Create value as if the world exists

There is a final disruption charging at full speed through the old world. It promises to be more fundamental than the disruption to the business of content creation and distribution, more disruptive even than our ability to self-organise to shape what we care about.
It is that we can self-organise to pay for it.

It is this disruption to mass, centralised blocks of capital, the switch to widely-distributed ownership and leadership that this entails, that will have the greatest long term impact on how our society is organised – on how we live our lives.

The web has been like a Big Bang to business as usual – disrupting media, marketing, customer service, new product development, the business of elections, the business of who governs us, how we are educated, how we are cared for and so much more.

But disruption of this people-power kind alone has limits. Even though we can find other people who care about the same things as we do, and in so doing lower the cost of action to achieve the shared purposes we have, long lasting and valuable change is slowed by the huge inertia of big capital.

There are those who argue big capital is just too big to be undone from the edge. But who thought the arrival of the internet would one day herald the end of big media? Today more people read Twitter each morning in the UK than read all the national newspapers put together. The power shift is almost complete in media; The content and distribution monopolies gone.

And so for big capital?

Make no mistake, big capital is holding back real change. Take Facebook. First the VCs have to get paid. Haven’t developed a business model to meet the needs of the networked world? F**you! Pay me! And so we get traditional broadcast style ads interrupting your FB time.

Then the VCs are replaced by Big Capital. Who want dividends. Fast. No time to develop a new model. You’ve caught all those fish in a barrel – let’s go spear them...

Where is the interest in long term benefit to the users? To their communities? To their society?

Clay Shirky has a nice line about news websites which are (shock!) “designed as if the web exists”.

Member-led, peer-funded partnerships offer the opportunity to create value as if the world exists. By which I mean value creation which goes beyond the back slap in the boardroom and the bottom line on the balance sheet, value creation which acknowledges that resources are finite, that people, communities, societies and ecologies are connected and matter to each other.

As I described in a recent post about Mindful Consumption, this kind of approach isn’t for a happy clappy hippy utopia, it provides a genuine competitive advantage: In a connected world where to win is to work together with ever greater numbers of people who care about the same things you do, few are going to sign up to support businesses who are damaging the ecosystem in which they exist.

Exploitation which damages our connected well-being has never been welcome. The fact is that exploitation is visible now more than it ever has been before: The web has revealed our interconnectedness like nothing in history before.

And that is a genie which is not going back in its bottle.

Change will come, big capital inertia can only slow things. And where we are frustrated, where we care most, where we see the most significant damage to our future and to that of those we care about, we will vote with not only our connectedness, our collaboration, our action – but with our personal funds.

Sure, it’ll be slow. We’ll chip away at first – Kickstarter by kickstarter. But one day big capital will wake up to find itself in the place newspapers have.

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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

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

The case for ignoring your customer

I quite often hear of organisations which take the quite deliberate action of ignoring what their customers say about them online.

They reason that either:
1) They tried engaging and a group of antis came to dominate the conversation, (many brands gather themselves some long-term enemies)

2) There are only ever negative comments - and they 'already know' what customers don't like (think utilities - stuff that you take for granted until something goes wrong).

Both of the above represent a door closed on innovation.

Imagine, if you will, that all those complaining about your org or brand are in reception at HQ. In their hundreds or thousands. Would you ignore them, their feedback and their ideas?

Why then, when they have taken the time and trouble to tell you (and their peers) what they think of your products and services, would you ignore this crowd at your online door?

If thousands of newspapers and magazines had published negative comments, would you ignore them? Why ignore all those published online - collectively delivering huge reach and much greater trust.

And if a cohort of angry antis seek to dominate the conversation, think again about their concerns. Why are they so angry? How has your connection with your customer broken down so badly? Could you fix the damage of decades of mass broadcast comms with some human-scale peer to peer conversation? Could you show a brand is just a representation of the activities of people? Good interactions with people shift perceptions about brands.

It may be tempting to ignore the lone-but-noisey anti-fan - but something makes that person do what they do. No one sets up websites, twitter accounts etc and keeps building them over sustained periods without a pretty strong set of reasons. Are they reasons that matter? You'd best find out.

Further - disengaging with all your online customers as a result harms you, not them. All you leave behind is anger and a record revealing your ignorance which remains unchallenged and which stays on record for ever.

3) The third group who ignore are those who believe they know better than their customers. Some luxury brands take this view.

It comes from the belief that super premium brands are there to lead, not follow.

Those that believe this should take a look at their company history and ask themselves if they haven't at any point changed their products, servicing or marketing in response to customer usage, perception or complaint. Social media monitoring just writes that process fast and large.

In short I don't see a case for ignoring your customer. When you do so you are saying:

We know better than our customers - all of them, always.

And not even Steve Jobs would claim that.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

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Dog Bites Man: Reclaiming the issue attention cycle

I started wondering why I hadn't heard or read about a dog attacking someone for what seems at least a good while now (apologies for the scientific language...)

And then I recalled something called the 'issue attention cycle' we used to talk about in newspapers back when I was in that industry.

Essentially it was the length of time people would still be bothered about a particular issue.

The first dog attack may get a 'brief' on page 7. The second a lead story on page 5. By the third there's a campaign on page 1. But as the attention wanes further attacks warrant less and less attention until they are no longer covered at all.

The issue - one assumes - remains, it's the attention that has gone.

Newspapers likely had a viral impact on each other. Neighbouring local papers having their agendas set, their attention focused, by those nearby.

I imagine (and if you have a relevant example, please do share) if you mapped the reporting of dog attacks over time you would see classic viral dispersion across the nation. Bubbling up, bubbling down again.

Let's assume that dog behaviour isn't viral - that there isn't the equivalent of doggy newspapers to spread the news. The behaviour of the dogs hasn't changed. The reporting of it has.

That's worth remembering when you read any story selected for you by lowest-common-denominator publication.

But it's also important we remind ourselves of this in social media: where the issue attention cycle remains. Through our selection of trusted sources (ie rss readers or peer-to-peer recommendation focused by our selection of Twitter or Facebook friends) we are active participants in the generation of these cycles.

