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On being wrong

August 7, 2010 in Business, history, Ideas, infrastructure, Technology | 7 comments

I recently realized that the line “Markets are conversations” (familiar as the first thesis in The Cluetrain Manifesto) was born at least partly from my experience as a resident of many forums on Compuserve, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was on Compuserve that I learned the differences between flaming, trolling and plain old heated discussion. While I wasn’t a full-time sysop (discussion leader) I often came off the bench as a back-up, and learned a lot about good sysop practices from forums devoted to the subject.

Perhaps the most cardinal among rules enforced by syops was this one: no personal attacks. (Wikipedia agrees.) Personal attacks were a broad category that included unwelcome characterizations, ad hominem arguments and various forms of passive aggression. Most often, however, they could be flagged by the pronoun you. Written or spoken in the second person singular, you tends to provoke a defensive response, especially if it implies a state of being. When A says to B, “You are wrong,” A is not making a statement about what B has said, but rather about B himself or herself.

Conversations risk going south when one person characterizes the other’s very being as “wrong” — even though the phrase “You’re wrong” could hardly be more common.

This fact came to mind today when I read The Evolution of Society, Madness and Social Media, by Tac Anderson. In it Tac says this:

Anytime I have a visceral reaction to something, I’ve learned that it’s usually because there’s some truth to the statement that threatens my own closely held beliefs. This kind of fear is rooted one of two concerns: a) The truth is misrepresented and misleading or b) the truth is right and that means that I’m wrong (for the record it’s almost always that they’re wrong).

All of which is something of a corollary to a bit of wisdom I often give my 13-year-old son: “Being right is overrated.” We’re here to learn, I tell him. Not just to score points in a game that others aren’t also playing.

The trick in conversation is not just to listen, but to do two things that come hard for people with an unhealthy need for being in a state of rightness. One is to respect the other person as an original source of interesting (if not necessarily correct) things to say. The other is weigh without prejudice the substance of what the other person is saying. Neither, of course, comes easy. Both, however, are helpful.

The case Tac brings up is his own aversion to Nicholas Carr and two items for which Nick is lately best known. One is an Atlantic article titled, Is Google Making Us Stupid? The other is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a book that enlarges on the article, about which Tac says, “…once you take away his intentionally provocative title and approach, for the most part I think he’s right – about the facts at least.” Tac goes on to say,

The Internet, like every other technological advancement, is changing the way we think, live and work. But where I disagree with Carr, is that the Internet is not making us stupid. Instead I believe the Internet is making most of us smarter. But there is a consequence to this evolution: Not everyone evolves.

Tac adds a number of points that I agree or disagree with to varying degrees. Here is what I would like him, and anybody else who is interested, to think about: What if the Internet does not persist as an environmental condition?

It certainly won’t persist in the forms we know it best right now. Phone and cable companies, by whose graces most of us access the Internet, have self-serving ambitions for the Net that are at variance from the ideals of the Net’s founding protocols. Phone companies, especially mobile ones, want to bring the Net inside their billing systems, with metered charges for data use and national boundaries across which customers pay huge additional fees for “roaming.” Cable companies wish to become “content providers”, as publishing, broadcast and entertainment goods move from paper, airwaves and cable channels to new all-digital forms that display on glowing rectangles of all kinds.

In other words, I wonder if the world in which Tac and others like him (including myself) find themselves adapting so well isn’t doomed to become Business As Usual 2.0. That’s what Jonathan Zittrain warns in his book The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. As Jonathan sees it, the Internet was designed to be generative. That is, it encourages originality and productivity for everything it runs on and that it supports — not just for the companies and technologies that “carry” it. (By the way, the old sysops forum on Compuserve was run for many years by Jonathan, who later co-founded the Berkman Center.)

I think the Net will get worse before it gets better. But I think we need to consider seriously whether it will get better at all. Recent defeats of the FCC by carriers make clear who holds the cards. (And I’m not saying that the FCC was right. I’ve always felt that “Net Neutrality” was more effective as a red flag for carriers than for helping its proponents’ legislative and regulatory agendas.)

