Specifically included are INFDaily, CelebStyle.com, and JustJared – though obviously there are many other picking up this trend, which has its origins in the celebrity stalking watching print magazine world.

The technology, from vendors like gumgum and Pixazza is fairly rudimentary, as described by the Times:

Companies like GumGum and Pixazza tag the paparazzi photos with links for buying the clothes. They hire people to look at photos and match the clothes they are wearing with the same or similar, more affordable items from retailers like Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and Zappos. (Image recognition technology is not yet sophisticated enough to automate the process, they say.) The companies get a small fee from retailers when a shopper clicks on or buys an article of clothing.

Essentially, the technology turns the celebrity photo into an ad for the clothing the celeb is wearing, endorsement or no:

“Publishers and readers look at it as this really informational resource,” said Ophir Tanz, chief executive of GumGum, which tagged the photo of Ms. Jolie with one of its “Shop this look” badges. “We look at it as an ad unit.”

Celebrity sites are an obvious place to start with this business, but photos all over the Web could be turned into ads or e-commerce portals, said Bob Lisbonne, chief executive of Pixazza. Pixazza plans to add sites that cover travel, sports and interior design.

I see this as further validation of the integration between content and commerce. Why have a magazine brand and a retailer as two completely separate entities, with the information about where to buy what’s featured in the spreads hidden in the small type at the back?

We’ve long said that “Every company is becoming a media company” in the age of the assembled web – and that includes learning how to take advantage of commerce opportunities around content just as much as it means learning to leverage content in the context of commerce.

1. Paul Gillin: “The Future of Media is: Small, Aggregated, Inclusive, Community-driven, Conversational, Fast, Flexible, Experimental.”

2. New from the PCF: Video WTF?

First, a great presentation given by Paul Gillin at the Inbound Marketing Summit yesterday. Covered very quickly with dense references the shifts in mainstream media:

Second, Video WTF?, a great new site from the Participatory Culture Foundation (who also bring us Miro and and Make Internet TV) which will be helpful to those of you (us?) who are making the future of media:

VideoWTF: Questions and Answers About Video Production, Video Camera, Editing, Publishing, and et cetera

It’s about your digital footprint: the sum total of all the interactions your customers, prospective customers, fans, antagonists, employees, suppliers, and partners have with your content and services throughout the entire Internet.

A quotation in a recent post on the Inc. Technology blog, It’s Not About Web Traffic Anymore, put it this way:

It’s not about getting people to come to my web site anymore. It’s about getting my content; my videos,my articles, my event promotion announcements, on YOUR web site. That’s what I’m paying attention to now.

– Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

I agree wholeheartedly, but remember that “YOUR web site” might be a Facebook news feed, it might be a blog, it might be an link from YouTube sent via IM or a tweet. It’s no longer about getting folks to come play in your garden, but about making yourself available in all the places folks might already be hanging out.

Private Garden (Photo by surprise truck, cc-by license)

Your web presence (which should be a combination of sites, blogs, microsites, and official presences in social networks) is still critical, of course – as the place to which folks will often go for more information, to sign up, to interact with you – but if your efforts stop at the sites you own and control you’re missing out on the majority of the web.

Google’s new offering, SideWiki, makes Brands in Public look very web 1.0. Why make consumers come to a third party site just to see all the comments about a brand, when you could put them right next to the brand’s site?

SideWiki, which requires installation of the Google Toolbar, lets you add comments to any web page. You can comment on the page as a whole or on specific highlighted text within the page.

Here, for example, is the Ford Motor Company home page with SideWiki showing (click for full size):

Ford.com with Sidewiki comments showing

Those of you who’ve been “on the internet” for a while will recognize the concept – it’s not really a new idea, having been tried by Third Voice (in 1999!), Me.dium, and even Microsoft (“Smart Tags” anyone?).

However, it now has the force of Google behind it – and it links those comments to your Google Profile, providing a nice centralized view of your activity, as well as the ability to share those comments via email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Will brands rebel, chafing at the idea of random internet users leaving post-its all over their carefully controlled and designed brand presences? (See the discussion at Google Webmaster Help – only way is to block all users with the Google Toolbar, which is rather like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face).