And through the speed of publication, the cycles are hugely truncated.

The saving grace of the web in this regard is the universal ability to publish that it grants.
We don't have to wait for the centre to pay something attention; ourselves and our peers create our only cycles. We choose when to start them, how long to sustain them and when their job is done.

No one can tell us where our interest starts and finishes any more.

And for that we should be eternally grateful. The media chose what to surface. Now we do.

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FasterFuture is regularly updated by David Cushman

Are the iPad and the iPhone leading publishers astray?

Despite all the excitement for publishers over the iPad (and no doubt the excitement to come over the iPhone4 - well the screen resolution should improve the reading experience) I remain sceptical about the long term benefit for publishers - particularly publishers of 'news'.

In fact you could make the case that by encouraging them not to adapt, it puts their survival at greater risk.
The issue is that news - at least what we understand as news in the current lexicon - is not a best fit with the networked world.

It's lowest common denominator - the fat end of the long tail. And we all know more value exists in the long, long, skinny end - and that the fat end seems to keep on getting smaller.

That approach to news suits a broadcast world. If you can only make one TV news show, with a limited amount of items, then you'd best try include news that appeals to as many people as you can muster.
It has always been the fact that more people weren't interested in each item than were (fact - more people won't watch the World Cup this month than will - you'd be hard pushed to believe that if your guide was traditional broadcast news and programming).

But until recent times there was no alternative to this model. They'd have had to broadcast a million versions of the TV news with a never-ending range of news items to meet the needs of all the people who weren't interested in the main agenda.

Now of course that's pretty much exactly what does happen and is possible. Say hello YouTube.

In a networked world we produce for niches (for ourselves), distribute peer-to-peer and get value from relevance rather than quality (we like both, but we'll always take relevance over quality).

News, as I have often said, is now less about when it happens and more about when it's relevant (matters) to you.

So, back to that iPad and iPhone4. Too many traditional news vendors, it seems to me, see Apple's open hand as a way of reformatting/repackaging exactly what they've already done on the assumption that the reason we have been buying less newsprint is because it wasn't available in a beautiful digital format.

That doesn't make sense to me. I don't sit on the train each morning pining for a copy of the Guardian to read. I get on with participation and interacting with other people discussing stuff that's way more relevant to me than the vast majority of stuff in ANY newspaper. At least any they've come up with yet. Yes, some of it comes from newspapers. Shotguns hit targets, too.

Even the personalised rejigging of the content they have, to respond on individual use patterns, only delivers the more relevant stuff from their pile of 'not-quite-the-right-fit-with-me'. And it's individual. We are social.

There are two options. Invest like crazy in quality rather than scale. Think less mass and more about serving a niche of people who value the specific and otherwise unattainable. There are, after all, still people who will hand illuminate a leather bound Bible for you some many centuries since the invention of the printing press.

The other is to be the filter; the curator for specific niches. Prove you are a better filter of what's valuable to me than my peers and you win that game.

That is no easy task - and one that's a million miles away from decanting your current offering into the latest digital formats.

The networked world demands new models, new approaches - not just new technologies.

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Catch-up: Causing a stir on BlogTalk Radio

Jon Hansen was kind enough to invite me to be his guest on his BlogTalk Radio show yesterday. It was broadcast live at 5:30-6:15pm UK time on October 8.

I very much enjoyed and - and Jon's invited me back to do another show in the near future - which I'm going to take him up on.

Apparently, yesterday's caused a bit of a stir:

This from Jon's blog:

"...today’s show regarding the differences between traditional media such as newspapers and the emerging social media world, delivered an incredibly insightful and powerful message in terms the future of these paradoxical mediums.
"Unexpected . . . certainly not given guest David Cushman’s level of expertise regarding the subject matter.  "What was surprising is the level of interaction within the confines of the show’s on-line chat room which even had one listener post a note asking me to take callers earlier in the show.
"While there have been segments in which I have had 19 or 20 people in the live chat room at the same time, the activity was noticeably brisk during today’s segment.
"It was also considerably more active than it was during the 90-Minute Buy American Special that featured a brief interview with Canada’s Trade Minister.  Perhaps Dave should run for public office."

Listen to it for yourself using the player, below.

Lessons from the mass media wars

There are those in print media - newspapers/mags etc - who cling to the idea that they can 'do a cinema'.

When TV arrived as the latest mass media many predicted the demise of cinema.

They didn't count on its:

• Ability to adapt with experience-enhancing technology (colour, stereo, Dolby, 3d etc) 
• The power of that experience being shared.
  

If I was in a media company right now I'd be looking at how what cinema did could translate to shore up my properties. To start with. (image courtesy rivalee)

And then there's the elements that kept radio in the game when first cinema and then radio rocked up:

• Convenience

• Portability

• Currency.
  

Print shares convenience and portability - but scores zip for currency against anything post radio. It's ability to enhance shared experience ain't the greatest, either (though this can be enhanced through events and digital communities, of course)..

Media properties need to adapt. And the obsession with print has to be questioned long and hard.

Those cinematic and radio survivors of the mass media wars give a guide.

Cinema uses technology to enhance shared experiences, radio is convenient, portable and current.

Combine all these and you have a proposition to take you into the age of the eighth mass media - us.

From (We are the eighth mass media)

I don't just mean that we create the content in a UGC vs Professional Content Creators kind of way. I mean WE are the distribution, the content, the 'user journey', how messages are transmitted... WE are the medium and the media carried within it.

We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made.

In the age of the eighth mass media, organisations must understand that serving multiple and ever increasing numbers of niches is the route to sustainable scale.

Those who wish to remain part of our lives must provide value to the adhoc self-forming communities of purpose our digital selves can't help but participate in.

We have already adapted. We are creating a new landscape. Are you fit for it? Are you prepared to become so? I wonder how this 'Twitter: The newspaper of tomorrow? matches up.