Here’s what I believe, at least for now. The Internet, as the open and generative thing its protocols like to support, is good for humanity, for human evolution, for society and for business. I would like that to be right, but it might be wrong, and I’m open to hearing that.

Meanwhile, I don’t think we’ve had enough time to prove anybody’s case. And evolution will prove more patient than any of us.

Ancestral bonus links here, here and here.

The Data Bubble

July 31, 2010 in Berkman, Business, Journalism, problems, Technology | 52 comments

The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. bubble

That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten links to other sections of today’s report.

It’s pretty freaking amazing — and amazingly freaky when you dig down to the business assumptions behind it. Here is the rest of the list (sans one that goes to a link-proof Flash thing):

Here’s the gist:

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

It gets worse:

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges. “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.” The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer. As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles. But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.

Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers. For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss. The frontier here is on the demand side, not the supply side.

Advertising may pay for lots of great stuff (such as search) that we take for granted, but advertising even at its best is guesswork. It flourishes in the absence of more efficient and direct demand-supply interactions.

The idea of making advertising perfectly personal has been a holy grail of the business since Day Alpha. Now that Day Omega is approaching, thanks to creepy shit like this, the advertising business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: “consumers” are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff.

Rough impersonal guesswork is tolerable. Totally personalized guesswork is not.

Trust me, if I had exposed every possible action in my life this past week, including every word I wrote, every click I made, everything I ate and smelled and heard and looked at, the guesswork engine has not been built that can tell any seller the next thing I’ll actually want. (Even Amazon, widely regarded as the best at this stuff, sucks to some degree.)

Meanwhile, I have money ready to spend on about eight things, right now, that I’d be glad to let the right sellers know, provided that information is confined to my relationship with those sellers, and that it doesn’t feed into anybody’s guesswork mill. I’m ready to share that information on exactly those conditions.

Tools to do that will be far more leveraged in the ready-to-spend economy than any guesswork system. (And we’re working on those tools.) Chris Locke put it best in Cluetrain eleven years ago. He said, if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get… A picture named not.gif

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal, that dealing may finally come in 2010.

To get started, I highly recommend installing TACO, the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out, or its fork, Beef TACO. There are other approaches, but these work for me.

What matters is that they show you at least some of the tracking activity that’s going on. And a little knowledge is better than none. (You can also block tracking as well.)

Meanwhile, this gives us more to talk about (and work on) at VRM+CRM 2010. Bonus barf. I don’t think we need legislation here (it’s too early and sure to have bad unintended consequences), but I also don’t think the Internet Advertising Bureau is operating in Reality.

[Later…] Jeff Jarvis thinks the Journal is being silly. I love Jeff, and I agree that the Journal may be blurring some concerns, off-base on some of the tech (see comments below) and even a bit breathless; but I also think they’re on to something, and I’m glad they’re on it.

Most people don’t know how much they’re being followed, and I think what the Journal’s doing here really does mark a turning point.

I also think, as I said, that the deeper story is the market for advertising, which is actually threatened by absolute personalization. (The future market for real engagement, however, is enormous. But that’s a different business than advertising — and it’s no less thick with data… just data that’s voluntarily shared with trusted limits to use by others.)

[Later still…] TechCrunch had some fun throwing Eric Clemons and Danny Sullivan together. Steel Cage Debate On The Future Of Online Advertising: Danny Sullivan Vs. Eric Clemons, says the headline. Eric’s original is Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet. Danny’s reply is at that first link. As you might guess, I lean toward Eric on this one. But this post is a kind of corollary to Eric’s case, which is compressed here (at the first link again):

I stand by my earlier points:

  • Users don’t trust ads
  • Users don’t want to view ads
  • Users don’t need ads
  • Ads cannot be the sole source of funding for the internet
  • Ad revenue will diminish because of brutal competition brought on by an oversupply of inventory, and it will be replaced in many instances by micropayments and subscription payments for content.
  • There are numerous other business models that will work on the net, that will be tried, and that will succeed.

The last point, actually, seemed to be the most important.  It was really the intent of the article, and the original title was “Business Models for Monetizing the Internet:  Surely There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising.”  This point got lost in the fury over the title of the article and in rage over the idea that online advertising might lose its importance.