Will brands embrace the opportunity, adding SideWiki into their social media monitoring tools, responding to comments, and claiming the top spot on all their pages? (Sidewiki allows the page owner to rank comments, including putting the official page owner note at the top of the list).

Jeff Jarvis at first saw Danger in Sidewiki, writing:

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and so it bifurcates the conversation and puts some of it behind a hedge. Ethically, this is like other services that tried to frame a source’s content or that tried to add advertising to a site via a browser . . . .

So this goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the center.

One can definitely see Google asserting a direct relationship with the end user here, and disintermediating the hosting site – whether you provide comments or not Sidewiki will provide them for you.

It feels different than Disqus or the other examples since it happens “on” your domain – or at least appears to. Is there some fundamental line crossed when third parties operate on your domain without your consent?

If so, what about GreaseMonkey, or AdBlock Plus, or Stylish, or any of the other browser plugins which change the look and feel or functionality of sites?

Sidewiki is yet another reminder that the user is in control of the experience, not the marketing team – how will brands react?

Control! (Photo by Faramarz Hashemi, cc-by license)

One of the principles of the assembled web says:

Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).

One site which demonstrates this quite well is Noah Brier‘s Brand Tags which presents the user with a brand and asks for a one word (or phrase) tag. The results for BBC, for example, include (in descending order of priority):

news, british, tv, quality, england, television, reliable, english, smart, bbc, boring, radio, top gear, intelligent, serious

Whereas Fox News gets these results (again in descending order of priority):

biased, conservative, news, lies, republican tv, liars, right wing, bias, crap, evil, propaganda, boring, simpsons

Interesting that both end up with “boring,” though I suspect the BBC is happier with its results than Fox News. (Yes, of course, it’s not a fair sample, since the population drawn to Brand Tags may not be representative of the whole population – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful.)

There’s also a battle mode, in which two brands are presented and the user chooses which “wins”:

Brand Tags in Battle Mode - Which Brand Winds?

Current winners on the leaderboard? Adidas, Google, Pixar, Apple, BMW, Nike, Lego, Coca-Cola, YouTube, and Ferrari make up the top 10.

This week, Seth Godin and Squidoo launched something they call Brands in Public, which is essentially a microsite containing aggregated information about a specific brand from throughout the web, offering the brand owner the opportunity to respond (albeit for a cost). As a starter set, they created 200 “sample pages” for major brands.

Filter Control (Photo by JavierPsilocybin, cc-by license)

Godin claimed the pages offered not exactly control, but an opportunity to influence brand perception:

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

The Squidoo offering would bring together what users are saying about your brand throughout the web:

If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once [we build] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that’s currently all over the web–and information you can’t “take down” or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.

Of course, not all brands were so happy about the fact that Squidoo had created this centralized place to find feedback about them. Meghan Keane of Econsultancy put it the most bluntly (Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it):

Squidoo is providing a forum for brands to monitor, control and influence their reputation online. But rather than letting brands set up their own pages, Squidoo is doing it for them and dangling control over the site for the $400 monthly fee.

If that price sounds like a threat, it is. If Brands in Public becomes a space where people go to learn about brands, it would be in a company’s best interest to influence the way they’re pictured there. It’s up to them to decide if it’s worth paying Squidoo $4800 a year to influencethe way they look in the space.

As a result of the criticism (of which the above was just a single sample), Godin and Squidoo have changed course, and will be only setting up Brand in Public pages for brands which request them. Godin explains:

One way we tried to encourage that was to build 200 sample pages, pages brands could adopt. Alas, some people felt that this was inappropriate, so we’ve recalibrated and we’ll take those pages down before the end of the day.

When a brand wants a page, we’ll build it, they’ll run it and we’ll both have achieved our goals.

So is it band hijacking (taking over control without permission) to set up such a focused page? Isn’t that essentially what all the real time search engines already do, under the radar?