Care less what the 15 year old intern does: Ask what his mum is doing.

I've really enjoyed the righteous abandon with which some sections of the traditional media have crowed about one 15-year-olds insight that his friends don't use Twitter.

Among the other details of his note for Morgen Stanley are that online advertising is 'pointless' (I'm pretty sure he means interruptive traditional style advertising of the kind that sustains traditional media) and that no kids are reading newspapers.

That teenagers aren't using Twitter (much) comes as no surprise to anyone whose been watching the regular stats that role out of Nielsen, Comscore and the like. That it took an 'intern' to tell Morgen Stanley is perhaps the greater surprise - but that's by the by.

What is of more concern to me is the considerable amount of barking going on up wrong trees around this.

First, why does it take one intern's paper to get media owners jumping up and down? Kids are available to speak to every day of the week everywhere. Take them seriously and they will speak to you. Ask Ruby Pseudo. Same message goes to Morgen Stanley. Publishing the bleeding obvious as 'insight' doesn't do you many favours.

Second. Please, please, please don't think that the behaviour (particularly what they say they do compared with what they actually do) of teenagers is an indicator for how the world is changing and a guide to how you should respond.

As Clay Shirky put it if you want to know what technologies will succeed don't ask what teenage boys are doing - ask what their mums are doing.

Mums are busy. And if the tech doesn't make a material difference to their lives they don't use it.
How many mums are on Facebook, how many on Twitter? How many using email? Text?

You can be sure there are many. They are organising their lives and the things they care about with these tools.

They are showing these tools matter for very many, now. Enough to change the world? Not yet. When we stop using terms like social media and just get on with organising ourselves - then we'll know the world has changed because enough of us find it everyday ordinary enough.

Follow the teenage boys if you wish - I'll be watching the mums.

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The Future of Newspapers

The Guardian's Open Platform project has caused a bit of a stir, at a time when mass media of all kinds is struggling to work out business models that have a better fit with the networked world.

The clever bit about the Guardian's plan is that they don't pretend they have the answers - they are sharing what they have with the rest of the world in the hope that a bit of global crowd-sourcing will evolve a sustainable solution.

At least that's my take. But let Dr Chris Thorpe tell you more.

Chris (one of Brando Social Consult's team) has been consulting to The Guardian on the project for the last six months. Now it's live he can finally talk about it.

I interviewed him at the Brando Social offices last week and have finally edited the video...

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Trust can't be broadcast

Trust in the banks is down. I believe the expression is 'no shit, sherlock?'

Much more interesting than the bleeding obvious to me is the accelerating collapse in trust in advertising and traditional mass media.

(Image courtesy.)

This from Edelman's 2009 Trust Barometer release:

• Trust in nearly every type of news outlet and spokesperson is down from last year.
• Trust in business magazines and stock or industry analyst reports—last year’s leaders— decreased from 57% to 44% and from 56% to 47%, respectively.
• Only 13% trust corporate or product advertising—down from last year’s low of 20%.

Let's say that again. Only 13% of people trust the ads now. That's assuming they are still accepting the interruptions.

Even more staggering, the figure for the UK is down to JUST 5%!

So let's assume you overcome our studied ignorance of ads in social media. Those whose attention is snared by them (remember folks, it's a 0.01% click-thru rate), of these, only 13% (5% in the UK) trust what they see, hear and read. So they're hardly likely to act on them.

Peer-to-peer recommendation however, of the kind we see inspiring purchases of products and services every day in social networks, in conversations between friends, is not interruptive and it is trustworthy.

• Britain trusts media less than any other of the 20 countries surveyed (30%)
• Traditional sources of information are on the wane and at an all-time low
• Newspapers down 10 points at 19%;
• Radio news down 20 at 33%
• There is a Trust Bust in conventional Corporate Comms
• Only 5%trust corporate/ product advertising; 15% for corporate website, press releases, live speeches - Edelman Trust Barometer, UK
  

More reason to explore models like this.

Trust in banking and business is down because of some very unusual economic factors.

Trust in mass media is down because of something much more fundamental. We've found ways to connect one to another - there is a new model which places trust in new places - in each other, in the edge - not the centre.

Trust can't be broadcast.

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How to avoid extinction in an evolving world

I saw Rory Brown tweet about journalist Hugo Dixon talking about the death spiral of newspapers today. It's a subject dear to my heart. Newspapers were where I started my career 21 years ago. I was trained for print.
But we've logged their decline on this blog and many others. Microsoft, for example, predicts their extinction within 20 years.

The newspaper industry made, in my view, two key errors.
1. It missed the quality opportunity.
2. It spurned the R&D advantage it had

Now these are very grave errors. But if you're not in the newspaper industry I'd advise against form of smugness. For there, but for the grace of etc etc... (image by colin purrington via flickr)

Newspapers had (perhaps still have) an opportunity to do what the gift economy of the net couldn't: Invest in quality.

Churning out the same press releases anyone can find repeated 1000+ times on the internet may be cheap but it's also self-destructive. If you can't beat the web on price, you can't beat it on relevance and you can't beat it on speed (and you can't) you'd better find something else to beat it on. Quality seems the only game left in town. The creation of the point-worthy.

The R&D advantage was spurned too. When the print barons had piles more cash than the gift economists of the likes of wikipedia, google, youtube et al, they could have invested to make the kind of structural change required to match the networked world.

Now, ever more fearful, they are reduced to picking through the wreckage and looking for further efficiencies.

They chose not to invest in survival strategies for a world of complex adaptive systems (such as the net, such as evolution) and instead persisted with the linear mass-efficiencies models which worked so well in a mass industrial age.

Ok, so newspapers are having it hard. What's that got to do with you (if you aren't a print journalist, for example)?

Well, I don't think all of the troubles newspapers are facing are caused by the medium.

Anything which seeks to mediate in a networked world faces the challenge of being worked around, that's for sure. That is the impact of group forming network theory in practice.

But perhaps of even more impact is the way traditional companies and corporations are responding to, or are able to respond to, the huge changes being wrought by the networked world.