My case is that advertisers themselves will tire of the guesswork business when something better comes along. Whether or not that “something better” funds Web sites and services is beside the points I am making, though it could hardly be a more important topic.

For what it’s worth, I believe that the Googles of the world are well positioned to take advantage of a new economy in which demand drives supply at least as well as supply drives demand. So, in fact, are some of those back-end data companies. (Disclosure: I currently consult one of them.)

Look at it this way…

  • What if all that collected data were yours and not just theirs?
  • What if you could improve that data voluntarily?
  • What if there were standard ways you could get that data back, and use it in your own ways?
  • What if those same companies were in the business of helping you buy stuff, and not just helping sellers target you?

Those questions are all on the table now.

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Opening new common ground

July 31, 2010 in Berkman, Business, Events, Ideas, Technology, VRM | 5 comments

VRM + CRM 2010

So that’s the logo for the first VRM+CRM workshop, which will happen on 26-27 August, at Harvard Law School. It’s free. You can register here.

ProjectVRM, which I’ve been running as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center has been growing nicely over the past four years, and is on its way toward becoming an independent entity. (It will exist, as always, to support a community of developers and interested parties outside of the project itself.) It’s funny, I remember Jeremie Miller, who encouraged me to choose VRM (before it had that name) as my Berkman project when I started out in late summer of 2006, telling me “it will take five years.” Meaning that’s generally how long any new world-changing development effort spends in the quiet shadows before it breaks out into the open and starts taking off. (If it does at all.) That’s about how long it took for Jeremie’s own Jabber/XMPP efforts. (He predicted five years at the beginning of that too, and he was just a kid then. Wise dude.)

I’ve liked keeping VRM in the shadows, because I felt that code mattered more than anything. Code talks. Buzz walks. And I say that even though I’m not bad at generating buzz when I need to. Now the code base is growing enough that many of us feel a need to start talking about it. Especially to potential partners in the business world.

We’ve described VRM as the “reciprocal” of CRM at various times. It’s much more than that, actually. Its tools that give individuals independence from others, yet useful means for engaging with others — especially organizations, and among those especially sellers. But the core elements are individuals and independence.

I’ve also seen VRM from the start as fundamentally an open source effort, not a commercial one. I also saw open source tools, with their high use-value, having enormous leverage into sale-value for any company selling products or services based on those open tools. This would include, among other things, many fourth-party services — itself another whole new category.

CRM in the meantime has grown to become a $15-billion business. It has also lately enlarged its intrest to include Social CRM. Our friend Paul Greenberg has written extensively on both, and is the driving force behind Destination CRM next week in New York. (Which I hate to miss, but have a prior commitment elsewhere.) Since VRM will be a topic at Destination CRM, and we can get space here at Harvard before the students come back, we put together the workshop to follow at the other end of the same month.

The workshop is for VRM and CRM developers and other interested parties (such as CRM customers) together to start building out the common ground between them. The nature of relationship is to exist between and apart from both parties. Neither controls the other. Both work together, in a common space between the two. We haven’t had that space before. The default on the CRM side (and one that predates CRM itself) is for vendors to control relationships with customers. What VRM proposes is that neither controls the other, but both manage the space between them, in mutually beneficial ways.

The workshop will mostly be an unconference, though there will be some opening briefings by VRM and CRM folks, to set the stage for sessions to follow. Here are a few of the topics and questions I expect will come up. (These are copied over from a post I just put up over on the ProjectVRM blog.) —

