Flipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.
Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.
Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.
I am at The Future of Workplace Communications webcast, which is an hour-long discussion broadcast as live video as part of Viocorp's Future Forum series. (Archived event now available)
The four panellists are Oscar Trimboli, head of the Information Workers group at Microsoft, Nicky Wakefield who runs the Human Capital practice of Deloitte Australia, Phil Cronin, General Manager of Intel Australia, and myself.
I am just taking notes through the event - on the fly so they probably include misquotes. I also won't be able to record what I say, so I'll do a separate post later with my thoughts.
[UPDATE:] Here are the thoughts I shared on future of workplace communication
NICKY: It's about solving the war for talent. Difficult to get talent. We have found a strong correlation between use of Yammer and staff retention. Deloitte Australia is world's largest user of Yammer, with over half of 4,600 employees using it, having sent over 24,000 messages. Use quickly shifted from social use to business applications. People are looking to communicate with each other and the organization. Workplace communications is a key part of the answer.
I have just been requested permission by London School of Economics to use my Web 2.0 Framework in their Management and Innovation of eBusiness program for the next four years. The first part of the framework is below, and the industry landscape further down the page.
Click on the image for the original description and full pdf
I’m delighted that the framework is still seen as relevant and useful over 3 years after it was created in May 2007. Certainly the original post continues to get plenty of traffic, not least because an image from the framework still appears on the front page of a Google search for ‘Web 2.0’. The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ has been largely replaced with ‘social media’, 'cloud' and similar terms, but the underlying concepts remain valid in understanding what is going on today.
I thought it would be worth reviewing the framework today to see what is still current and what I would change.
I've long said that newspapers and books will become digital when they have all the qualities of the existing media - including readability, portability, and the ability to highlight and make notes - as well as all of the capabilities of digital media - such as searchability, compactness, and remote access.
The Amazon Kindle allows people to highlight passages and take notes - a basic functionality required for a e-book. What this also allows is to discover what others are highlighting, providing a form of collaborative filtering. Amazon has just released a list of the most highlighted books and phrases on the Kindle.
The most highlighted books are:
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
The Holy Bible
The Shack by William P. Young
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
A selection of the most highlighted phrases:
I notice that Imogen Heap is continuing with the free streaming of her album Ellipse . And no doubt significantly because of the free streaming, Ellipse is charting at #5 on Billboard. It is a glorious album, though I think we can pretty definitely count the free streaming of the album on the web as a very effective strategy. Perhaps it will become commonplace to stream music for free in order to maximize sales.
I'd be keen to know the proportion of sales of this album and the songs on it online versus through CD. It would almost be surprising if she sold much in CDs at all, because her presence is so online..
I notice Imogen on Twitter now has over a million followers.
A bit tangentially, I just found this beautiful video of a beautiful song by Kate Havnevik, who I found through collaborative filtering and Imogen's music. If you like Imogen you'll absolutely like the extraordinary Kate. (note that it doesn't start for 10 seconds)
One of the key themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009 on August 31 / September 1 will be the emergence of the 'reputation economy', and how value is being created in that space.
Howard Rheingold, who has been deeply involved in this space since the 1980s, and has demonstrated his prescience by writing - among others books - Virtual Reality in 1991 and Smart Mobs in 2002, will be doing a keynote at the conference.
In our recent conversation about influence and reputation Howard mentioned the 2004 article Manifesto for a Reputation Society, which appeared in First Monday. I saw this a number of years ago but had forgotten it. It is in fact a great overview of where reputation may go. The abstract reads:
I recently gave the keynote speech for a Sun Microsystems Partner Executive Forum, where Sun brought together the top executives from its extensive partner network for an update and relationship building session.
Below is an 8 min video containing brief excerpts from my keynote, titled The Future of the Network Economy.
Topics covered in the video include:
* In the Depression of the 1930s there was little structural change in the economy; in the current downturn there will be massive change.
* In a connected world you can – and must – reposition yourself across boundaries.
* Scale-free networks provide a common structure across society, web, infrastructure and more.
* Collaborative filtering is where the web is going: it enables us to find what is most relevant to us from infinite content.
* Open innovation requires identifying and stimulating the social networks where relevant ideas are proliferating.
* Our individual and organizational reputations will precede us, giving us and others insights into our expertise, reliability, and credibility.
* Strategy in an economy based on the flow of information and ideas requires us to rethink alliances and identify opportunities in new domains.
* The law of requisite variety means we must be at least as flexible as our environment.
* Studying ants' collective behavior can help organizations understand how to tap emergence to create value.
Download Chapter 8 of Living Networks on Next Generation Content Distribution
Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.
For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.
Living Networks - Chapter 8: Next Generation Content Distribution
Creating Value When Digital Products Flow Freely
OVERVIEW: In a hyper-connected world digital products flow freely, unless safeguards are put in place. Providers of content - including entertainment and high-value information - must balance protection and promotion to maximize value. All content industries are in a state of massive flux, and evolutionary strategies are required to succeed in this time of transition.
Chapter 8 of Living Networks - Commentary and updated perspectives
It is inevitable that news dissemination will become a largely social function. By whatever means, we will be provided with extremely low touch ways of sharing content we think would be interesting to specific people we know. This will then be filtered in various ways by the recipients, however most will value being recommended articles and sites on an individual basis.
Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and other tools allow us to recommend content to the world at large. But recommendations are far more valuable if they are specific to the person and context. The best way to disseminate these recommendations is through our social networks, if we happen to spend time there. So social networks can become a platform for the collaborative filtering of content, giving individuals the benefit of their network’s judgment and access to information.
In this context, the announcement today by New York Times and LinkedIn of a way of providing custom content and recommendations to their network is a landmark. Over the next few years this integration of social networks and content will rapidly evolve to be a very important part of the landscape.
The Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications list is now officially launched – the full list is below, after appearing this morning in a feature section in BRW magazine on Web 2.0. A few quick comments:
* See the scope and criteria for the list.
* No doubt many will disagree with what has or hasn’t been included in the list. That’s inevitable in drawing boundaries around defining Web 2.0 applications. We have been strict in applying our scope, and many very worthy applications have not been included in the list, not because they’re not excellent, but because they haven’t met our judge’s view of what constitutes a Web 2.0 application.
* A few more applications have come to our attention since the list was finalized. In a very dynamic landscape we cannot hope to cover everything, but we are continuing to build as comprehensive a view of the landscape as possible. Please let us know what we’re missing.
* Despite the caveats above, we’re very happy with the list and what has come out of our efforts in creating it. It provides the broadest coverage of the Australian Web 2.0 landscape available, and we are sure will achieve its intention of supporting and drawing attention to the value created by Australia’s vibrant online entrepreneurial community. I hope and expect that the 2009 list will once again represent a far deeper and richer landscape featuring many global success stories.
1. mig33
Website: http://www.mig33.com/
Person/Company: Project Goth (Steven Goh/ Mei Lin Ng)
Description: Global mobile and web-based community, including social networking and messaging such as IM, email, text and photo sharing. Founded in 2005 in Perth and now based in the US. Has raised US$23 million, and has over 7 million users across 200 countries.
2. Confluence
Website: http://www.atlassian.com/
Person/Company: Atlassian (Mike Cannon-Brookes/ Scott Farquhar)
Description: Enterprise wiki with 5,000 clients in over 80 countries. Based in Sydney and San Francisco. Atlassian has over $22 million in revenue with no external funding.