The death spiral Hugo Dixon describes is that of a company managing efficiencies. This is the mass industrial response - the fnal phase of the S-curve seen in many businesses (as referred to by Professor Malcolm Mcdonald among others).

When you have run out of innovations you turn to the accountants. More and more effort is focused on saving, less and less on growth.

You save until you can no longer spend.

This applies to newspapers.

It may also apply to a business near you.

I'm in media! Oh really? So are my children...

I responded to Paul Bradshaw's interesting question about the future of training for journalists here and by way of introduction mentioned that: "I've been in media for 20 years, unless you count the fanzines I wrote as a kid."

Actually, I was in media as soon as I could be. I even made my own comics and newspapers before I had any means of distributing them.

Which makes me think today's kids will be in media rather earlier and rather longer - and they'll understand the power that gives them rather earlier.

As soon as they connect via the likes of habbo hotel, club penguin, or many of the other social networks for kids they are in media. (image by Terry Lloyd Smith)

They have the tools to enable what we've all become:

We're all publishers now, we're all distributors now, we're all advertisers now, as I've said before.

Which means as soon as we start forming into groups via the network we're in media.

Perhaps we are really in media even before we reach out for our first mouse - part of the eighth mass media I've started exploring here and here?

Twitter: The newspaper of tomorrow?

My old mum says she hardly reads her daily newspaper these days. She's been getting the Daily Express delivered for as long as I can remember.

Habit is a powerful thing so the executives at the Daily Express may sleep safe; I don't think she's about to give up paying for her daily copy. It's just she's "seen it all on the TV" by the time the paper arrives.

There's no use telling me you're setting your own news agenda, ploughing your own furrow etc etc. Your user thinks you're just reheating old news. Sorry, but there it is. (Image by kamerakrazy)

Her son (that's me folks) has never had a newspaper delivered in his life. Plenty to worry about for national newspaper folk then.

There's nothing new in this. Microsoft predicts the death of newspapers within 20 years.

Some of the debate about the skills journalism students need, which you'll find here, suggests that while there may still be printed mass distributed things in the future, we may only persist in calling them 'news' papers out of habit.

The thing is, my old mum does still read her weekly local paper. She doesn't do that out of some loyalty born of the fact it was where I started my career. No, she does it because it carries content she has not had access to elsewhere.

She doesn't have access to the internet, and the broadcast types behind the likes of teletext have never gone hyperlocal enough to become relevant or convenient enough for her.

So the local paper remains (for her, at least) a source of unique, relevant content which she is prepared to pay for. Even the advertising in it - by virtue of its focus on the local - for the most part, is of some value to her.

There are hints here for all services - print and digital:
Relevant = useful = valued

Imagine if you knew enough local people on twitter, people you have connected with and maintained connections with through the metadata you have exchanged - so that you trust them and can believe what they have to say.
Imagine if you could select 'My location' on twitter - and only receive tweets from people with x miles.
Imagine you could toggle this on and off when it matters to you.

Perhaps this is the shape of the newspaper of the future?

Whatever tools your communities choose to use, what is clear is that 'news' (read information or content) that people find relevant is that which is niched, either by topic or location or both.

Communities of purpose are the groups to make that happen - just another reason why they will play out as the business units of the 21st century.

Twitter; The newspaper of tomorrow? Well yes, in as much as it is a very effective way of discovering, filtering and distributing information with levels of relevance no printed medium yet has been able to compete with.

It is not alone in asking tough questions. The new digital tools of human connection (of group forming) consistently raise them:

• What is the value of mass/broad?
• What is the value of mediation?

Fred Wilson, Stowe Boyd and Josh Bernoff at Widget Web Expo day 2

The following is simply my notes, made at the time the presentations were being made at day two of WidgetWebExpo in NYC. Lack of wifi made live blogging impossible.

I'll add a little commentary and links later (am at JFK waiting to board for Heathrow at the time of posting). Apologies if it's not polished, but it's the best I could do in the time available!!

Fred Wilson gave the key note

1.Fred Wilson: (Fred blogs at AVC)
Why widgets is the wrong word and why it matters.

"I wrote a blog post this morning and in the process I developed some thoughts. the ppt is available at slideshare.

Fred's powerpoint for WWE:

| View | Upload your own

Fred referred to the widget as defined on wikipedia.

"The words are wrong and the way we are using them is wrong.

"The first i used was in 2005, the flickr badge. Eye opener for me It developed a lot of interaction, people would click through and comment on my flickr page.

"Most interesting widget i have used is the mybloglog widget. It made me realise widgets would do more than just show content, they would introduce new function – that my blog could become a social network.

"My favourite widget is one hacked together by a friend named darren, a frequent reader. we all post music. (widget is on fred's blog) you can fast forward, auto play skip, etc. pulls from tumblr.

"The problems with widgets: what is content and what is ad?
we increasingly are getting trained by google to think of organic results as content and the stuff on the right is ads. that notion of separation of ad is content is something we see a lot of places on the web.

"Widgets get relegated to the sidebars and increasingly viewed in the same way as ads and therefore increasingly ignored.

"Three times I have cleaned out widgets, I posted 'widgets suck' cos most of last year the single most used search term on my blog was 'widgets suck'. I found widgets i liked and then found I needed to clean house and I'd poll people and people said they didn't like the widgets.

"Widgets cause a painful slow down in load times."

Fred demo'd with his own blog taking 25-30s.

"Responsiveness and load time is key to success on the web.

"On my tumblog there are no sidebars. it is delivered inline and a better experience for the user – but these are embeds or feeds.

"I am enamoured with the concept of flow and rivers, we need experiences on the web that are a flow controlled by the user... a river of news or of anything, is more compelling than the more interruptive experience of widgets on my weblog.

"The challenge is how do you get into the flow, with a better end user experience."

Q&A: Stowe asked: "Why don't you come up with a better design for AVC."

"I don't really have any other way to do some of these things – I don't have a way to express my social network any other way, or these flickr photos and put them into the flow.

