Here’s a round-up of VRM blogs and twits from conferences and stuff over the last couple weeks. Not all of them, but a bunch.
You are currently browsing the archive for the VRM category.
Are markets role playing games? If so, can we change them by making customers more capable? And if the answer to that is yes, what existing RPGs best resemble the game we want markets to become? Say, one where we either kill marketers or win them over to our side? Or something like that?
Those are the questions behind what I just posted here.
VRM is starting to pick up steam just in time for IIW this week. For details, follow the links from Mine! and A nice unpacking of VRM. And thanks to Adriana Lukas, Eve Maler, Alec Muffett, Ben Laurie and Joe Andrieu (along with currently uncredited others) for getting many conversational as well as developmental box cars packed and rolling.
It’s great to see what I saw coming in 2003 finally start to take off.
PaidContent.org reviews the announcement by CBS of “a new media player desktop app that brings together song personalization and recommendation for users, with a broad, contexual canvas for marketers to reach listeners.”
It goes on,
| The new media player, called Play.It, groups all stations in the CBS Radio network together, providing a wide choice of formats for users and advertisers. The player features large space for contextual ads that displays marketers’ slides, along with banner ads that are synched with the content coming out of the player. |
Imagine a car radio that only played one owner’s stations and nobody else’s. (Oh, we already have those. They’re called Sirius and XM.)
Then there’s this:
| The deal that CBS and AOL Radio announced last month is key to CBS Radio achieving its goal of being the “number one internet radio station.” Goodman claimed that will be the case when the unified AOL/CBS network launches next month. That led into further promises of the much talked about integration with Last.fm, which CBS bought last May for $280 million. Lastly, Goodman previewed a new internet radio ad program Called the i5 – with a logo designed like an official Interstate Highway sign – that promises seamless cross-network, cross-platform deals. |
Fred Wilson unpacks this a bit. A sample:
| As my friend David Goodman explained, when the next Eliot Spitzer moment happens, you can go from the wonderful WNEW stream to 1010 WINS to get the news and then go back, all in a single state of the art flash player. |
He also tweets “These guys have nailed it”.
No, they haven’t. It’s a closed system from a closed-minded company. As of today WNEW doesn’t have an open live stream, via .mp3 or anything else. They have their own live player you can only use on their site. WINS has no live stream at all, near as I can tell (correction: it has one just like WNEW, that’s a player that runs only in a browser window), though it does have podcasts.
Here’s an exercise. If you have iTunes (which most of you probably do), click on Radio under Library. Count how many live streams they have there. “Alternative” has 146. “Public” has 94. “College radio” has 37. And you can add whatever you like with the “open stream” command. Go to a station like KRCL and you’ll find a bunch of choices that in many browsers will automatically open iTunes or the player of your choice. Chances are most or all of them don’t bother you with ads.
All the stations in the iTunes directory, and countless more, already comprise a wide-open radio dial controlled by no one company.
I don’t care how pretty CBS/AOL make the UI, or how big the back-end deals are. If it’s just another silo’d sluice for advertising and mass-appeal “content” from a single source and its partners, it’s not radio. And it’s not fulfilling the promise of the Web, which is direct interaction between any two parties, where anybody can produce, consume or both.
A real open market supports transaction, conversation and relationship between anybody and everybody, on terms any party can assert and any party can accept or reject. It’s not “your choice of silo” alone. It has business models other than just advertising. And at is base are open standards for interaction.
There will be far more business in an open world with many kinds of radios, from many sources, playing anything by anybody for anybody, than there will be in yet another closed system by yet another bunch of big boys trying to turn the Web into a 1980s-style online service with a Web 2.0 paint job and all the advertising you can stand.
This CBS thing is a silo. Sez Fred,
| And that flash player can be launched whenever you visit a CBS radio station’s website, whenever you play an AOL radio station, and whenever you play a custom station you or your friends create using the new CBS digital radio network |
We can do better.
In fact, we will do exactly that. Stay tuned.
Connie Bensen: As a Community Manager the Cluetrain Manifesto provides the foundation for my philosophies & underlines the relevance of my work…
I may be alone in thinking that Microsoft’s offers for Yahoo were all mistakes. All were too much to pay for a company that would be hollow on Day Two. But don’t get the idea that I care all that much. I don’t.