3. Red Bubble
Website: http://www.redbubble.com/
Person/Company: Martin Hosking/ Peter Styles/ Paul Vanzella
Description: Art gallery and creative community where artists can upload art and sell it in many formats. Over 100,000 items sold in 71 countries in the first financial year. Has raised $3.7 million in funding.
4. 3eep
Website: http://www.3eep.com/
Person/Company: Rob Antulov/ Nick Gonios
Description: Social networking platform covering sports from national to school level for sports enthusiasts, players, teams and parents, allowing discussions and photo and video sharing. Has licensed the platform in Australia, Canada and Germany, and is also run as a stand-alone social network.
5. Engagd
Website: http://www.engagd.com/
Person/Company: Faraday Media (Chris Saad/ Ashley Angell)
Description: Web service application that creates 'attention profiles' of users, and enables these to be used in customising services and content for users.
So far the primary theme of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco seems to be openness and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which I defined in our Web 2.0 Framework as “A defined interface to a computer application or database that allows access by other applications.” Web companies new and old are announcing APIs that provide access to the data that resides on their site.
ReadWriteWeb writes about the next frontier after ubiquitous APIs, an interview of Web 2.0 keynoter Max Levchin focuses on the implications of APIs on every application, and Tim O’Reilly in his keynote says that the paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power.
In the last weeks I’ve been looking across what is available on APIs, and it is quite extraordinary. Driven significantly by the impetus of Google’s leadership, over the last couple of years the industry has taken a massive turn towards openness, making it hard to run online initiatives any other way.
I am finding myself completely staggered by the possibilities. There are so many ways that this vast trove of information can be used in new and innovative applications. ReadWriteWeb's article provides a list of the ways APIs can be used. Some of the promising areas I see include:
Content aggregation. Despite the existing proliferation of blog and feed aggregators, there are many more opportunities to create highly specialized content aggregators, bringing together the web’s most relevant content in niche domains.
Collaborative filtering. The richness of information about people’s content preferences available from something like FriendFeed (or the individual feeds that go into it) make it possible to correlate taste across media and genres.
Latent social networks: Suggesting friends or connections based not just on profile or musical tastes, but an integrated view of preferences and activities. This could be particularly powerful in dating.
Download Chapter 1 of Living Networks: The Networks Come Alive
Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.
For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.
Living Networks - Chapter 1: The Networks Come Alive
What the Changing Flow of Information and Ideas Means for Business
OVERVIEW: Connectivity is shrinking our world, and in the process transforming business. As communication between people becomes more fluid and pervasive, it is creating what looks like a global brain, in which ideas procreate freely and we collaborate to filter an ever-expanding universe of information. But just a small proportion of the planet’s population is connected. It is critical that we extend participation as broadly as we can.
Chapter 1 of Living Networks - Commentary and updated perspectives
As for almost all the book, the underlying messages in Chapter 1 are as relevant today as they were over five years ago. The five key issues outlined at the outset: collaboration with clients and partners; organizational performance; innovation and intellectual property; strategy and positioning; and individual leadership are still today the most relevant issues for business in our extraordinarily networked world.
The opening words of Living Networks were “Macromedia, the company best known for Flash software, is blogging.” In 2002 companies were already using blogs to communicate more effectively with their customers. After the launch of the book, in my speeches I used the story of how this initial foray into blogging evolved, with Macromedia (since bought by Adobe) aggregating now almost 2000 approved blogs, including those of its staff, partners, and customers. This entire community spanning inside and outside the organization is engaged in a conversation on how to use the software tools, bugs, fixes, and useful approaches.
For the last ten years I have believed that collaborative filtering will be one of the most fundamental platforms for business and society. In a world of massively increasing information overload, the only way we will cope is to collaborate to filter what will be most relevant to us. Early this decade I was finding myself very surprised by how slow progress had been over the last five years, despite some interesting research and initiatives. However the last five years on the Internet could almost be characterized as the rise of collaborative filtering. Our Web 2.0 Framework is in a sense a description of how we collectively filter information. Almost all the significant developments on the web I would interpret as related to this evolution of collaborative filtering.
An article out a few days ago in the New York Times titled Finding Political News Online, The Young Pass It On described how young people share political news they are interested in by email and on social networks. In the same way, many young people primarily read articles that has found them in this way. In short:
“..they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.”
Over the last week FriendFeed has being the hot topic of the online world, soaring in popularity after an already strong start from its launch on February 25. FriendFeed allows you to see all of the online activities of the people you like or admire, who choose to share that data. So for example I have created a FriendFeed for Ross Dawson that brings together a summary of blog posts I’ve written, what I’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us, shared on StumbleUpon and Google Reader, videos I’ve posted on YouTube, pictures on Flickr, profile changes on LinkedIn, and songs I’ve loved on Last.FM. There are currently a total of 28 services that people can include in profiling what they are doing online.
On one level, this provides a quite staggering depth of visibility into what people are doing, and ultimately who they are as people. I’ve written before about the role of exhibitionism in allowing Web 2.0 to flourish, and this is evident once again in FriendFeed. Of course, it is supposed to be primarily about keeping track of your friends’ rather than strangers’ lives, and the reality is that all of this information is available anyway. It’s just that it has been brought about into one place. Not just that, it is a community itself, allowing comments and other ways to respond to people’s content directly, rather than going back to the source.
While there are other competitors in this space, including SocialThing! (see ReadWriteWeb’s comparison), the availability – and success – of these services is a fundamentally important transition in the online world. The reason why Facebook has been so successful is that it allows people a quick way of keeping in touch with what their friends are up to. Once either all the feeds are available from people’s current social network activities, or people start updating their profiles and activities in a more open format, social networks will be a completely different space.
An interesting article on Techcrunch says Digg refugees may be heading to Mixx. Mixx is one of literally hundreds of community-based collaborative filtering tools that is competing with Digg, yet it is getting significant traction.
It is particularly instructive to read what some of the “Digg refugees” are saying:
“I have already had quite a lot of success with getting my submissions voted on, this may be partly due to the fact that many of my digg friends have joined the site.” Dave Eaves
“Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.” Vandelay Design
The context here is that while Digg gets millions of readers, the way stories get voted to the top is based on relatively small communities. As discussed in an article I wrote on the structure of social opinion, 30 people out of a million-odd are responsible for the original submission of 30% of the articles that hit the front page of Digg. The reason for their success is that their friends follow what each other Digg and vote on these stories, at which point the general mass of readers pick up on it. Someone who is prominent in the community is highly regarded, and can be an overt as well as a covert influencer. The community starts to become highly social, with personalities, exchanges, likes and dislikes.
Today I am speaking at KMWorld 2007 in Silicon Valley on Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media. The speech is based on Future Exploration Network’s Web 2.0 Framework, and how the framework can be applied to setting and implementing successful strategies for Enterprise 2.0.
I’ve provided the slideshow below, mainly for people who attend my presentation. As a speaker, I don’t believe in duplicating all the content of the speech in a presentation – slides should be visual cues to accompany what I am speaking about. So if you weren’t at the speech, don’t expect the presentation to make complete sense on its own, though you can get the general gist of the ideas and content by flipping through.
