Concepts Are King

The phrase 'Content is King' has a long history. Its origination is usually ascribed to one Bill Gates from a 1996 article. Smart dude.

But I suspect it goes back rather longer. Those of us with a traditional media background always knew it was the content people bought our stuff for, for example.

Then there was the build - that not Content, but Conversation is King. Cory Doctorow memorably put it that "Conversation is King... Content is just something to talk about."

Content is pointless without conversation. Conversation needs 'something to talk about'.
Neither is king. It's the interaction of people and ideas that drives us to action. The web has lowered the barrier for millions to interact with ideas.

And no one is describing what they are interacting with as 'content'. In fact 'content' has some rather unhelpful connotations in the context of what the web is best at enabling - ie adhoc self-forming groups of purpose.

Content implies constraint; An idea boxed and kept within - a thing inside with limitations.
This isn't how people behave with ideas. We take, shape, add, delete, remodel - hack ideas in our every interaction. And the web is a splendid evolutionary environment for them.

So I'm going to suggest Concepts Are King is a better 'catch-all' for what is really important in connecting folk. I can take your boxed up piece of content and share it, of course. That's old-style viral. Pass it on unmolestered. Don't expect evolution.

Or I can connect with and play with a concept. We can.

And in so doing we add value - not mere distribution.

Image attribution: By Enoch Lau (Own work (photo)) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The dash from convergence and how the web can save us if we choose

I wonder if the proliferation of devices we are experiencing give us a hint about what will happen to the web?

A few years back – when the first smart phones were making inroads, when the first all-you-can-eat mobile data deals were laid before a hungry audience, then it seemed to make perfect sense that convergence would arrive via the device.

Hell, I have a phone that can take picture, tell the time, calculate, run my diary... open documents, access my email, access the internet, play games and music, play video, show broadcast tv etc etc. Why wouldn’t we think one device could do it all?

And here I am packing a few items for some days away on business and finding it essential that I load up with a laptop, ipad, kindle fire AND iphone (4S)...

Little sign of convergence here. And I’ve never given up on wearing a watch either.

But platforms? Despite the vast variety of opportunity, there are only ever a handful of giants. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, for example

All start off with relatively focused aims. But over time they bloat – copying the ideas of others, assuming that the battle is on for the one social home we will become and remain loyal to.

But the more they bloat, the more we see the value in the specific, the more we spill out into those with greater focus on specific needs – the Pinterests, Instagrams, 4Squares of this world – and the thousands more behind them in the long tail.

I wonder if, given just a little more bloating from the big boys, we may rediscover the self-forming-group value of the web – that we need less direction and guidelines from those who would be our internet, and more purpose from ourselves to make our connectedness count.

The dash from convergence in devices may be yet another indicator that we are more comfortable with complexity than the reductionists would have us believe, that we value niche over lowest common denominator in a very powerful way.

And that’s a good thing – because it’s a much better match with the infinite variety of adhoc self-forming groups the web is built to enable.

The web is our salvation from the bland, from the mass, from the uniform. If we want it to be.

Click the 'incorporate this group' button

"The idea of membership has gone away.  Facebook is not very good at dealing with  named groups, they’re not very good at saying, “We’ve got this book club and I’m a member and you’re not.” But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action. My bet is that the group pattern — the named group that can do things like open a bank account or take some kind of coordinated action in the world — is an overlooked pattern that someone is going to reinvent."
Clay Shirky in Wired

As ever - another powerful insight from Clay. This speaks to the belief that what the internet is brilliant at is enabling groups to form around what matters to them.
That lowers the cost of action. But that lowering could be further supported by formalising membership.
Imagine an 'incorporate this group' button, which, if clicked by enough members, signs them up to be part of a co-operative group working to achieve X and sharing in the benefits of its provision. It would enshrine an agreement between those members about its functions and intent.

Life may never become quite that simple, but that's the principle we're looking at here.
Clay isn't saying our desire for membership has gone away - but that our ability to make that meaningful has been neglected by the platforms we've had so far.

To enable all the value that self-forming groups can deliver, that neglect will have to end.