  • Terms of service. How can we get past the legal hurdles and shackles that inconvenience both buyers and sellers when they get acquainted?
  • Privacy policies. How can we reduce the suspicions and frictions that these involve?
  • Personal data. What tools, methods and services are being developed for individuals to keep track of data they generate or is being kept by sellers and other parties? What means do we have for sharing or exchanging that data in secure and trustable ways?
  • Signaling. What new methods will both individuals and organizations have for notifying each other of interests, intentions, policies, preferences, or changes in any of those? How can we make these common across the industry, rather than different for every organization?
  • Self-tracking and personal informatics. What vendor-independent means are being developed for individuals to keep track of their own personal data, and manage it?
  • Interactive shopping. The Live Web we saw coming in 2005 is here. So is the mobile one. Combine those facts with the ability to issue personal RFPs (or just to publish your shopping list to trusted retailers and fourth parties), and what do you get?
  • Search. What new paradigms for searching are being developed, especially in the context of all the topics above?
  • Non-coercive loyalty. What ways are being developed for individuals to express and manage their own forms of loyalty to sellers and other organizations? How can this improve existing loyalty programs?
  • Personal RFPs or Advertising in Reverse. How can individual customers notify whole market categories of their intent to purchase a product, safely and securely, without inviting a torrent of promotional jive in response?
  • Leveraging base-level protocols, standards and tools. There are hundreds of thousands of free and open source tools, protocols and other goods already in the world, ready to serve as free building materials and guidelines. What can we use of these, and what new ones do we need? What new ones are in development on the VRM side?
  • Reducing MLOTT — Money Left On The Table. In our current system, a huge sum of demand goes un-met because of the the means for communicating interest and availability are on the supply side. How (including the means listed above and others) can we equip demand to notify supply of money ready to be spent? In the old days this was seen as “lead generation” by suppliers. But now it’s time to get past that.
  • Tie-ins with SCRM. Social CRM is the hottest topic in CRM. How can VRM connect with and through social networking? Important question: Should “social” be restricted to just what can be done through Facebook, Twitter and other commercial services?
  • Patient-driven health care. How can individuals be the collection points for their own health data, and the point of origination for what gets done with it?
  • API symphonics. The commercial world is increasingly building around a collection of interconnected APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. Many CRM systems are built around their own APIs. VRM will surely connect into many APIs. How should we be thinking about and guiding evolution here?
  • The oppposite of cookies. Sites and companies of all kinds have been keeping track of customers through cookies since the mid-’90s. How can customers do the same with their suppliers?

Feel free to add your own, correct these, or make other recommendations.

More details on the event wiki page.

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A lost moment in email marketing hell

July 29, 2010 in Business, problems | 3 comments

So I get an email from The River: Integrating Web Intelligence, subtitled “Bridging the Web and Physical Channels”. The first section is this:

1. Audio Tweet 4 min. :

Clickstream Trust / Privacy in Telcos – Part 1/4 in the “Who owns Clickstream data?”

paulmagelli

Series – Courtesy of TelecomTV’s Main Agenda Interactive

Paul Magelli – Nokia Siemens, Head of Subscriber Data Management, Nokia Siemens Networks

I’m interested in the subjects — privacy, telcos, data ownership (or whatever we’d rather call it), clickstreams, Nokia — and Paul looks like a nice guy, so I click on the link (the one above) and it takes me to a page that says I have to be a member to get in.

Why? Am I a member already? I dunno. So I do a search for teradatariver.com in my email pile and find that the current email is the fourteenth since November. Before that there is only one email: an invite from somebody I know, a couple weeks before the emails started. Did I respond to the invite? I click on the link in the email. Teradatariver.com comes up and says the invite has expired.

I don’t know what to do with all that, so I write about it here… last January. That is, everything above this is a draft I started in January, when it was front burner for a minute two and I cared about it. I just discovered the draft and decided to post it rather than throw it away. Who knows, maybe it’ll do some good.

Padding a category

July 29, 2010 in Business, Gear, Technology, Travel | 7 comments

This graphicapple revenue progress, of Apple’s revenues per quarter, broken down by products, tells several stories at once. One is that the iPhone remains huge. (I was amazed by how many I saw in the UK and France.) Another is that the iPod may be getting a bit stale. But the big one is the sudden size of the iPad business.

We have one, a 3G model that arrived when we were in Paris in June. It was nice-to-have but something short of its full promise until a friend in Paris got us a 2Gb SIM so the unit became useful outside of our apartment’s wi-fi zone. (Orange, Apple’s carrier partner in France, requires of Americans a French bank account — just one of many vexing problems with 3G outside anybody’s home country. It’s a freaking mess.) With that SIM, the difference became absolute. Now we could look at maps, shop, and read about topics of immediate local interest, live and on the spot, anywhere. (Even in the subways.) The iPad is much faster than the iPhone and much more convenient than a laptop or a netbook. Form-factor wise, it’s a whole new category.