"Idea that widgets get served like in context ads – gthe only that appear to the user being the ones that suit the content. Less interruptive then.

"Is it just a design issue? I used to have a lastfm badge which showed my most recent songs. I took it out, in my tumblr page there's a post that's autogenerated showing my five most recent songs, in the flow.

(worth noting Fred is delivering a very publisher rather than consumer perspective, by which i mean widgets are not always 'ours'. Fred's are displays of elements of his likes and interests, not ones designed for the user to take and display for themself - to make their own).

"There's a signal to noise ratio issue. the signal on avc is now much stronger about tech and venture capital because much of my 'noise' about other things I'm interested in is now in a different flow (tumblr).

"Generational shift, those born after 1980 are much more fast paced about the way they consume content, they want to get to the answer really quickly so twitter and tumblr are doing well.

"Facebook is taking the apps off the profile and into an apps tab, the fact I've installed an app doesn't mean it should be on my profile page (though it'll be in the river of news...)

"First gen of he widget economy was powerful because it showed we can mash up on a single page. But the user interface needs to change. widgets shouldn't suck."

Chris Saad: “You don't have to consume your friends entire life stream. You post to the world but your friends should be able to filter for themselves.”

Stowe: people are experiencing blogs differently – via rss without any of the widgets.

Fred: "The ultimate power of feeds is to route content to the people who want it where they want it. Widgets can put that content before the right people at the right time.

"People are starting to access the power of rss as plumbing rather than as publishing.

Q what models are making money.
A: widgets aren't, they are marketing system to get to web services.
People say this fb app has been installed 20m times, but then you see the daily active users might be 20K. It's about the engagement of the widgets.

"I want to know how much people use a widget on my blog.

"Web is becoming more intelligent more social and more playful. the most successful widgets on fb are games, social games, with real engagement. 2m a day play one of comps games a day. 12% of worldwide fb reach.

"everything should have some game dynamic to it, it has to have entertainment value even if its just about information.

Stowe Boyd:

Social Meaning In a fragmented world.

"Tower of Babel was destroyed and everyone's languages were confounded and spread out. that's what's going on on the web.
"People are spending more time on the web, less on tv! there's a fragmentation of exp.

"Is widgeting enough to bridge all of this incompatibility, bring together all these social shared meanings?

"Can we have distributed reputation and identity. If I have rep in tech is it worthwhile in politics, can we abstract sociality.

"I am a webthropologist, I am a synthesist, trying to get a big picture view on the impact on all of us, more an art than a science.

social tools and fragmentity:

"social tools have the purpose of creating or shaping culture, not just to make communication more important.

"culture is about a shared experienced, shared context and shared ethics.

"FB and google's actions are being amplified by the herd behaviour. Large population activities can cloud what people actually do with their closest context, down to social scale. There's a whole different set of physics in social groups compared to crowds.

"You can make the wrong interpretations and assumptions, just like we did about subatomic particles.

"Individuals aren't concerned about the fragmentation of their ID. denizens of the web are trying new stuff and setting up accounts all the time. I've recently used brightkite, i used to use plazes, i was just waiting for something new.

"people are curious and looking for new things to do, this playfulness that Fred was getting at.

"They will tolerate and even gravitate towards a fragmented world, it is this willingness to use fragmented identity on the web, they want a porthole here into some other context and they want to show that to someone.

"We can't expect uniformity when there is so much innovation going on. I use change.org, they have devised new ideas which aren't like anything found elsewhere.

"People can propose activities that other people can take on (eg give up your car). I create the activity, it is unique at the moment. You will see this innovation, new ways of sharing in social tools. and we'll see more and more innovation, leading to more fragmentation.

People will do the big things AND all the other little things.

Edge vs Centre:

"The move away from mass to social media is the move from the centre to the edge. here we talk to each other as individuals. not published by a media org. I am an individual having a conversation – and this hollows out the centre and the impact has been enormous.

"The death of newspapers is one impact.

"The difference is that people choose to find their info from people they care about.

"People find it more enjoyable interesting and rewarding to work with real people rather than companies. People can say, I really like Louis Vitton, I really do, not because I'm being paid to, it's a natural social conversation. I express myself through this.

"Ads always come up, what do ads do for us on the web? as individuals? Are they a tax – in order for this to be free...

"Is it possible that they could be supportive of what we do – not just be at best benign.

"Could they support our social tools – I suspect ads will be enmeshed in the social experience – just using them as some kind of ugc is already proving to be more successful.

"Make it easy to share ads, too. I can't reblog ads, I can't share it.
Doing something more with ads, changing the words, making it personal, voting on them, we'll see that in the context of people sharing.

Social = Me First!
"The paradox is that we connect with others, through whom we define ourselves, we have to start by defining ourselves. We present ourselves in one way or another – makes us seem a little self-obsessed but its ok cos we are searching for a reason to be – (psychological self-determination) we are developing our personal identity at the heart of all we do online.

"Sharing widgets, our favourite this or that, it's all part of that. It can be a core way in which we define who we are and what we do.

"Rep and status plays to that (numbers of my followers) etc, I'm defined by my connections. It's about me in the world of other people.

The web is no democracy but it's not a hierarchy.

"It's more like living in a village where your rep and id is not even, some have more than others. We have kin, just not genetic. We have a sense there's a whole world of people we can talk to yet we are broken into language groups. There's 2K languages. English as a second language is accelerating cos of the web. it's killing language diversity.

"David Weinberger said on the web we will all be famous for 15 people.
DW also uses the term continuous partial friendship – deep connections in short periods.

"Long tail changes our concepts of involvement.

"Does the world become a deeper place or do our feelings become shallow. No, I have rivers of information and get to know hundreds of people meaningfully. The long tail isn't just about retail, it's about the spectrum of relationships we can afford.

"Widgets can help this with a low cost of doing so.

The web of flow is huge, but not massive

"We are moving to a web of flow where streams come to you, twitter, friendfeed, new google reader with commentary and sharing, tools which allow us to mediate the web... a stream of sociality.