Alternatively download the slides as a pdf (2.9MB)
Here is a summary of the key points of the presentation:
When you go to networking events in Silicon Valley and ask people what they’re doing, you’ve got around a 50-50 chance of a “we’re in stealth mode” reply. Lots of nascent start-ups, and all of them afraid that someone will steal their idea and get to market before them. It kind of makes sense, since ideas can be copied in a flash, and whoever gets there first has got a head start, however fleeting.
Turning that thinking on its head is Path 101, which is “live-blogging” the start-up from even before the company was incorporated. Full details of everything the start-up is doing, from its core positioning through to the memos of its Monday strategy meetings (complete with Digg this! buttons), are online. Sometimes what they write about makes obvious sense to post to the world, such as what they want from LinkedIn to be able to build a good complementary product. Other times, they write about details of their strategy and activities that go far beyond what most entrepreneurs would want to discuss.
The thinking behind this approach is that your lead before you are copied by others is evanescent anyway, whereas exposing what you are doing brings attention, useful feedback, relevant connections and more. What is truly differentiated these days is not so much ideas, as the ability to generate ideas. No doubt if someone tried to copy exactly what Path 101 is doing, they’d always be behind the new insights the founders were generating. The other truly differentiated foundation of the economy is relationships, and being open is one of the strongest relationship-generators there is. It builds exposure and trust.
Tomorrow I’m going to the Influence conference organized by Phil Sim and Mediaconnect, an invitation-only event held in the heart of the Hunter Valley wine region. Originally the event was only for technology journalists and the tech companies that wanted to reach them, but it has now been extended to the all most powerful influencers in the technology community, whether they are journalists, analysts, or bloggers.
Last year I spoke on the Web 2.0 panel, where I described what User Filtered Content is, and why it is such an important foundation to Web 2.0. This year I will be speaking on the Living Online panel, which is devoted to looking at where life online is going for consumers. In my brief introductory talk I will touch on six trends that will transform living online over the next years.
1. Pervasive connectivity
The trend underlying all the others is that we will be far more connected, wherever we are. Broadband speeds, while still disappointing in most countries, will continue to increase. A good way to think about it is to consider when the majority of consumers will have 100Mbps in the home. In Australia, probably not by 2010, but I would certainly hope by 2014. Gradually WiFi will become pervasive – and hopefully free – in metropolitan areas. WiMax has the potential to offer high speed roaming Internet access over large areas. As importantly, 3G mobile technologies that require less power and thus can be used for extended periods by handheld devices will enable access to the Internet by anyone anywhere. The critical enabler here will be reasonable pricing of mobile data. In Australia it is in most cases obscenely expensive, so big price falls will be required to make access pervasive. A key indicator of pervasive access is when car radios become IP-based, as this will indicate there is always good access to the internet, and all radio stations simulcast over IP.
The Future of Media Summit participant blog was recently launched. This is a forum for speakers, partners, and attendees at the Future of Media Summit 2007 to discuss the issues covered at the Summit before, during, and after the event. When you register for the event you will be given a login and instructions to post on this blog (If you have registered recently you will receive your login shortly. Click here for full details on the blog, including how to get a login if you cannot physically attend either the San Francisco or Sydney events).
Last year we only launched the participant blog for the Future of Media Summit 2006 at the time when the actual event kicked off, so we garnered a range of comments during the event itself, then a very healthy and extremely interesting discussion between the event participants in the month after the event.
Check out the Future of Media Summit blog before, during, and after the event - this is where speakers will be providing pre-event insights and perspectives, participants will be live-blogging, and discussion will be engaged after the event.
Also associated content, including the Future of Media Report 2007 and other research will be posted here.
The most recent post on the blog is a reposting of an extremely interesting blog post from Anne-Marie Roussel on collaborative filtering, a topic I believe will be central to the Future of Media. Anne-Marie, who manages Microsoft's entertainment portfolio (Zune, Xbox, Video), will be speaking on the San Francisco side of the Future of Media Summit.
I am behind on my blogging, so I thought I’d make some very brief comments about a host of extremely interesting announcements that have come out this week.
Google acquires Feedburner.
Feedburner has been prominent in enabling the world of RSS. This acquisition, estimated to be worth $100 million, makes eminent sense for Google in being able to create more value for both publishers and advertisers. Feedburner’s analytics are a key part of that. This is a powerful combination.
Top references/ analysis:
Feedburner CEO comments
Reuters story
[UPDATE:] We have taken the Web 2.0 Framework and applied it to the enterprise in our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report - You can download Chapter 2 on Web 2.0 and the Enterprise here.
Alongside our corporate strategy consulting and research work in the media and technology space, Future Exploration Network has created a Web 2.0 Framework to share openly. Click here or on any of the images below to download the Framework as a pdf (713KB).
The intention of the Web 2.0 Framework is to provide a clear, concise view of the nature of Web 2.0, particularly for senior executives or other non-technical people who are trying to grasp the scope of Web 2.0, and the implications and opportunities for their organizations.
There are three key parts to the Web 2.0 Framework, as shown below:
Web 2.0 Framework
* Web 2.0 is founded on seven key Characteristics: Participation, Standards, Decentralization, Openness, Modularity, User Control, and Identity.
* Web 2.0 is expressed in two key Domains: the Open web, and the Enterprise.
* The heart of Web 2.0 is how it converts Inputs (User Generated Content, Opinions, Applications), through a series of Mechanisms (Technologies, Recombination, Collaborative Filtering, Structures, Syndication) to Emergent Outcomes that are of value to the entire community.
Web 2.0 Definitions
* We define the Web 2.0 Characteristics, Domains, and Technologies referred to in the Framework.
* Ten definitions for Web 2.0 are provided, including the one I use to pull together the ideas in the Framework: “Distributed technologies built to integrate, that collectively transform mass participation into valuable emergent outcomes.”
Web 2.0 Landscape
* Sixty two prominent Web 2.0 companies and applications are mapped out across two major dimensions: Content Sharing to Recommendations/ Filtering; and Web Application to Social Network. The four spaces that emerge at the junctions of these dimensions are Widget/ component; Rating/ tagging; Aggregation/ Recombination; and Collaborative filtering. Collectively these cover the primary landscape of Web 2.0.
As with all our frameworks, the Web 2.0 Framework is released on a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use it and build on it as they please, as long as there is attribution with a link to this blog post and/ or Future Exploration Network. The framework is intended to be a stimulus to conversation and further thinking, so if you disagree on any aspect, or think you can improve on it, please take what is useful, leave the rest, and create something better.
In the Framework document we also mention our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2007, which will be held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco this July 18/17. In the same spirit as this Web 2.0 Framework, we will be releasing substantial research, framework, and other content on the Future of Media in the lead-up to our event, continuing the tradition from the Future of Media Strategic Framework and Future of Media Report 2006 that we released last year. Hope this is all useful!
[POST-EVENT:] Also see post-event comments and release of Web 2.0 Framework.
The Web 2.0 in Australia event on 6 June is turning out pretty much exactly as designed. It will be a compact, senior executive, invitation-only event covering topics including frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0, why progress has been slow in Australia, current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia, and implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups and marketing.
Sponsors and partners include BEA Systems, KPMG, Australian Venture Capital Assocation, Australian Information Industry Association, Department of State and Regional Development, Australian Interactive Media Industry Assocation, Smart Internet Technology CRC, and Innovation Bay. The latest information on the event is here.
