paper is finite.

That simple fact leads to a number of outcomes. For example; there is a cost involved in adding extra pages to a publication. Paper constrains how much we can publish and therefore what we choose to publish. Paper demands that we are selective - that we edit. We filter the world's information and publish only that which we see fit. And then we make it fit, the way we see fit.

We filter on the way in.

We place ourselves in a self-selecting position of authority. It's a seat we find hard to give up.

We do this, of course, from a perspective of 'serving the needs of the consumer'. We aim to give them what they want. It is in our financial interests so to do.

But the needs of the consumer have to fight for resources with the demands imposed by the medium. And the medium tends to win.

Paper has mass.

This creates distribution challenges. We have to move this mass from one place to another (driven by an initial transcation). We do our best to distribute it to distribution hubs (we call them shops) where we hope the supply chain can be completed with another transaction (which puts them in the hands of the consumer.

These facts (paper is finite and has mass) mean we are forced to serve consumers as large, lowest-common-denominator-driven groups. Paper's physical nature imposes a structural limitation on what print media does and how it must treat its users.

It is conceivably possible that each consumer could have a magazine crafted precisely for themselves, to meet their precise needs. All it would take is a dedicated team of content producers (and in the print world this means employing a team of writers, photographers, designers and sub-editors), a one-off print run and a delivery direct to the lucky receipient's door.

There is nothing standing in the way of that. Nothing but cost.

If you're prepared to pay multiple thousands for each issue of your magazine you can have what the digital space can give you right now (where you'd get it for free). It'll just take a while to deliver.

Print never felt there was much of a market for that. So it created content aimed toward the lowest common denominator (granted, niche by niche on occasion).

It distributed to reach as many as possible with as little waste as possible - but still found 20-25% of its output pulped. The need to drive down unit cost make us err towards a mass production approach. It forces us to think locally, too. (Distributing a newspaper globally is something of a challenge precisely because of that mass and cost thing.)

Consider then how digital is different.

Digital space is infinite. There is zero cost attached in adding an extra page. There is therefore no need to filter on the way in. There is therefore no reason for us to be selective, no cause for us to take up our seat upon our self-appointed editorial throne. The user gets to filter on the way out.

Digital has no mass. There are zero costs to distribution. We don't need supply chains or distribution hubs in the physical sense. Distribution can be pulled to those who want it, distributed by those who advocate it. And it can happen everywhere right now.

Now you can have your ultra personalised content at zero cost - and you can have it this very instant, updated the moment relevant change occurs. It's unlikey you'll do this alone, because you are a human being and hard-wired to be social.

When we think of the role of media in the digital world, are we considering what is equivalent to newspapers and magazines (that is media properties) in digital form - or do we want to become the paper (the medium)?

Is the platform approach (and it's one I advocate myself) about trying to be the digital equivalent of paper? Bearing in mind digital 'paper' has no mass and is limitless, would we be better off delivering brilliantly creative media properties closer in form to user accounts than to social networks?

My initial thoughts are that we may may have multiple roles - as nuancers of the culture (helping with collaborative filtering) in a platform/aggregational style AND as brilliant media properties (of the user account kind) where we become part of the conversation, pulled into someone else's aggregator or platform.

Who says it has to be either/or? The digital world offers more dimensions than we've had to consider before.

Please contribute your thoughts by commenting below.