On the Gillmor Gang (where I am also a participant at the moment) Dan Farber just called online advertising “the most efficient way to make money in the world right now”. That might be true. But advertising itself is a bubble in the long run, because it’s guesswork even at its best, and making it better and better only improves a system that has been flawed fundamentally from the start, because it proceeds only from the sell side, and still involves enormous waste (of server cycles, of bandwidth, of pixels, rods, cones and patience).
Advertising is a big churning system by which sellers hunt down buyers, rather than the reverse. It pollutes the media environment and theatens to corrupt the producers it pays.
I could go on. Or I could just point to Bill Hicks’ wisdom on the matter. Bill goes way over the top in that routine, but he’s talking to your soul, not to your wallet. It’s important to pull them apart once in awhile.
Yes, I know some advertising is good. A lot of it, in fact. But I’m not talking about that advertising. I’m talking about the 99+ percent of it that’s wasted.
I’m sure few at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook (or TechCrunch, or pretty much anywhere that makes money from advertising) agrees with much if anything of I just said. And I’d rather not argue it, because I don’t have evidence to prove my points. There still is no system by which demand takes the lead in driving (and not just finding) supply. But I believe that’ll happen eventually. And when it does, advertising will fall. Advertising is not a tree that grows to the sky, no matter how fast the Google redwood is gaining altitude.
But… I might be wrong. I dunno. It happens.
Mike Arrington just said on the Gang that he is “outraged” by something I said. I forget what it was. Some of the above, I guess.
Anyway, I don’t know what will happen to Yahoo or Microsoft. I am sure Google will still grow like crazy as long as advertising money flows from other media to the Web. But that’s not the whole story. What Google’s doing with Web services, with Android, with the Summer of Code, with Earth, Maps, Talk, Gmail, Docs… are mostly Net-friendly, cross-platform (including Linux) innovative and positive. They’re far from perfect, but not as far as Microsoft and Yahoo. That’s an advantage, if you’re into vendor sports. Which I’m not. (Well, a little, but not much.)
Who’s buying whom, who’s committing suicide by saying yes or no to acquisition offers, or the rest of the Stuff that’s front and center right now, kinda bores me. I care far more about the independence and empowerment of individual users, and of independent developers working to make a world where free markets are not “your choice of walled garden”. We don’t have that world yet. One walled gardener succeeding or failing to buy another doesn’t move us any closer.
What gets us closer will come from the edge. It’ll move under the feet of clashing giants.
Tags: Bill Hicks, Dan Farber, Gillmor Gang, google, microsoft, Steve Gillmor, yahoo
So John Cass started this thing, asking five questions about the Cluetrain Manifesto. The latest answers come from Jason Falls. In addition to his own, Jason points to Valeria Maltoni, Richard Binhammer, Michael Walsh, Phil Gomes, Mack Collier — and John Cass.
I’ll save my own answers for the next There’s a New Conversation event, in Palo Alto, on 29 May. Here’s a video of my talk at the last one. The next will be different, though. Times change.
Here’s the link, and here’s the text:
Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.
And here’s Bart Stevens’ blog post with photographic proof as well.
Big thanks to Joerg, Martin and all the folks at Kuppinger Cole for hosting VRM 2008 and for welcoming all the participants from the VRM crew to EIC2008.
We have many more events coming up. In addition to regularly (and irregularly) scheduled ones in the U.K and elsewhere in Europe (need to get everything on the wiki), we have the VRM sessions at the next IIW, plus the first VRMW (VRM Workshop, unless we come up with a better name for it) at Harvard on 9-10 July. Mark your calendars.
I missed Munich last week, at least physically. But I did get there virtually. There’s a video here of the keynote I gave (complete with slides — nice editing job there by Mike Deehan of the Berkman Center, who also stayed up all night with me as we got this done in the wee hours of East Coast Time). Most of that was not shown at the conference, due to technical glitches. But at least it got captured at the source end.
Here is a nice report by Phil Whitehouse on VRM2008 and the relbutton idea (first vetted publicly at Media Re:public earlier this month), in addition to his own talk there, together with Paul Downey, whose sketchnotes are here.
In Linux Journal, Is government open source code we can patch? And in the ProjectVRM blog, VRM is user-driven.