The question is, can anybody else top it, or even compete with it? Certainly somebody should. Here’s what I’d recommend.

First, a second unit with a smaller form-factor: about half or two thirds the size of the iPad. There’s a need for something that’s bigger than a phone but smaller than the current iPad, which is a bit too large for most purses.

Second, freedom from anybody’s silo. Apple has done it’s vertical thing here. Now it’s time for the horizontal one. In product categories, the horizons are always wider than the skies are high.

Third, featuring the 3G or 4G model, rather than regarding it as a premium exception. This also means working energetically to expose and break down the national boundaries to mobile carrier data plans. We desperately need the phone system to become a data system that also does telephony, rather than the reverse. (More about those in another post.)

Fourth, better speaker(s). The iPad actually sounds quite good, for a speaker that talks out of the same flat hole that’s plugged by the power connector (just like the iPhone).

Fifth, two microphones, for binaural recording. This is hugely under-rated as a feature, and generally ignored by portable gear makers. With binaural recording, you get a you-are-there sound field when listening to the recording with headphones. Related idea: two cameras, for shooting in 3D. The latter would also be a cool peripheral.

Sixth, make the ‘pad a production and not just a consumption device. Shooting and/or editing video, and uploading it to a server on the spot, would be a way cool use for the thing.

Of course, consumer electronics makers are notorious copy-cats. But what they need to do is zig here where Apple zags. There’s infinite room.

Nice production on consumption

July 26, 2010 in Business, Ideas | Permalink

At Consumer Choice, Judi Clark has a nice interview with Jerry Michalski, Tara Hunt and myself. I learned a lot. Highly recommended.

The train goes the other way

July 23, 2010 in Blogging, Business, Cluetrain, Future, Ideas, Technology, VRM | 4 comments

Marketing Needs To Stop Its BS and Wake Up, the headline says.

True.

The bottom line: “At the end of the day, audiences have moved on and their expectations have changed. The next five years will see drastic changes in the way organizations engage with their audiences. It’s not a choice anymore. These are the ‘cluetrain’ years.”

Yes, but what will change most is how ‘audiences’ engage with companies.

r-buttonFor r-buttonone thing, we’re not ‘audiences’ any more. And we’re not here for the show. We’ll have our own ways of engaging, and they won’t just be through “social media” that are privately owned and we don’t control. In fact, those ways might include the symbols you see here. You’re on the left, and the company you’re engaging with is on the right. If that company believes a free customer is more valuable than a captive one, the symbol appears, or turns from gray to red.

For more on all that, go to Cooperation vs. Coercion, which I posted on the ProjectVRM blog this morning. Also see three other posts on this blog from a couple days ago. Pointers to those are here.

If you’re a marketer, and you want some fresh clues about how the tide is turning, take the time to read through those. They’re not gospel, just some blog posts. But they point in a direction, and it’s not toward marketing as usual, even if that marketing is called “social”.

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We are more than what we eat

July 22, 2010 in Business, Cluetrain, Ideas, problems, VRM | 5 comments

The sign above points to the toilets of the cafeteria at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. The Kid and I were at the museum a couple days ago, and he spotted the sign, insisting I shoot it. So I did, and here we are.

Now, lest you think that “consumers” is bad Franglish for “customers,” here’s the same sign in French:

Looks to me like a literal translation.

And, it also seems to me, the term “consumer” is far more deeply embedded in Europe than it is in the U.S. Here (I’m back now) I can ask people to say “customer” instead of “consumer,” and they don’t have much trouble with switching. In Europe (especially in the U.K.) it’s harder. I don’t know why.

Still, I think the literal meaning of the word is an issue, and has been for some time. Here’s John Perry Barlow, in Death From Above, his March, 1995 Electronic Frontier column for Communications of the ACM:

Over the last 30 years, the American CEO Corps has included an astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on people from commanding heights served as a great place to develop a world view compatible with the management of a large post-war corporation.

It was an experience particularly suited to the style of broadcast media. Aerial bombardment is clearly a one-to-many, half-duplex medium, offering the bomber a commanding position over his “market” and terrific economies of scale.