Related articles

• Clay Shirky: There Are No Rules To Creativity [Video]

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• Clay Shirky: How we will read, and how we will publish

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• On Bubbles, Facebook, and Playing for Keeps: 10 Questions With Clay Shirky

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The end of The Age of Being Told What To Do

Image via Flickr - and free to share anywhere!

The end of one of Britain's oldest newspapers marks the end of the Age of Being Told What To Do.
British politician's must be privately sighing with relief (or more likely laughing themselves dizzy). Because this spells out if not the end of the power of press barons, a very significant reduction in it.
The News of the World is one of NewsCorps. Part of the vast Murdoch media empire. It is an empire which has given the Murdochs huge power. They have used it to threaten, cajole, instal and topple Governments. They backed one party or another - and went on witch hunts and mud-slinging exercises to attack those who they did not annoint. Through this they have seeked to control how we are governed.
Successive generations of Britain's leaders have cow-towed to this power. It's been embarrassing to see them cringe before Rupert and Co.
Now politicians are waking to the realisation that Murdoch's media power has gone - and that learning has to impact every press baron remaining on the planet.
The rapid and angry response of the people took down the News of the World - destroying the brand. And that response was only able to grow, aggregate and self-organise to impressive effect because of the social tools now at our disposal - the social media. We didn't need to be told how to think, or what to do.
A community of purpose organised and created change, fast. The web lowers the cost of group forming. But the important bit is that these aren't any old groups. These are groups of people with shared purposes: Communities.
And communities lower the cost of getting things done.
No longer is the power at the centre - it is at the edge.
We, the edge, the self-organised, have achieved what Governments could not - we have brought the press barons to heel.
Of course there will be emergent clusters and clumps of influence, flocks to be turned in the peer to peer world where influence now resides. We don't all have equal influence - power if you like - all of the time. But it is us, the edge that will do the flock turning.
Messages are no longer done to us, but done by us - or at the very least with our considered consent. We will share what we choose to share - and that is the only way in which information will flow in this space. We will no longer be told what to think by a huge source of power at the centre - we will influence each other.
But before the politicians raise a glass of champagne to the demise of the media baron, they must also note that their fate remains in the hands of exactly the same forces. They may believe they are the power at the centre but unless they take rapid steps to open up to the people they represent - and relinquish the control that dominates the current model - they will go the way of the News of the World and of the press barons.

Related articles

• The end of the News of the World (theglobeandmail.com)
• Murdoch Empire at Risk (thedailybeast.com)
• Why News Corp.'s Fukushima-Style Clean-Up of Its Phone-Hacking Scandal is Doomed (adage.com)

Don't blame Twitter for bending to 'the man' - we all know it'll make no difference

If you want an illustration of the fruitlessness, and indeed illusion, of control from the centre, just follow what happens with the whole wikileaks witch hunt as it plays out.

Some of the traditional corporations, legislatures and judiciaries (and more corporate dependent denizens of the web) have rapidly folded to demands from the centre (the US and other Western governments) as that centre lashes out against wikileaks sharing information the centre feels the rest of us have no right to.

I'm not here to argue the rights or wrongs of that, by the way, many others follow the intricacies more closely and are better able to comment on that than I.

What I do know is that when Mastercard, Paypal and even Amazon pull the plug on wikileaks you know it is because they have come under pressure from the centre. And that's hard to resist when you rely on the corporate norm for your paycheck.

Tonight the ante was raised as Twitter started suspending accounts and - remarkably - removed wikileaks from the trending topics.

Suddenly those for freedom feel even the open web and its uberlords are cowtowing.

Panic not. And don't blame Twitter, Facebook or any other pressured party.

I'm pretty damn sure the guys at Twitter et al are wise enough to the self organising nature of the internet to know that a blockage here and a restriction there is soon worked around. Intelligent networks have ways of reforming.

The internet was developed to survive nuclear war. I'm sure it'll survive the best efforts of even the most zealous of politicians.

Central control is not an option. Never was.

So if the guys at Twitter or elsewhere throw the hapless politicos a sop here and there - don't blame them. They'll be doing it with fingers crossed behind their back and in the full knowledge that it'll make little difference in the very near term - that the network will reorganise and self-organise around whatever restrictions it faces.