"It will be a socialised world, not mass media. it has to be filtered by other people – via social relationships. Fred waits to see things come around cos it gets pushed to him. There's a mass impact but not cos its a mass medium.

"Its not one person's decision but 100k peoples considered opinions and thoughts.

CONTEXT

EXPERIENCE: we all watched the same TV and talked to each other about it. Now its fragmented. People are doing other stuff. mass media is failing as a primary experience we share. instead socially scaled tools are emerging. The experience at one places will pop up in another context, like seeds in the flowers you give to someone and the seeds falling in their garden.
We adapt to this unequal and lumpy web with different experiences, where old experiences can be re-embedded in new contexts.
eg mybloglog, people tolerated, people experimented with dozens of different widgets.

People crave these novel experiences and our use of it as a mechanism of self expression.

Q&A

Big brands fear letting go of control!
Stowe: Courage is one of the key skills for people moving from mass to one-to-one. They might have to accept they will get their feelings hurt. At this scale different rules are at work, they have to have same kind of courage, they have to cede control, the control was already lost, the conversations were already happening.
Playfulness is another part of that courage thing.

Get down to social scale.

Stowe: “People departed to the web (from mass media) just as fast as it emerged”


Josh bernoff – biz case for widgets:

You better be thinking about your objectives. In groundswell this is important in any social app.

We had a client called us and said we want to start a community. cos a competitor has.
ok
What do you want to achieve.
There was a long embarrassed silence.
The client had not figured out why they were doing this.

Groundswell:
A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions.
Concentrate on the relationships.

P: People, assess your customers social activities (25-35yr olds are widgeting!)
O: Objectives: decide what you want to accomplish
S: Strategy how will this change your relationship with your customers – people officially declare they are an x fan
T: Technology is last.

Don't think of the technology first and then try to find a use for them.

Widget use in us:
12% used desktop (18+)
17% of 18+ 53% used web widgets (12-17yr olds)

Groundsell.forrester.com has a tool to look at how this ladder looks around the world.

Widget users are highly socially active. they are doing a lot of creativity and use of social tools. if you do create a widget then you can count on its users are using lots of other social technologies too. You won't reach everyone. you reach an elite, a highly influential elite.

Objectives:

research – listening
marketing – talking
sales – energizing
support – supporting
development – embracing

my starbucks – tell starbucks how they should improve.
widgets can do all of these.

listening with widgets – you can get insight, see MuseStorm you can measure the interactions and learn from them.

Talking with widgets: usa today isn't that sticky – it doesn't extend the conversation (just broadcasts rss).

Purina has a personal outcome version which allows you to add a pic of your pet.

Q: “people will not post your widget because they love your brand. They will post if they find something useful.”

(not always true, eg fans).

Widgets can embrace customer suggestions and ideas (bit like digg), crowdsound, salesforce ideas,

Summary: To make widgets work start with your clear objective, measure progress toward that objective, choose technology to meet that objective.

Widgets as Adverts
scott rafer, lookery

Are you trying to get people to click thru? Or enjoy themselves.

New formats are hard sell, clearspring and kickapps have some really expensive sales people – i dont have the margin, we don't pitch the agencies we don't pitch the brands.

83% of US display ads (6bn dollars) sold for under $1 cpm in 2007. on a dollar basis on an impression basis its nearer 97%.

myspace average 9c a 1000 across the entire enterprise.

There are 12bn dollars in us above this of txt ads – and most is google.

facebook has left out search from apps deliberately, so we can't get into that.

Below all this you're into remnant advertising.

We run about 3bn ads across social networks the majority on facebook.

We got most of our traffic with a low guarantee. we said we'd pay 12.5c per thousand on which ever fb apps want to play. Shared this on techcrunch. Within 24hrs loads of interest. we did 150m in jan and 3bn more than that in may.

for this to work you need to find impressions by the truck load.

Later this year we'll offer a guarantee 1c a 1000.

what widgets are actually good at massive data collection. that data is a lot more valuable than the impression itself.

Facebook has closed half of its viral routes, most people are shrinking in there, it's getting harder to launch.


Fraser Kelton; adaptive blue; semantic web type company funded by union sq ventures (fred's)

our secondary product is widgets

everything can be explained by pop culture.
Widgets: if you build it they will come... if we have thing with a grab button everyone will grab it and share it.

you need value for the publisher
value for the browser
ease of replication

the major failure usually is we leaves out the fact that there has to be some utility – otherwise we get very skilfull at tuning it out.

How can you find the equilibrium between the three things.

Value for publisher: Why do I want to put this widget on my site/fb page etc.

1.self-expression – I'm a fan, I'm showing something about me.
2.Additional content – if its pulling in rss, lazy man's update.
3.$ the potential to make money
4.playful/fun
5.community building – my bloglog
6.Increased page views – media companies want more page views cos they live on cpm models.
You can have a widget strategy that layers in a bunch of these, provided you keep the other two arms in balance:

Next: Value for the visitor.(browser)
We are good at blocking out items we don't deem the content. sidebar stuff.

Have to get interaction; something to get them to engage with the software, you're halfway to your goal of having widgets to promote widgets.

1.self expression – my bloglog face roll. chance to replace the 'you' picture with the real you.
2.playful/fun
3.call to action (shoot the monkey on banner ads, for example)
4.Ego: tap into people wanting to show themselves off – feedburner gives you a chicklet to show how many have subscribed.

Ease of replication

People have focused on this too much. In order to make it effective:

1.1-click installation – don't have pivot points
2.on-page – people don't want to move from where they are – no pop-ups etc
3.customizable – you must allow people to change it to suit a users own background colours etc. issue for people who want to control brand look and feel. ditch it! it's the basics why you wouldn't have a flexible width for sidebars, too.
4.Simple
5.transaction timing: a really big one. if you instal one widget on fb people get an offer of a second. that works cos of context on fb. on the web its where you see one specific widget, so when you try to do the same thing people see it as a negative thing.