The final speaker line-up is absolutely fantastic, including:
* Richard MacManus, Editor, Read/ Write Web
* Allan Aaron, General Partner, Technology Venture Partners
* David Backley, Chief Technology Officer, Westpac
* Brad Howarth, Journalist and Director, LaGrange Communications
* Randal Leeb-du Toit, CEO, Yoick
* Adrian McDermott, Vice President of Engineering, BEA Systems
* Chris Smith, General Manager, Sensis Interactive
I’ll also present our Web 2.0 framework (which will be released next week) and chair the event. Richard and Adrian are flying in from New Zealand and Silicon Valley respectively. Richard’s been keen to get over to Australia to get a better feel for the local Web 2.0 community. The event is partly intended to help Richard – and of course others! – to do this. We have a fantastic audience of some of the most senior executives from the corporate and technology sector in Australia coming along on the day.
The main reason for this post is to announce the companies we’re showcasing as “five leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia” at the event. These have been selected purely on merit. We did a good scour of what’s out there in this space to make the selection. The results of our research, giving a quick rundown on the top 50 or so Web 2.0 companies in Australia, will be released in the next few days, appearing first on Richard’s Read/Write Web, which is one of the top few technology blogs in the world. I’ll post it on this blog shortly afterwards.
In the meantime, the leading five companies that are being showcased at the event are (in alphabetical order):
Euan Semple, formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC, has written a blog post titled The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?. His answer (in summary) is:
DO NOTHING
GET OUT OF THE WAY
KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP
So is it that easy? Last week at Barcamp Sydney I bumped into James Robertson, who had recently been at FastForward conference (and been one of the writers on its the excellent conference blog). He told me that at the event there had been a fundamental disagreement between Euan and Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who has popularized the term Enterprise 2.0. Euan said that it was easy to make Enterprise 2.0 happen. Andrew said that it wasn’t. Andrew has written a great post about it that is well worth a read for the counterpoint. He says:
But it still felt as if most people weren't with me -- as if most participants in the round table felt that enterprise 2.0 was essentially a historical inevitability. So I asked for a show of hands. I asked "How many of us, when we look into the crystal ball that shows the organization of the near future -- say 3 to 5 years from now -- see widespread deployment of E2.0 technologies?" Almost every hand in the room went up. At this point I completely lost my poker face. I sputtered "You have got to be kidding me!!" or something equally profound as I stared around the room.Very interestingly, Andrew brings up a analogy with the (lack of) success of knowledge management, a movement I was associated with back in the 1990s before I endeavored to distance myself from it (see my thoughts on the future of knowledge management written in 2004). Andrew says:
I reminded the audience that there were plenty of conferences devoted to knowledge management (KM) systems and approaches in past years, and that these events had almost certainly featured rooms full of enthusiasts wondering exactly what the future was going to look like, and probably paying very little attention to the possibility that the future would be KM-free. I asked the room how many people wanted to be remembered as this decade's equivalents of KM enthusiasts and evangelists, and got a few chuckles.James Dellow goes into this comparison in more depth, and seems to suggest that he’s prepared to back Enterprise 2.0 over knowledge management’s success.
I have to say that I’m on Andrew’s side on this one. I count myself as a true believer in Enterprise 2.0, but I’ve seen enough of organizations to know that the status quo has enormous power, and making good changes happen is never easy. In particular, unstructured implementation of social media tools in organizations will yield only a fraction of the value of a planned one. Yes I believe in emergence, but leadership is required to create fertile fields. If people try something once and it’s not useful, they won’t try it again. In particular, there are ways to structure how social media works so it creates valuable results in collaborative filtering and enabling useful connections. You don’t know what the results will be, but clear vision and specific planning and actions will make it far more likely to be valuable than just letting it happen.
I often write on this blog about the fabulous things I come across in the wonderful living networks in which we exist. In this case, I have to write about something that sucks real bad.
From back in the mid-1990s I have thought that one of the most awesome applications of the Internet is for everyone to be able to listen to any radio station on the planet. Back in the bad old days of crude electronic distibution technologies (AM and FM radio), we could only listen to high-quality radio from stations in our immediate locality. As soon as the first internet streams were made I started listening to radio stations in the Netherlands, LA, Nigeria, New Zealand, anywhere where there was an early desire to gain listeners farther afield. How fantastic to be able to listen to them all, finding unique DJs and hearing local news from across the globe! I envisaged that soon anyone would be able to find and listen to their very favorite radio stations from the tens of thousands across the planet.
Since then a whole new space has arisen, with not just existing radio stations streaming their sounds onto the net, but a whole new cadre of internet-only radio stations. Soma.FM, out of San Francisco, is my very favorite DJ-selected station I’ve found. Listen to their Groove Salad station – I love it. In addition, an entirely new offering has arisen, in which technology enables us to listen to personalized music. I have written many times before about collaborative filtering music stations like Last.FM and Pandora. Other interesting ones I’ve discovered lately include Finetune and Musicovery.
Now all of this may disappear. In a shocking decision last Friday, the Copyright Royalty Board announced new Internet radio royalty rates, doing exactly what was suggested by the RIAA’s lobby body, effectively tripling the cost of streaming music, effective retroactively from the beginning of 2006, and increasing every year until 2010. Bill Goldsmith of Radio Paradise, a leading Internet radio station, does the math, working out that he will now have to pay out around 125% of his revenue, meaning he immediately has to consider closing down. Mark Cuban says “goodbye to webcasting.” Om Malik asks “Last.FM, Pandora KO’ed by new royalties?” Mike Masnick talks about “internet radio royalty rates designed to kill webcasts.” Indeed, there some bad craziness in the business logic here. In the first instance, putting music webcasting stations out of business isn’t going to increase revenue. Secondly, recording companies make the majority of their money from hits, and hits happen because people hear them. There is massive investment in promoting music to traditional radio and music TV stations, yet for no good reason the opposite attitude to online music streaming.
Now this isn’t to say that Internet radio will die completely. Those with big pockets or associated business models may still do OK. Indeed, new business models will be found. But it is an extraordinary pity that innovation in how all of us discover and listen to music is being stymied. It would be criminal if Last.FM and its peers were forced to close down, leaving us all impoverished. I hope that sense will prevail and this decision will before too long be changed.
[UPDATE] A few resources: Save Our Internet Radio, Save Internet Radio, Online petition to US Congress, email your Congressman about this, and Bill Goldsmith's blog post about it.
This issue has been discussed before and I’ve written about it several times, though it doesn’t seem to go away. Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, has written a very interesting post titled Are blogs a 'parasitic' medium? He notes :
Over the past months, I've heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a "parasitic" medium that wouldn't be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.
Back in April 2006 I wrote a blog post on The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs, in which I quoted from the Financial Times and commented on this idea of parasitism:
“The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new - but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.”Cute metaphor. Yet symbiosis is far more apt than parasitism. Mainstream media in its online form largely gets attention through blogs. Blogs add immense value to the original articles, by identiyfing what’s important, pointing out flaws, adding other perspectives, making visible to all the conversations that stem from media pieces. Blogs depend on mainstream media, with its resources and editorial capabilities, for sure. Yet media is increasingly dependent on blogging for the direction of attention and layer of value-add created.