Related articles

• Anons knock down Mastercard in Wikileaks feud (inquisitr.com)
• WikiLeaks supporters hack Mastercard.com (telegraph.co.uk)
• 4chan Attacks MasterCard, PayPal and More In Defense of WikiLeaks (techie-buzz.com)

2020 vision

I know. I'm meant to review the last decade or predict what'll happen in the next year around this time.

Thing is, I'm not going to follow the rules, because for the years following 2009 it simply wouldn't be appropriate to follow rules which may have applied up to this point.

We're in for a big change: Where the noughties were a decade of discovery, the teens will be a decade of realisation. And not discovery of new tech. The future isn't digital; it is self-organised.

The noughties were when we discovered our self-organising power - little by little. And new models started to emerge.

But we are embarking on 10 years in which people all over the globe will realise the self-organising power now at their fingertips - and start turning that realisation into the world they want; niche by niche.

Which means everything you know is up for grabs. Everything.

Everything that is organised or mediated can and will be disrupted by this.

That's pretty much every aspect of society, then. (image courtesy Life Archive on google)

As the realisation dawns, you can be certain no one will be talking about 'social media' anymore. They will just get on with using the best ever set of tools and platforms to communicate: With each other, find each other, form groups, act.

They won't wait to be directed. They will simply come together and debug their world. Niche by niche. The edge in action.

Which is bad news for those who would organise and those who would mediate.

It's not just traditional media, advertising, marketing etc that's going to be replaced. Even the 'new media' stuff that relies on central organisation is threatened. Traditional search (for example) is already being replaced for many by collaborative filtering.

Ubiquitous, always-on computing will arrive as the enabler. Digital social tools which allow us to express meta data beyond silos (including language) will emerge to enable all of us to find all of us when we need each other most. Those tools and platforms which fulfil those roles most successfully will be those with the best chance of commercial success.

And by 2020 we will have the tech and the will to make communities of purpose the primary form of organisation: adhoc self-forming groups brought together to collaborate - driven by common purpose.

The self-organised future will begin taking shape, new structures for education, law, government - all the aparatus of the state - will emerge. And as they do the state itself, as a formalised centrally-controlled collective based on geography, will submerge.

This new form of organisation will over-ride more traditional methods primarily because it provides a more effective tool for the allocation of increasingly scarce resources. But also because people like doing stuff together. It's a better fit with the reality of our social selves.

Lowest common denominator models will disappear wherever communities of purpose can self-organise (which is pretty much everywhere and anytime).

One example? Mass party politics will decline. New democracy will formulate in open systems - with collaboration delivering a better fit, niche by niche,

In repeatedly failing to understand the cross-border collaboration of 'their' people, our national leaders remind us of the failure of lowest common denominator politics and broad and assumed national interests.

The issue of global warming may prove a key catalyst. We gave our leaders the chance to sort things out with their big, broad, one-size fits all policies (they found that none did).

In a decade of realisation we move beyond being passive consumers in all aspects of our lives - government policy included.

We won't sit back and wait for the centre's solution. Instead we quietly and determinedly get on with wikifixing our world - collaborating across borders, ignoring the fictional silos the nation state has imagined and attempted to impose.

The impact of the edge on the centre has the potential to be cataclysmic. If change from without happens faster than change from within, something will tear. Fundamental organisational change is hard to imagine as a gentle process.

Judging when to cede control will be a key skill for leaders of all organisations in the coming years. Protecting the vulnerable, another.

My daughter has just finished her first term of traditional schooling. I have to wonder if she will complete her education (what a curious pre-network phrase...) within a similar lowest-common-denominator structure. And if she doesn't - then how does the morph from old to new happen? With a meeting of a parents collective and nods of assent - or with teachers manning the barricades?

There is much to consider; much I (and we) could strive to predict.

Instead, in the words of BBC Childrens TV long gone (and with more than a nod to Clay Shirky's Gin-swilling tales of newly industrial London), Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? Start inventing the self-organised future - niche by niche - with someone you care about, today.