Keep 1.2 and 3 in equilibrium (value for publisher/value for browser/ease of replication

We launched widgets a few months ago.

People hover their mouse over images. Go image heavy rather than text heavy.

Give people buttons for installation – visual. changing to logos and images made a big difference for us.



Future of online branding, content and advertising on the web, Jeff Nolan NewsGagtor.

The way audiences are engaging media is changing. They aren't going to media, they are bringing it to them so media, brands and advertisers have to change.

Newsgator works with over 100 media companies. all of our customers are syndicating their content and monetising their content with advertisers.

the best value for getting traffic is to get the people who already visit your site to promote your site.

A site that gets 200k pi, you get 50 placements = 1m more page views. widgets are traffic multipliers.

USA today works as a simple extention of reach. their audience only needs this.

If you are in music you have to be in myspace. it drives distribution and discovery. But you have to know who to seed with.

Media co's see this as a way to also synidcate content to other media sites.

See National Geographic's Our Shot/Your Shot



Danny from Amnesty demo'd Hypercube which makes widgets render as users want them in whatever networks and in an itunes style.
I like what it does, but wonder why people would visit in the first place? maybe widgets are a point of inspiration thing. you grab it when you see it. you don't go looking for it.

Top 10 widget mistakes:
vp marketing MuseStorm:

1.mismatch with your demographics or demographics of where the app is launched
2.fail to take advantage of social graph
3.spend a lot before you know what works
4.don't limit incentives – push people to your site instead of have them use app (you need them using app for virality
5.Naming may be key if you have a rival.
6.its content that rules, not the brand. utility wins.
7.do a better analysis of your category before you develop your widget. try the other rivals.
8.don't bet the farm on a single social network – consider going where your competition isn't
9.do provide content that is useful
10.do remember whey people post or share – it's the content.


DON'T ALWAYS BUILD YOUR OWN, SPONSOR OR BUY WHAT IS ALREADY WORKING
IF IT'S DEEP APP

11.don't be self-serving and uber ad heavy. facebook demographics hate that.
12.DON'T LET YOUR Widget go stale
13.don't forget to make your widget searchable.

WHERE SHOULD WIDGET STRATEGY SIT IN THE BIZ?
IS IT MARKETING, ADVERTISING, CONTENT DISTRIBUTION – WHO SHOULD OWN IT.

There are five types of widgets:

mobile
desktop
gadgets (igoogle)
Applications
Flash

musestorm wrap them so it can work across all.

marciak@musestorm.com

preso will be on slideshare.net/musestorm


strategy questions to answers:

who is responsible (what dept in our biz)
what is the objective (what do we aim to achieve with a widget)
then tech solutions (see josh bernoff preso)
who will use our widgets and why?

its pull marketing. the majority in facebook are staying in there, not surfing – are they like your demographics.

discover how people are using social media, the people you want to reach.
what kind of widgets are best fit for your peeps.

Recommendation: it's all in the mind - theirs not yours

When I started out in the world of work, as a journalist, we had high principles about the distinction between advertising and editorial.

Where those lines blurred we had a blurred word to describe it: advertorial. An advert dressed up as editorial. A subjective advertising message posing as editorial recommendation.

We thought editorial should entertain and inform, be useful to you. In consumer media it was important to us that our recommendation should not be tainted by commercial concerns (beyond trying to sell newspapers, magazines etc of course!).

Advertising was clearly and explicitly about selling something, nothing more.

The advertorial aimed to do a little of both. And this adulteration made it something of a dirty word to editorial people. Written through gritted teeth, we felt as if we were perpetrating some kind of con trick.

And we held steadfastly to the control of the metadata so we could raise alarm bells for our readers. Warning: You are being sold to. We are being paid to write this. Warning! Suspend your trust in us!

This metadata was expressed through a label 'Advertisement Feature', for example, and the use of clearly different design cues to distinguish it from the pure editorial content. We wanted to be clear this wasn't really our recommendation.

That carries through in most advertising mediums. There is consistent metadata which makes it easy for my 3-year-old daughter to distinguish the difference between a TV advert and a TV programme within seconds. Ads online comply too. We feel guilty if we make google adsense indistinct from the editorial it sits within.

Roll forward. The digital disruption has changed who gets to publish content (recommendations) and who gets to distribute that content - through peer-to-peer networks of trust. We've moved from a centralised broadcast model to an edge-in networked one.

The need for a distinction between advertising and editorial content is an outcome of mass broadcast models. Where control of production and distribution of the message was in the hands of the few, to get your message to the eyeballs meant you either had to own the means of production/distribution or pay for placement.

If you were paying for placement we should be warned that the message was likely to be biased.
So we created a set of rules, both implicit (metadata) and explicit (legislation) to regulate those placements and warn us of the risk of bias.

But it's no longer the case that you need to either own the means of production or distribution in order to get your content OR advert published and distributed.

In the networked world we are all creators of what would once have been called editorial messages AND advertising messages.

And where the payment distinction dissolves, perhaps so does the need for distinction between advertising and recommendation.

Where they meet we find services. What advertising message would you forward (recommend) to a friend? One you think they will find useful. How did you decide to turn that advert into a recommendation?

Well, that's entirely up to you. First it has to be something you personally found useful (a service to you). Being able to change it to better suit your needs (a widget with a personal outcome, for example) makes that more likely. Moulding it to the needs of your own network of trust makes it more likely you will decide it's worthy of your recommendation. Where the content becomes a service, the ad becomes more likely to morph into a recommendation. But there's no certainty.

As JP Rangaswami was suggesting here, recommendation doesn't happen in the mind of the forwarding party, or the person who would distribute. It happens in the mind of the receiver. It's pull. The forwarder, the wannabe distributor, is pushing - is advertising.

I guess that means that one man's advertising is another man's recommendation.

The fact is, peer-to-peer distribution models are likely to make a better fist of selecting the right 'adverts' to forward to the people most likely to regard that service as a 'recommendation'.