I later wrote about the collaborative space of blogs and newspapers, discussing how Technorati enables blog commentary on newspaper articles to be visible when you read the original article:
Newspapers and other mainstream media are still the primary reference points for what’s happening in the world, and the first pass of editorial commentary on that. Yet mainstream media increasingly feeds off the dialogue and news that surfaces in the blogosphere. News sites are also vastly enhanced by having the conversations that stem from their articles being visible to all. Anyone who wants to comment on a media story can have their thoughts available to readers globally, not just on a single site, but through an entire world of syndicated media.
In the Future of Media Strategic Framework, the central feature is the Symbiosis of Mainstream and Social Media, as illustrated by the circular flow of the cycle of media (click through for anthe downloadable diagram and explanation of symbiosis):
Robert uses a diverse range of interesting quotes to unpack the idea that blogs are parasitic. Ultimately, the most important reason that this is nonsense is that blogs are collectively a mechanism for us to discover what we as a society (or subset of it) find interesting and useful. Even if there were no useful content in blogs (which of course is also nonsense), their collective function of collaborative filtering is an extraordinary bound forward for the world of media.
For the record, there are at least a dozen bloggers whose coverage of topics I care about do a considerably better job than any journalist working for a traditional media company.
while Howard Owen comments:
The best way to understand blogging is to blog. That’s why I say: All journalists should blog. You can’t get modern media without understanding blogs, and you can’t understand blogs unless you do it.
Emily Chang has written about a project to aggregate all the information that flows through her life.
"As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway)."She has now created a data stream that aggregates her blogs and websites, and usage of stylehive, del.icio.us, twitter, plazes, flickr, last.fm, and upcoming. There has been substantial interesting commentary on this initiative already, notably from Grant Robertson, Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa (including what an enterprise data stream may look like), and Stowe Boyd, who says he’s working on a similar initiative. Stowe writes:
"This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. Yes, we will want to have our traffic cached -- for search and analysis purposes -- but we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into.A pal of yours is having a party? He will create the event using some social application site, and the event will be cast into his traffic. Your flow-aware calendar app might snag the event from the traffic, and ask you if you'd like to confirm. You agree, and the agreement is thrown into your traffic, for your buddy and others to make sense of, downstream."
For me, what this suggests is a world in which many people choose to expose all of their activities to the world. Del.icio.us is a great example. People used to favorite websites on their PC. Now many are happy to do it publicly, so other people can look at what they choose to make note of. Very importantly, this exposing of behaviors provides the foundation for Web 2.0, in that it provides input to allow collaborative filtering and the creation of “collective intelligence”. It seems that many people are thinking about and putting the mechanisms in place to expose all that we do, including our activities in socializing, entertainment, work, and more. Clearly not everyone will choose to expose their activities, yet many will – this has been proven over the last few years. From an enterprise perspective, implementing these kinds of exposing mechanisms inside organizations will allow far more effective knowledge work and business processes – but only after substantially new workflow and systems are put in place to synthesize this plethora of valuable information.
I recently did the keynote for an event on Web 2.0 marketing run by Hothouse, a very interesting web house with major clients including News Corporation, Toyota, and Yahoo!7. My 25 minute keynote (and the rest of the event) can be viewed on an online videostream.
If you don’t have the patience to watch the keynote, here’s a brief snapshot of what I covered:
The background to Web 2.0. The World Wide Web, including HTML, HTTP, and URLs, were created in 1990. The first ascii web browser was created in 1992, the first graphic web browser was invented in 1993, and in 1994 the big debate was whether commercial use of the Internet should be allowed. Thus began what is now dubbed Web 1.0, from 1994 until the web crash in 2001. Since 2001 a new approach to tapping the potential of the internet, dubbed Web 2.0, has grown and developed, based on a new mindset, and offering a universe of extraordinary possibilities.
There are six key characteristics of Web 2.0:
Participation. The seed of Web 2.0 is participation. The turning point was when simple, free blogging platforms emerged around 2000, enabling people to ignore domains registrations, HTML, and website design, and in minutes post their words and pictures on the Internet for all to see. Through human history the vast majority have been cast in the role of consumers. Now, finally, everyone has been enabled as creators, with not only more than half of US teens, but fully 18% of over 65 year olds having created content on the web. The new Web 2.0 tools, such as Jumpcut , not only allow people to upload their content to the web, but also to edit and remix it without expensive equipment or software. As technology unleashes everyone’s creative potential, lowering the cost of creating quality content to almost nothing, a key implication is the creation of a world of infinite content.
Social media. As broad creativity is unleashed, the famed “long tail” has become prominent, with the many new creators of media collectively establishing a presence that equals that of the established media and entertainment enterprises. Mainstream media and social media are not distinct, but feed on each other in a marvellous symbiosis. Online social networks such as MySpace have soared in popularity over the last years, as their functionality has moved beyond chat forums and has struck a chord with young and old. Now media is increasingly about building a presence in the interstices of people’s personal relationships, rather than trying to bombard them with information and messages.
Emergence. The crux of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is how the activities of many participants lead to emergent behaviors and outcomes, that cannot be predicted or created individually. Digg.com and its many imitators tap the opinions of thousands of users to uncover the most popular content on the web. Last.FM and other collaborative filtering tools enable people to discover music, films, and information that they love, collectively sifting through a veritable universe of possibilities. User filtering helps make sense of the enormity of user generated content. When people individually add tags to images, documents, or other content, the combined results is a way of categorizing the Internet’s vastness. There is no librarian for the Internet, but through tagging we can collectively make it useful and manageable.
Visibility. The vast participatory world of Web 2.0 is visible to all. For marketers, the first implication is that you can see what customers are saying about your company, your products, your competitors, and your industry. This extraordinary ability, made possible through blog search engines and other tools, is remarkably often unused. However, the emergent nature of the Internet also makes visible the things you don’t want to be seen. Witness for example the Sony BMG rootkit debacle, where one blogger’s discontent blossomed into massive problems for the company. RSS, which allows people to subscribe to the information they wish to see, is a great marketing tool, with Continental Airlines, Purina, and others providing live information on special deals and information to their convert customers.
Shifting. One of the most critical shifts with Web 2.0 is power to the consumer. One of the most pointed examples of this is the ability to shift media and other content onto other platforms and devices. This means that online content is transcending the fixed internet, particularly to mobile devices, as well as merging consumers’ experience of TV, radio, news, Internet, and more. Time-shifting, space-shifting, and format-shifting are embodied in the new consumer tools. You can listen to a podcast whenever and wherever you want. Now video glasses allow consumption of video content in a large screen format while you’re on the move.
Conversation. For marketers, all of these trends converge in the central theme of conversation. Consumers are rejecting faceless corporations who communicate in PR-speak, and are drawn to those who engage in human interaction and conversation. When Rick Klau’s Lenovo Thinkpad crashed after 13 months, the second Thinkpad this had happened to, he sighed and blogged about it. Not good PR for Lenovo, one would think. Two hours later, Lenovo’s head of web marketing called Rick and offered his assistance. Rick again blogged it, enthused with a level of customer service that meant he didn’t even need to call the company. Engaging in conversation is a step further. It is in fact more dangerous for companies not to blog than it is to blog. The new tools enable conversation, engagement, and evangelist customers. Without them, you are subject to mob justice.