By 2020 a person's worth will be valued by what they share, not what they keep. That may be the most significant shift of all.

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• Now Entering The Second Dark Age? (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
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Five things I'm really fed up of

Five things I'm really fed up of:

1. Businesses insisting on massaging (messaging?) the humanity out of their best efforts to communicate with humans. There's a kind of insanity in that which is beyond grotesque.
2. The desparation for certainty. The world has always been adhoc, hard to measure and unwilling to yield to your command and control simplicity. Learn to love the opportunity within the cloud of 'vague'.
3. The allure 'mass' still has despite our niche know-how and why. Twitter trends; 'ooh I'm on the tele', 'I've got more friends/followers than you' - you know it doesn't make sense. Just let go.
4. Those who think they can 'use' us (that's me and you, kid) as a channel. 
5. Anyone who thinks the conversation is trivial. They belittle what it is to be human and the value we place on relationships. Their loss.

and... breathe. (image courtesy)

Oh go on then, tell me what you're fed up of.

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Why traditional advertising won't work in social networks - and what will

Finally got round to doing a slidedeck which I hope graphically demonstrates why traditional ad models are bound to fail in social networks.
It also illustrates the ways messages ought to be released into the wild if you expect them to survive (succeed) in a group-forming environment.
Of course, we don't just form groups in the digital world, but the internet is a more rapidly enabling environment on a global scale than most physical ones. But the two are coming together.

Further inspirational reading:
Herd,
Here Comes Everybody (now only £8 gah!),
Everything is Miscellaneous.

Legendary 'visuals' dude Dave Armano tweeted of this slideshow: Armano @davidcushman nice visuals. Like the happy faces. Social networks are made of shiny happy people (holding hands)...
Who said Americans couldn't do irony?

| View | Upload your own

Facebook. Just another rss aggregator?

The bulk of activity I now see on my facebook newsfeed is gathered from other sources. In other words facebook is acting as an aggregator of stuff going on elsewhere. A bit like any other rss aggregator then?

Twitter updates bounced into facebook lead the way, followed by notes, imported from friends blogs (in both cases we're being treated to a one-way narrowcast - unless we make the effort to follow the link... actually come to think of it, we can comment on an imported note - but few 'in-the-know' would bother, since it's kind of a ghost version of the original - and you have to kind of figure the real conversation is going on back at the base! So facebook is the ersatz conversation!?).

Yes, of course many people update their status with a pure and simple filling in of the box (I know I do - and via mobile a lot... and in both cases that gets narrowcasted out to my minute band of twitter followers...)

In between there's a little bit of 'X has sent Y a gift' - yeah the real need-to-know stuff, invites to be a zombie or take part in a My Little Pony quiz.

I won't deny there is some valuable stuff. Some potentially very valuable stuff.
X has just joined Y group. I like those bits. That's the non-directed self-forming group bits, the bits where people can organise around a purpose and make things happen. Not a lot of this though.

And I begin to wonder if there's enough of the valuable stuff full stop. I wonder if there's enough of it to sustain the closed world of facebook in a disaggregating, widgetised world.

I'll tell you what I don't see much of. X is a fan of Y product or X has just bought Y product.

UPDATE Jan 16 2008: See comments below for more on this. I like what spokeo and latterly yahoo are aiming for: newsfeed from all your friends from all sources - but in an open way - treating the web as your newsfeed. When open takes on closed I know which I'll always place my money on! Read more from Harrison (aka twhman) at spokeo here.

Media as the interface between human and experience of culture

BMW doesn’t make all of its cars. They use a network of subsidiaries and partners for the messy business of putting together bits of glass, rubber and metal.

But BMW also looks after other stuff which can best be described as the interface between driver and the experience of driving.

It focuses on the high-tech development of electronics; the stuff that determines what it feels like to drive – the feedback through the steering wheel, the ergonomics of the switching, the feel of the suspension, the sound of the engine. And of course they hold the web of suppliers, peer producers if you will, together.

It also looks after the customer experience – showrooms, aftersales, marketing. The branding. How you feel about being a BMW owner.