Now, most of these jut-jawed former flyboys are out to pasture on various golf courses, but just as they left their legacy in the still thriving Cold War machinery of the National Security State, so their cultural perspective remains deeply, perhaps permanently, embedded in the corporate institutions they led for so long, whether in media or manufacturing. America remains a place where companies produce and consumers consume in an economic relationship which is still as asymmetrical as that of bomber to bombee.

Eating isn’t a bad metaphor for what we do with the products we buy. But it’s not all we do. For example, I’m writing this on a computer. Is “consuming” all I did with that computer when I bought it? And what about the writing I’m doing now? Writing is production, not consumption. In fact, much of what we do with our electronic devices involves producing information rather than consuming it.

And is information something we consume? Or is it something else? Here’s what I wrote for my chapter of Open Sources 2.0:

Several years ago I was talking with Tim O’Reilly about the discomfort we both felt about treating information as a commodity. It seemed to us that information was something more than, and quite different from, the communicable form of knowledge. It was not a commodity, exactly, and was insulted by the generality we call “content.”[1]

Information, we observed, is derived from the verb inform, which is related to the verb form. To inform is not to “deliver information,” but rather, to form the other party. If you tell me something I didn’t know before, I am changed by that. If I believe you and value what you say, I have granted you authority, meaning I have given you the right to author what I know. Therefore, we are all authors of each other. This is a profoundly human condition in any case, but it is an especially important aspect of the open source value system. By forming each other, as we also form useful software, we are making the world, not merely changing it.

The footnote goes to this:

↑ I had the same kind of trouble when I first started hearing everything one could communicate referred to as “content.” I was a writer for most of my adult life, and suddenly I was a “content” provider. This seemed ludicrous to me. No writer was ever motivated by the thought that they were “producing content.” Their products were articles, books, essays, columns, or (if we needed to be a bit more general), editorial. “I didn’t start hearing about `content’ until the container business felt threatened,” John Perry Barlow said.

“Consumer” is the noun form of the verb to consume. Here’s what Dictionary.com says consume means:

con·sume

–verb (used with object)

1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.
2 to eat or drink up; devour.
3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning: Fire consumedthe forest.
4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully.
5. to absorb; engross: consumed with curiosity.

–verb (used without object)

6. to undergo destruction; waste away.
7. to use or use up consumer goods.

So what does #7 say? That there is a class of goods meant to be destroyed or expended by use? Well, yeah.

Are we past that? I hope so. We certainly have more reason to be.

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EmanciPay

July 19, 2010 in Business, Future, Life, music, Technology, VRM | 8 comments

At ProjectVRM we call EmanciPay “a relationship management and voluntary payment framework in which buyers and sellers can present to each other the requirements and options by which they are willing to engage, or are already engaging”. These include preferences, policies and choices about what to pay and how. (Actual payment would be carried out by PayPal, Google Checkout or some other system built for the purpose.)

All of this is new stuff for buyers, and we’re not building it all out at once. In fact, we’re starting with a small piece of code for the seller’s side, so they can signal willingness to engage with buyers in the free and open marketplace, rather than only in the sellers’ own silos. If they want to signal that willingness (which we might call “VRM-friendliness”), they’ll include a bit of RDFa code in their Web pages. If that code is present, the seller’s r-button goes from a default gray to red. If the user already has a relationship (or has had some other interaction) with the seller, the buyer’s side r-button also turns red. So, in this mocked-up example —

— I can see that KQED is VRM-friendly, and that I already have had some kind of dealings with the station.

Right now the code for both sides is in the works, and is also a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. It builds to a large extent on Tipsy, described as a “a framework for voluntary donations to bloggers, musicians, and other content creators on the web”. Tipsy is the creation of Oshani Seneviratne and Adam Marcus, both grad students at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), whom I got to know through David Karger, a professor at CSAIL, whom I got to know through Keith Hopper, who fathered ListenLog. Our GSoC programmer is Ahmad Bakhiet, a student at Kings College London.