In conclusion, there are four initial steps marketers need to take, just to begin to tap the potential of Web 2.0:
1. Listen to and learn from conversations
2. Speak… honestly and transparently
3. Provide compelling content in accessible formats
4. Go where lead consumers are going
This Friday I’m doing a lunch presentation titled Knowledge, Networks, and Social Media in Melbourne to the KMLF (originally known as the Knowledge Management Liberation Front), a group of knowledge management practitioners, and the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network. Details on the event are here – the organizers say all are welcome. The description of my presentation is:
Knowledge management has provided a foundation for many of the most exciting developments in business today. Network approaches, including social networking platforms, organisational network analysis and industry network development, are proving to be fundamental business tools. The media landscape is being transformed by social media, including blogs, podcasts, photo and video sharing, user filtering and how user content is being integrated into traditional media.Enterprise 2.0 is the term being used to describe how enterprise blogs, wikis and other collaborative tools are transforming knowledge sharing and co-creation in the organisation. Those with a deep background in knowledge management are eminently qualified to apply their experience and skills to these transformative domains; they represent massive opportunities for KM practitioners to create value.
Back in the 1990s I was usually identified with the knowledge management (KM) movement (though I always disliked the term). From the beginning of this decade actively sought to disassociate myself from knowledge management, because I felt the term had already become archaic, and it certainly didn’t encompass the scope of my interests. In an article on The Future of Knowledge Management published in KM Review and other publications in 2004, I explained why I felt it was time to move on from knowledge management, at the time identifying five successors to the movement: social networks, collaboration, relevance, workflow, and knowledge-based relationships. Moving on, this year I have found a large proportion of my energy spent on the future of media and media strategy, closely linked to my work on social networks, both inside organizations and in technology-enabled social media.
What has struck me over the last years is that while knowledge management is not perceived as a highly dynamic space, the skills and capabilities that were developed in the 1990s and beyond within the knowledge management movement are immensely relevant today and in the future. The KM label is unfortunate, yet the issues practitioners have been grappling with for a long time now, such as fostering collaboration, virtual work, enhancing social networks, serving relevant information, reducing overload, and so on remain absolutely central issues. The terminology and tools have substantially moved on, yet the fundamental problems are not new. As such, the wheel does not need to be reinvented, and those who have been in the knowledge management space can apply their expertise with enormous relevance. The language has changed, and I personally don’t regret that KM has been largely sidelined as a term. Yet there are big opportunities for the people who can adapt the knowledge organization skills they have developed over the years, and the organizations who apply them.
Netflix has just announced a $1 million prize to whoever can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. To enable people to design an improved recommendation engine, they’ve provided their users’ ratings of 100 million movies, an extremely valuable database. This harkens back to Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp’s initiative, whereby they publicly released the geological data on their properties, and set up a competition with prizes for whoever could give them the best recommendations on where to dig for gold. Other open innovation initiatives such as Innocentive match a whole series of people looking for innovation, again providing pre-specified rewards for meeting specific parameters. Some note that the prize will mean a lot of people work for free, and it's arguable that if you can indeed do better than the other competitors, you'll be able to make more than $1 million from it commercially anyway. The size of the prize indicates the value in enhancing the accuracy of collaborative filtering, as I’ve written about many times before. If Netflix can more accurately recommend a movie to its customers, the more likely they will stay with Netflix. For companies with other business models, greater accuracy directly impacts sales and revenue. More and more energy and resources will be going into this space. Netflix has chosen to combine two of my passions – open innovation and collaborative filtering – so I will be very interested to see the results from this. Details of the prize are at netflixprize.com, which will provide a progress chart on how the competing teams are doing.
A piece just out in the New York Times covers the current array of music collaborative filtering services (though it doesn’t call them that), including Pandora and Last.FM. I’ve written about these numerous times in my books and blog, including my initial thoughts on discovering Last.FM in 2003 (still love it!) and a comparison between Last.FM and Pandora. The article refers to a report by Gartner that predicts that by 2010, 25% of online music sales will be driven by collaborative filtering engines. That’s a high figure, given that social networks and personal recommendations will always be at the heart of individual musical discovery, but I do agree that much of the way new music will become visible will be through these kinds of tools. To review, the concept of “collaborative filtering” is that we collaborate to filter the virtually infinite possibilities we face. This is largely done through tools that compare our tastes with those of others, so we can benefit from what people with similar taste to us have discovered. The magic of this is that it becomes far easier to find what we like (be it entertainment, information, or anything else) in a world of infinite choice. One of the most important impacts of technology has been to uncover creative talent, since access to either high-quality production or distribution is no longer a barrier. This means we have far more entertainment choices than ever before. The growth of the “long tail” is vastly enabled by software that provides recommendations for things that we love, that we would never find otherwise. These collaborative filtering services are fundamental to the way the future media landscape will unfold. Progress on these for the last decade has been slower than I would have hoped, but it is picking up, and the promise is there for all of us to find far more music that we love.
Richard MacManus has part 1 of a very nice overview of “Search 2.0” companies and technologies, written by Ebrahim Ezzy of Qube. There are many facets to this category of search, however to my mind almost all of them are social or collaborative in nature. Google of course already implements this through the way it aggregates user behaviors in its ranking. However you get the same results when you do a search on Google, whoever you are. Central to the next phase is that you start getting results that are relevant to you and your interests. While there are many approaches to this, I believe that doing this well is most likely to be based on understanding people’s profiles relative to their search and information usage patterns - in other words social networks and collaborative filtering. These approaches can be self-selecting, for example in forming peer groups to share search results, or through algorithms. However it is clear that effort must be minimized – several of the current generation of Search 2.0 are still require too much manual input. This whole space is just opening out now, and will take many years to evolve. But those who can truly help people get better search results in a world of infinite information, will undoubtedly do extremely well.
A topic of great importance – serendipity – has suddenly surfaced in public debate. William McKeen, chairman of the University of Florida journalism department, recently wrote an article in the St Petersburg Times titled The endangered joy of serendipity, suggesting that in an online world we are less likely to stumble across the vital information you aren’t specifically looking for. Steven Johnson, author of among other titles Everything Bad is Good For You, responded with a blog post Can we please kill this meme now, strongly disagreeing that online information is worse for serendipitous discoveries than print, sparking substantial debate on the theme. With the mainstream press commonly taking their stories from discussions in the blogosphere, not surprisingly the BBC took up this issue of the importance of serendipity, with a piece Serendipity casts a very wide net.
I’ve been speaking about serendipity for some years, and more specifically the concept of “enhanced serendipity”, that is, deliberately making fortuitous and valuable accidents more likely to happen. As part of the debate Nicholas Carr wrote a post expanding on the history of the word serendipity. However he missed out an important detail of the story. As Carr wrote, the word originates from Horace Walpole, who coined it from the story, The Three Princes of Serendip. The three princes, in their adventures, had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries. However these didn’t just happen to them; the princes actually helped to create them. In the following tale, excerpted from a retelling of the The Princes of Serendip by Richard Boyle, the three princes are advisors to the great Emporer Beramo.