All brand-related areas of competence (design, purchasing, service, etc.) remain the responsibility of the BMW Group.”

Aston Martin has an interesting attitude, now that Ford has sold it.

The chief exec, Ulrich Bez, can see a day when a 'car maker' like Aston only controls the brand and marketing - everything else (design, R&D, manufacturing) can be outsourced to suppliers, according to an interview in Car Magazine in May 2007.

Car manufacturers are not alone in this approach. Hotel chains rarely own bricks and mortar and certainly don’t build it. They act as the interface between guest and experience – they do the branding, they train the staff, they set the standards etc.

This idea has set me thinking about how it could be applied in my industry, media.

What is the production line process of building a car or the bricks and mortar of running a hotel when it comes to media?

Perhaps it is the creation of content? While we are currently geared to making content, what if we were not – what would we do instead? Regular participants in the conversation of this blog will know I have a view on this.

Perhaps this is another way of groping towards some new conclusions?

What does it mean to act as the interface between humans and content? And isn’t this what we have always done? Isn’t a magazine a way of shaping someone’s experience of content?

Perhaps it helps to think about what the selection of that content does to shape our experience of culture.

What is the equivalent of developing ways of nuancing our communities’ experience of culture (in the way BMW nuances the experience of driving)?

BMW has a Point Of View. It knows what experience it wants to generate. It selects technologies, invests in development, chooses materials, positions its brand, to respond to this POV.

The question from a community perspective is how this POV is arrived at in the first place? We have to assume BMW gets meeting the needs of their community substantially right. Failure to do so means no more car sales.

But what we also know about BMW is that the customer can indulge in a reasonable range of co-creation (ie customising) of their vehicle. The value in this for the customer is in creating something they cherish more.

Surprisingly – despite the clear marketing value for BMW in allowing people to shape their vehicles – BMW doesn’t give you a cut of the value you create. Still – while they can get away with it, I guess why not? What am I on about? Ok, bit of a meander here but, if I opt for the better alloys on my beemer my car looks better – I love it more, more people see better-looking BMWs, more demand is created both in a broadcast way (each car out there acting as a rolling billboard) and in a recommended-by-a-friend way (the most powerful selling technique there is). And yet BMW want you to pay extra for this. Neat business model!

Anyway, back to the nuancing of experience.

Let’s say the selection of relevant, quality, materials is equivalent to a media brand curating a range of relevant, quality, materials.

The customising element? We then allow the individual to choose from among these quality materials to customise the experience of the culture to their own tastes.

Our role becomes one of aggregating materials against a brief agreed with /determined by our community of passion. And there are various social tools available to us to allow the community to engage in the co-creation of this brief.

Does this mean we must cease all content production? Not necessarily. Boeing, for example, still makes the tail-piece on its latest airliner while working with a peer-producer network to create the rest. It has chosen to retain control of this because it’s technically tough to do and gives them control of one element which the rest of the peer-producers in the creation of a plane would find hard to replicate. In short they can’t build a plane without Boeing.

Perhaps this indicates the kind of content media companies should concentrate on. It can’t be the stuff that is easily replicated by everyone else. It must be the exclusive and the hard-to-do. It must be the piece that a new media, purely ugc-reliant company could not replicate if it sought to put together its airliner.

So do we have some guidance?

Regarding the role of media as the interface between human and culture leads me to a handful of conclusions:

1. We should curate content compiled against a set of shared values, shared values which have been co-created with our community of interest. This content to include that produced by all sources. This represents our nuancing of the relevant culture.
2. We allow individuals (and self-forming groups within the community) to customise their experience – nuancing their experience still further and making that experience one they are more likely to market on our (and their) behalf.
3. Manage the web of peer producers – create the platform, manage the interaction of those contributing to it.
4. Contribute hard-to-do content. This is the one piece no one else can easily replicate. It’s our Boeing tail piece and represents a barrier to entry as compared to purely user-generated-content models.

I should emphasise that this is my first wild stab in the dark at this notion of media as cultural interface. And I could really do with your help… definitions of hard-to-do content… ideas for managing the web of peer producers… etc