When we’re through with the current stage, we’ll be ready to test out the seller’s side code with stations (or with anybody), which will include means for deciding what happens when the user clicks on the right-side r-button. What matters most at the first stage is the signal of VRM-friendliness, which is a huge state-change form the old silo’d business-as-usual. What it says is “I’m open to what you bring to the market space between us, and to a potential relationship.”

We have this in the real brick-and-mortar commercial world, but not in the e-commerce world, for the simple reason that we have lacked mechanisms for creating the open market spaces between buyers and sellers — the space in the middle here:

Phil Windley of Kynetx gives a perfect “History of E-Commerce” slide in his talks. It goes,

1995: Invention of the cookie.

The End.

Cookies are bits of code that sites put in your browser to help them remember stuff about you. These are handy in many ways, but they also put all responsibility in the hands of those sites — of the sellers.

And if you want to do serious shopping, you can’t just put down cash or a credit card, do your business and walk away. No, you have to register. And to do that you need to accept terms of service that are known in the legal trade as contracts of adhesion. These are usually not read by users for several reasons, the most important of which is that they are not negotiable. Whether or not they are unconscionable, or enforceable, is beside the point. If you want to do business, you have to agree.

Where contracts of adhesion apply, markets are not conversations.
Needing to accept these contracts is a big source of friction in the online marketplace. It’s one of those areas where things are slower online than off. It is also therefore one of those areas where the better model is the familiar offline brick-and-mortar one. (In fact, one could argue that loyalty cards bring to the brick-and-mortar world one of the more annoying inventions of online retailing.)

So that’s a big part of EmanciPay’s challenge, and something we’ve been working on at ProjectVRM. What we’re working to create is a two-sided approach to eliminating the need for users to accept one-sided contracts. We’re creating code with easily-understood wording and symbols, which can be read by lawyers, ordinary users, and machines (ideals first articulated by Creative Commons.) This code can be used for expressing preferences, policies and bases on which each side can trust the other. There’s much more that can go on both sides, but those are a start.

When you click on the seller’s r-button in EmanciPay, you might see a pop-down menu that looks like this:

The new item there is the symbol I’ve labeled “terms”. It’s one half of the iconic “scales of justice.” A similar one might be on the buyer’s drop-down menu as well. Also there might be preferences, standing requests for products or services, links to personal data stores, or whatever we feel like putting in there.

We see the r-buttons and their affordances as places where both the buyer and the seller (or the individual and any organization — this needn’t be limited to commercial settings) can offer, selectively, means of engagement and the data required.

But one of the first jobs here is to get the paranoid lawyers out of the room and the engagement-oriented ones in the room, to help describe new terms of engagement that yield little or nothing in real protection, while offering means for engagement that reduce or eliminate the frictions to which we have become too accustomed over the last fifteen years.

While we’re still baking EmanciPay, I want to visit some questions about what my actual or potential interactions with KQED, WBUR, WWOZ and other stations on my ListenLog might be. There are many possibilities here. One might be to take a budget that I pay down proportionately through time. Another might be to just throw some money now and then at sources of programs that I’ve found especially good — or that I like right now, for that matter. We can be real-time about this. Another might be to pledge money to stations where which I spend more than X amount of time. The list can go on.

I can also, at my discretion, also share some or all of my data with stations and other parties (such as program hosts or producers).

And I can also open myself to programmatic approaches, created by other parties, that work inside the EmanciPay framework. The possibilities are endless here, and suggestions are welcome.

At this stage we plan to test out and play with EmanciPay at first by using Tipsy‘s lottery model. In this one, listeners pay one source, on (say) a monthly basis, with the source being chosen as the winner of a lottery. In other words, if you look at the list of stations on my ListenLog, I would budget $X per month to pay out to some lucky public radio station. Code on the station’s side (the same code that lights up the seller’s r-button) would make them eligible for winning my monthly lottery. At the end of the month, the lucky station gets paid. Get enough listeners and stations involved, and we can have some fun with it.

But that’s just a small first step. The ones that follow will shake down richer and more symmetrical, involved and cross-informative relationships between stations and listeners — and then expand out into other territory, I hope starting with the music industry. From there we can move on to other content industries, and then to the broader marketplace in general.