Beramo has fallen in love with a beautiful slave girl called Diliramma, who one day questioned his honour in public. In a fit of rage, he had her bound and abandoned in a forest. The next day, Beramo was filled with remorse and ordered a search for his paramour. No trace of her was found, leaving Beramo ill with sorrow. Witnessing the emperor's suffering, the princes advise him to build seven beautiful palaces and to reside in each one for a week. In addition, the best storyteller in each of the seven most important cities of the empire is to be brought into his royal presence to recount a marvellous story.Over the weeks, in his various palaces, Beramo listens with appreciation to six of the stories, his health steadily improving. While listening to the seventh story, about a ruler who spurns his lover, Beramo suddenly realizes that it concerns Diliramma and himself. On being questioned, the storyteller reveals that he knows Diliramma and that he is searching for her lord to tell him that she still loves him despite his act of cruelty. Overjoyed, Beramo sends for Diliramma and they are reunited.
In this story, the princes have created a strategy for making a happy accident more likely to happen. This is a great example of enhancing serendipity, not just being subject to it. That is what we must seek to do, in creating links between ideas and people that would be enormously valuable if only they were made. So many of the emerging technologies of today, from blogs to collaborative filtering systems such Last.FM, absolutely facilitate happy accidents.
The debate on the topic is very important. I believe that online search tools are currently at a very early stage of development, and so they are hardly likely to cut us off from accidental discoveries of relevant or interesting information any more than we have been in a print world. However we are moving closer to a time when we will be able to hone in on what we are seeking with great precision. I have previously envisaged a “serendipity dial” which we can situate either to give us great accuracy, or a greater possibility of accidents in our discoveries. I don’t share McKeen’s concerns. Most people are far more diversely informed than they were not long ago, except by choice. The tools we have are not at fault. As we move forward, we need to be highly aware of the degree of serendipity we are choosing. The new world of information gives us that choice.
Following on from my recent story on collaborative filtering for music, it’s worth taking a look at Videobomb (Thanks for the link Steve Rubel!). This enables people to post links to online videos. If enough people vote for the video, it appears on the site’s front page, so users can immediately find the most popular videos. This voting structure is extremely similar to the technology news site Digg, which has rapidly become one of the most popular technology websites around. Videobomb needs to get more users before it reaches critical mass, however its intent is to help provide a platform for Internet TV. On Current TV, the producers choose what to screen from all of the public submissions (see my earlier comments on this). Videobomb’s approach enables the audience to choose what they view. In the words of the website, they want “to create an independent, creative, engaging, and meritocratic TV system for millions of people around the world”. Some way to go towards this objective yet, but I don’t think it will be too long before we do have a system that meets this description.
I believe that “collaborative filtering” is at the heart of how the networks are coming to life. The basic concept is that we must collaborate to filter the massive information overload we face. We can do this simply by taking the recommendations of friends we know and trust. However now software can amalgamate the views and perspectives of thousands or millions of people to direct you to the information or entertainment that is uniquely relevant to you. One of the many domains in which collaborative filtering can be applied is music, by recommending or playing music based on your preferences.
Last.FM, which I last wrote about in this blog in 2003, has developed a lot further, and seems to have gained critical mass. Last.FM’s underlying recommendation engine, Autoscrobbler, is now also available separately, helping to fund Last.FM’s free, no-advertising offering. Last.FM creates personalized radio stations based on people’s preferences, and makes recommendations based on what other people with similar tastes like. As such, it is intrinsically based on social networks, and also provides group functionality so people with similar taste can interact. A newer service, Pandora, works quite differently. It uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze music based on its rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic structure, instrumentation, production qualities, lyrics and so on. You seed the service by nominating a song or an artist, and it creates an entire radio station from that. You can also provide feedback on your preferences, as in Last.FM. The service is available for free with advertising, or there is an advertising-free subscription service. Pandora raised $12 million last November, bringing its total raised to over $22 million, showing the faith investors have in the value of these models. However one venture capitalist prefers Last.FM to Pandora in an interesting comparison of the two services. Check out these music services and support them! The better they get, the more we can discover and listen to the music we love the best from the many millions of songs produced every year.
Continuing the live conference blog…Valdis Krebs of Inflow talked about the many types of real-life networks that can be analyzed, including studying cow disease contagion by which cows tend to hang out together as they eat, and the vast array of companies that Apple has brought together to create the iPod. His colleague Eszter Hargittai has researched liberal and conservative blogs in the US, and found – unsurprisingly – that they are as deeply divided as the US population seems to be. I then ran a Living Networks Forum, in which I first presented the ideas of the living networks, how we participate in the emerging global brain, and how collaborative filtering is enabling us to access the most stimulating, top-of-mind information and ideas of our collective consciousness. We then used a live Wiki, so everyone in the audience could contribute to the screen what they wanted to discuss with others at the conference. This led onto us selecting four topics – finding expertise, collaboration, identity and mobility, and network science – that groups gathered to discuss, explore, and create valuable connections between people and ideas. This is being followed by a conversation (as I write) between Esther Dyson, Edward Vielmetti of SocialText on social networks, looking at Flickr, which allows us to share photos with our friends, and many other spaces. A key theme being discussed is the evolving nature of personal networks. Esther believes that the technology is reducing friction in our relationships with our friends. However it also reduces friction in our relationships with those who are not our friends, so we need to create new conventions to contain our online relationships. This is a critical aspect of how our identities will evolve as social software enables us to relate more richly with those we choose to.
Some live impressions as I sit in the extremely interesting MeshForum 2005, blogging on the local WiFi network. Currently watching a video by the founder of the Yellow Arrow Project - an extremely cool global project that is a kind of collaborative filtering – people use yellow arrows to point out what’s worth looking at, and the arrows have codes that allow people to share their comments via mobile networks. Counts Media, the company behind the project, among many other interesting things does “mixed reality” gaming, which brings together real-life and online worlds. The conference kicked off with Dr Anna Nagurney, who works at UMass on Supernetworks, which is the science of how different types of networks relate at a higher level. An example is the choices that people make on telecommuting or physical commuting, that bring together both communication networks and transportation networks. These approaches are being applied across digital, transport, social, financial, migration and many other kinds of networks.
I recently gave a brief, casual presentation on The Rise of Social Networking Technologies to a very interesting group of technology innovation professionals in Sydney called Innovation Bay. A video of my presentation is at http://www.viocorp.com/clients/innovationbay.
I prepared a crib sheet for those attending the talk, as below, giving a few references and thoughts on this space….
What defines this space is that it taps existing connections between people – our “six degrees of separation” – to form new, useful direct connections.
Selected Social Networking Technologies
Social/ dating/ politics
Friendster
Tribe.net
Orkut
I Stand For
Professional
LinkedIn
Ecademy
Ryze
ZeroDegrees.com
Corporate
Spoke
Visible Path
Matcheroo
Related applications
Jobs: Monster.com
CRM: Interaction
Search: Eurekster
Content: LinkSV
Event technologies
nTag
SpotMe
PowerMingle
CRG
Intro
Business models
Subscription
Subscription for higher-level functionality
Pay per request
Link to classifieds
Targeted advertising
Enterprise implementation
Suggested references
Stanford Business School Alumni Social Networking Panel video
Stowe Boyd's weblog (see especially under Recent Publications)
Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
Later I’ll post some thoughts on where this whole space is going, including industry consolidation, user growth, business models, reputation systems, collaborative filtering, learning on demand, and more. Plenty has already been said on the current primary issues of privacy and extending trust through networks, not that these are close to being resolved…
Apologies to all my readers – it’s been way too long since I posted here. I’ve been frantically busy and on the road, but these are no excuses. I resolve to do better, and have no shortage of interesting stuff to write after my recent travels, so here we go…
“Collaborative filtering” – systems that allow us to collaborate with others to find what is relevant to us in a world awash with information – will rapidly become central to our lives, whether or not this is visible to us. One of the best single implementations I’ve seen is Last.FM, a personalized online radio station. It builds a profile of your preferences based on your nomination of your favorite artists, albums, tracks, and music labels, as well as what you choose to listen to. When Last.FM is playing on your desktop, you can either let it run if you like what it’s playing, or if you don’t like the song you can press skip to go immediately to the next one, or let the system know you love or hate a particular song if you wish. As it builds an increasingly accurate profile of what you like and don’t like, it can identify other individuals with similar musical taste to you, and play you what they like. In this way you both hear what the music you like, and get to hear new music you like that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. There's an article on Last.FM on Wired News that got it a lot of attention at the time.