So;

• Your service must be adaptable (so the user can make it a better fit for those he would advertise it to).
• Your service must be peer-to-peer distributed (it's the best fit with the networked world and the only way it can morph from advert to recommendation).

Remember, this model is not likely to fit the broadcast world. And not everything digital is a pure networked model.

Models where audiences consume content (eg everything from straightforward broadcast models to youtube - where 1% of creators forge a ugc-powered broadcast model for 99% of consumers) more traditional ad models continue to create value.

But in Total Communities - where 99% are creating and distributing (eg myspace, twitter, facebook, social networks in general) where to take part you have to create part, making it ever easier to turn advert into recommendation is the new alchemy.



I'm going to be talking more about this at WidgetWebExpo in New York next week. In the meantime, please join in the journey by commenting below.

Mobile Entertainment Market: Cannes - first update

I'm at the Mobile Entertainment Market in Cannes and would be posting live tweets BUT once again there's no free wifi in the conference room.

To be fair, there is in the lobby – but that's not where the speakers are. I think the word I'm looking for is doh! No back channel here!

So here's my compromise – a few highlights from the first session. I know it means you can't join in with the conversation but at least you can latch on to the broadcast of ideas and maybe join in the comments here. Gah! I'd rather be twittering.

Anyways a few highlights:

Lee Fenton COO at Jamba reveals his animated rabbit ringtone has become the biggest sellng physical cd in Germany.

Love to know what the demographics are. My daughter is 3 and pesters for princess comics. I'll make a wild bet she won't buy her own newspapers when she's older.

Jamba is also going to offer downloads from MySpace artist pages.

Jamba spends $100m on marketing. Less than 10% is spent marketing on mobile yet it is their most efficent ad channel. They'd do more but they can't get the inventory.

During Alistair Mitchell's (RIM, ie Blackberry) keynote someone pointed out how poor the Iphone is for typing (and therefore text). Much prompting about a touchscreen blackberry with a keyboard led to no confirmation.

Interesting to me this fascination with typing – given the increasingly less text heavy internet and increasing numbers of new mobile users globally who can't read, much less type their queries. I guess that may not be relevant in the business user smart phone world?

Brief discussion of the long tail of places people seek content from makes me think that this alone should make operators tear down their walls.

What do operators make money from? Conversation. What prompts conversation online, peer-to-peer, by voice or text or IM or etc? Content.

It's another example of the because effect. Operators can make money because of content but not with it.

Finally, BBC's controller of mobile Matthew Postgate says Beeb is both a content and and an engineering company. Early adopters are into news which is why its popular on mobile internet. Mobile will be mainstream for Beeb before too long.

News translates well across different platforms. Drama may not (on tv well shot and lavish, etc) take that and put it on mobile and it can't elicit the same emotional response). It will take time for people to use the medium most effectively in its own right.

BBC has about 17m uu on fixed line a month, 2.8m on mobile. He thinks 40% are a new audience which they hadn't reached before.

He says Beeb is planning to roll out the iplayer on mobile and that devices like the iphone bring the fixed and mobile internet closer together.

A version of iplayer is in beta on iphone and itouch. Plan is to roll it out on more handsets this year.

Beeb worked closely with the isps for iplayer to be "sensitive to their issues" about demand on bandwidth, that same dialogue is going on with the mobile operators.

"We can create demand, which drives Britain towards a digital economy," says Matthew.

More to come later today.

Two-way flow networks make humans the medium

Print, Recordings, Radio, Cinema, TV: Mass media has been, and remains, about one-way flows of communication. Broadcast.

The mistake we often make when talking about the internet (and mobile for that matter) is to describe them as mediums. They are networks. There is a difference.

The internet and mobile are tools to enable communication and reduce the cost of groups forming (helping to realise the potential of group forming network theory). These are the communities of purpose I described in Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21st Century.

What difference does this make? A significant one for marketing.

Because we treat the internet as a medium, we place our advertising on it and in it. But the ‘media properties’ of the internet are to the medium as paper is to print. It’s the enabler. Paper is what makes magazines, books and newspapers possible. No one advertises on wood pulp.

Anyone who ever read the Cluetrain will have understood that marketing is about conversations (markets are conversations).

Conversation involves two or more humans connecting and communicating.

So where are you going to 'place' your marketing message? Where all the humans are, where all the conversations are going on?

Sounds sensible doesn't it?

Social networks (the media property hits of the internet) are where conversation appears to be happening (online at least). So the response has been; let's cover them in banner ads?

That’s not placing the ads in the relevant medium.

It’s a little like putting notices on trees and wondering why no one is acting on them when they read the newspaper that's made from those trees when pulped.

We're advertising in what we perceive to be the medium (ie the social network) when the medium is actually the conversation occuring between humans.

Justin Kirby at Digital Media Communications would say humans are the medium. The ads have to be in what's made from the trees, not the trees themselves! Your ads have to be in what’s made from the connecting tools of the internet – in the conversation.

So banner ads on the ‘media properties’ of the internet are effectively placing ads around ads. Delightful. Would you enjoy a site made entirely from adsense code?

Of course some people do notice the ads, some do click on them (0.1% isn't it?) and more still have a seed planted by an idea that they act on later. The activation likely comes after a conversation.

The human beings (the nodes in these networks) are your access points to other human beings. They are where the connections are made, they are the conversations, they are the marketing.

Figuring out ways to engage them in your product or service, to make them natural advocates is not about constructing a social network around it and hoping they'll thank you for it. It is more about reaching out to them as human beings in the hope that they will have good things to say about you when they do what humans do: connect.

They do this in social networks of course, but they also do this on telephones, in person, by fax, by email, by im, by text etc etc...

The one consistent element is real humans talking to one another.

If the human is your message, then that message gets carried with them – marketed - no matter what the medium.

Food for thought.

And good news for content. The content that convinces – no matter what the source, remains crucial.

Good experiences are content, too. Content, as Cory Doctorow said, is what sparks conversations. And I think we’ve illustrated how important that is.

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.