If all goes according to plan, r-buttons will be commonly used and well-understood symbols. Of course, plans can change. Alternative ideas are sure to emerge, along with many improvements to this one, which is among many others in the VRM movement. It just happens to be the one I’ve been working on most.

Meanwhile, big thanks to to Vince Stehle (who has moved on from Surdna, but made the grant happen when we needed it most), to Keith Hopper and NPR, to Jake Shapiro and the crew at PRX, to many other friends in public radio (and to ones in free commercial radio as well, such as Bill Goldsmith of Radio Paradise), to Daniel Choi, Oshani Seneviratne, Adam Marcus, Ahmad Bakhiet and other helpful programmers, to the VRM community, and to the Berkman Center, which has kept faith with me and with ProjectVRM through the years required to get things off the ground.

We’re still getting started here. But we’ve come a long way too.

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ListenLog

July 19, 2010 in Berkman, Business, Ideas, infrastructure, Live Web, radio, Technology, VRM | 3 comments

In the last post we talked about price.

There’s a broad class of goods that either have no price, or that you can get for free whether they have prices or not. These include all digitized media goods. Most notoriously, these include music and videos, which can be uploaded and downloaded with little friction, even if doing so is illegal. This fact of early Internet life has presented an extreme challenge to “content” industries in general, and to the music industry in particular. You might say that the old container approach crashed, and most attempts since then on the industry side have consisted of creating new containers or raising costs to customers of violating the old ones — mostly by taking what the industry calls “pirates” to court.

At ProjectVRM we have plans for the music business, but first we’d rather work with a smaller industry that welcomes our participation, that hasn’t lost business to freeloaders (because giving the goods away is what they’ve done all along) and that has been working with ProjectVRM from the start. That industry is public radio.

The goods here are free for the taking but worth more than $0 — a claim substantiated by payments from listeners to stations for goods from NPR, PRI, American Public Media, PRX and other producers, as well as from the stations themselves. Business here isn’t bad. And public radio has embraced the Internet far more eagerly than most commercial content producers and distributors. Still, only about ten percent of listeners contribute, so there’s plenty of room for improvement.

So the challenge we’ve given ourselves is raising that percentage, while also starting to model the free and open marketplace described above. With help from the Surdna Foundation (working through PRX and the Berkman Center) we began developing two VRM tools that put functionality behind r-buttons. The first is ListenLog. The second is EmanciPay.

ListenLog is the brainchild of Keith Hopper, who works with NPR. Keith and I saw two goals for the program. One was to enable self-tracking as something individuals do for themselves (rather than having some organization do it for them). The other was to give listeners a way to know what they value, find their way back to it, and otherwise do whatever they like with it — including making decisions about what to pay for the goods themselves. (For more about self-tracking, read Self-trackKevin Kelly and Gary Wolf of The Quantified Self.)

As it happened a number of public radio institutions were working together on a free public radio player (originally called a tuner), for the iPhone. To make a long story short, the first generation ListenLog is now included with the Public Radio Player, which lets you tune in hundreds of different stations, plus “on demand” programs (basically podcasts stored in the cloud). ListenLog keeps track of your listening through all of them, and provides three different views:

  1. Current ongoing log
  2. Stream Listening Summary
  3. Program Listening Summary

— along with ways to export and delete data.

ListenLog is open source, and we’d love to see it used alongside other apps on other devices, and to model logging of all kinds of stuff (such as music).

So far the Public Radio Player has had more than 2.5 million downloads, which means there’s some chance you already have it, if you’re an iPhone user. If you don’t, and you listen to public radio, get one, check out ListenLog and offer feedback and suggestions below. Or, if you’re an open source developer, help us out.

Once you have the app, go into Settings, activate logging, and follow the results. You do that by clicking “more” on the bottom right tab of the Player, which goes to the page on the right.

Below are three screen shots of my own logs. These bring up questions that EmanciPay can help answer.

First, my current log:

Second, my Total Listening Time Per Stream:

Third, my Total Listening Time Per Program:

As logging applications go, this one is primitive. In fact, that’s one of the ideas behind it. We want others to take and improve on the ideas (and/or the code)_ behind it, and to put it to new uses.

This is where EmanciPay comes in. That’s the subject of our next piece, the third in this series.

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