I opened Living Networks with the examples of Macromedia using blogging to get messages out to its developer community, and the institutional bond market on Wall Street using instant messaging to enhance information flows. Stowe Boyd has written a very interesting piece on financial markets instant messaging (IM) in his publication Message, looking at some of the drivers of adoption, and incorporating an interview with the co-chair of the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association (FIMA).
There are a whole suite of interesting issues here. One is simply how the investment banks have become enormously more collaborative over the last five years, largely as a result of technology drivers. When I speak about how very high levels of collaboration are becoming mainstream in business today—even in intensely competitive industries—one of the most convincing examples to many is how the notoriously aggressive investment banking community is now working closely together on a whole variety of issues.
A key interest for me in the adoption of instant messaging is how it changes buy-side – sell-side (client-supplier) relationships. The commoditization of information and research means that increasingly the value to fund managers of interacting with financial market salespeople is in “knowledge-based” interactions, in which they gain highly relevant knoweldge and perspectives that integrate into their portfolio decision-making, rather than generic information. A good example of this is CSFB’s Locus product, that enables salespeople and fund managers to look at the same analytics screen on possible trades, and to jointly play with assumptions to make them relevant to the client’s portfolios, and provide a basis for useful discussion of risk and return parameters. Thomson Financial—having bought WorldStreet just in time for me to update the coverage in my book—has integrated it into its Connect product, which provides a peer-to-peer XML-based platform for customization and filtering of content delivery. All of these new tools shift the client-supplier relationship, and force the development of new skills, processes, and strategies for the investment banks.
Another interesting angle is that while SMS has played a major role in changing interpersonal communication in Europe and Asia, IM has played a similar role in the US. IM still has low adoption outside the US, just as SMS is only picking up in America now. Different levels of familiarity with these emerging communication technologies affect how they are being integrated into business applications. However all around the world, it’s good to see that investment bankers are leading the charge in taking instant messaging out from teenage girls' bedrooms into the world of business.
There's a good article on the business of blogging in the Guardian. AOL will offer blogging to its users, which is just part of the process of making this truly mainstream. Every time I speak I ask how many people have heard of blogs. For most audiences - even ones that you think would be well familiar with the idea - it's well less than half. I'm doing my bit in my media and speaking to spread the word. To repeat what I've written before, the single most important aspect of blogs is that they enable collaborative filtering, in which the most useful and relevant information emerges from the information universe in which we live.
The Guardian article also talks about how Andrew Sullivan scored $79,000...
...from his readers in his "pledge week", and how BlogAds is enabling bloggers to make money from ads. This is too much like dot-com thinking. Only a handful will make more than enough to buy a round of beers.
Earlier in the week, when I was making an in-house presentation at a large financial services firm, someone asked whether blogs could be used for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Yes, indeed, K-logs (knowledge logs) are being used as a knowledge management tool by firms like Verizon. (see for example this list of K-log links and Business 2.0's Blogging for Dollars). However the culture in the organization needs to be right for this to work. This would fall flat in its face in many companies; a knowledge culture would need to be reasonably well developed for k-logs to work well.
If you've read this far, love to get your thoughts, comments, or other links. Click on the "Post Comment" button at the bottom of this page and you're away! Ross.
I'm at the Information Online conference in Sydney, where I gave a keynote this morning. The conference is primarily populated by librarians. In sitting in on some of the sessions and speaking to attendees, one of the interesting dynamics emerging is how the democratization of information searching - through Google and more - means librarians must shift up in how they add value. Many spend much of their time using specialist databases (with 110 exhibitors pusing their wares here), and clearly can play an important role in finding, filtering, and customising information, but they find it difficult to sell their importance to their senior business or government bosses.
Layoffs are rife in business libraries and information centers, with these kinds of services easy targets in cost-cutting. One of my key messages to this community was how they can and must contribute to creating a global information architecture that enables collaborative filtering. The vast majority of Internet users only look, and don't contribute. If information professionals and others can make it easy for people to input what they find valuable, and for others to tap into that consolidated input, this will help support the emergence of the "global brain" in which we can draw on each others' perspectives, rather than face the information jungle alone. Blogs are critical in the creation of this infrastructure. The simple act of providing a link changes the shape of the Internet, influences Google and Blogdex results, and allows others to find more easily what you think is worthwhile. We all must participate, not just observe.
This blog has become participative! You can now add your own comments and thoughts to any article, and rate the comments made by other visitors. There will also be reader polls. The system is based on the open-source software PHP-Nuke, a fine example of users collaborating to create the software they want. Anyone can use and adapt it to their own purposes. One of the features I most wanted on this blog was the ability to rate each other comments. This is a fabulous example of "collaborative filtering", which is a central theme of the living networks. This is marvellously illustrated by the seminal Slashdot site, where much of the value is being able to sort through and access the comments made and adjudicated by an extremely sophisticated community. I hope and expect that many very smart people will be visiting this blog, so please do contribute your thoughts! Slashdot and its foundational principles are well known to the self-confessed "nerd" community. My intention is to make these ideas more broadly known to the business community and beyond. Please join in the fun! Special thanks to Rodney de Pater for implementing the system - a fine job!
Creative people now have far more choices about how to market what they produce. The New York Times yesterday reported about authors who have successfully self-published. One author, for just $99, had her book laid-out in a print-on-demand format, and on the basis of its succes shortly after got a large advance from a publisher. Another established author chose to self-publish a book that subsequently reached #1 on Amazon.com. As the article goes to pains to point out, these are the exceptions. Very few self-published books are more than moderately successful. However these new channels for distributing intellectual property (with parallels in music, art, design etc.) open up possibilities. In the chapter in Living Networks titled "Liberating Individuals" I described the generic model for distributing personal creative content.
In the first stage, people use digital distribution to attract attention and demonstrate to publishers (labels, distributors etc.) that they can generate an audience. They then achieve the peak of their career with major publishers, but subsequently go back to self-publishing in order to take a larger part of the rewards. The authors above are respectively at the early and late stages of this cycle. Many aging rock stars, like David Bowie and Todd Rundgren, are distributing direct to take more of the rewards than music labels would usually give them. One of the most important dynamics of this emerging model is simply how much content becomes available as everyone can market themselves directly. The publishers and labels do play a role of filtering that is useful, but they overplay their importance. Collaborative filtering, which helps us collectively to sort through what is out there and identify the best, will be at the heart of information flow moving forward. More anon