Compare the search results from, for example, Spezify for a brand against what would have been on the Brands in Public page: isn’t the only different the claim to offer some opportunity to respond?

Is the problem rather that the Brands in Public pages offered too little value, in terms of what influence they would enable a brand to exert?

How different is this from the model of Get Satisfaction, which creates a community around given products or services and offers product/service owners the opportunity to participate? (Check, for example, the Nike Community which is actually supported by Zappos not Nike). I don’t believe GetSatisfaction gets permission from brands to enable their products and services to be discussed – is that brandjacking?

How should brands attempt to influence the perception customers, prospects, employees, and partners have of them, and share freely across the web?

The Assembled Web is not experienced as a set of discrete web applications and sites, neatly separated from each other and organized into categories: it’s an indiscriminate field of content, functionality, and people interacting in multiple contexts and in unpredictable ways: like life.

New web applications are assembled from other projects/applications/frameworks/services, sometimes on the server, sometimes in the browser, sometimes in the cloud. People’s accounts, identities, and networks come with them across sites, applications, and contexts.

How should enterprises not only come to grips with this bewildering confusion but thrive in it?

By embracing the assembled web and participating fully in it.

Assembled Web First Principles:

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project. If you think you will (always) only have one interface to any given set of content of functionality, you’re mistaken, and you will paint yourself into a corner.
   
   
2. Success on the web is no longer (if it ever really was) about driving traffic to your site, or keeping eyeballs there once they arrive. It’s about engaging audiences everywhere they already are. It’s about improving the size, quality, and velocity of your “digital footprint.” Ubiquity is the target, not exclusivity. The danger is not that people will say bad things about you but that you will be ignored.
   
   
3. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).
   
   
4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects. It’s about usable interfaces, in the sense of traditional HCI (Human Computer Interface) design, visual design, and technical design. Creating usable experiences for users and usable projects for developers are both essential, and to ignore either is to invite failure.
   
   
5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined. Every project you do must be composed of smaller discrete components communicating with each other. The corollary is that every project you do must also be composeable or consumable by other projects – including projects you know nothing about. This is true across multiple projects (within your organization and outside it) as well as over time within a given project.
   
   
6. The difference between “behind the firewall” and “out in the cloud” is trending toward zero. Same for the difference between employees and contractors, customers and prospects, competitors and partners. If you’re still thinking in terms of intranet, internet, and extranet, remember that the difference between them is (from a technology point of view) entirely arbitrary. What differentiates them is business processes and decisions.
   
   
7. There is no defensible reason to invent a proprietary standard wherever an open standard exists. In fact, even where no open standard exists, great efforts should be extended to create one, rather than implement a proprietary version.
   
   
8. Working in isolation from the rest of the internet is inherently limiting and dangerous. This is true whether you’re a one-developer shop or a 5000 developer IT department in a Fortune 100 company. Collaborative engineering with appropriate participants (which almost always means open source licensing arrangements) is required. Why continue to work alone now that the Internet exists?
   
   
9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly. If your “in-house” IT can’t compete with a consumer-grade provider available “on the web” you need to catch up and compete or concede the function.
   
   
10. Small incremental releases are essential. It isn’t just a question of not putting too many eggs in one basket – it’s also about lowering the cost of failure and therefore raising the level of innovation. Don’t accept quarterly releases of functionality, or even monthly. Web applications should change hourly or at least daily. The web is live, not pre-recorded.

How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)

I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:

Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that

Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.

But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?

In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?

I think we’ve got to set our sights higher than just being interesting, and aim to be useful. The new commandment might be something more like:

Above all, be useful. Provide value – what your audiences understand as utility on their terms – and everything else will follow from that.

This applies to companies which are only now realizing they are media companies as well as formerly-only-media-companies who are now realizing they need to be more. Put differently, if every company is a media company, that those businesses which were already media companies also need to think about what other utility they provide above and beyond the experience of interesting content.

This Shop is Useful (Photo by Robyn Gallagher, cc-by license)

Two quick examples, from the world of iPhone applications. (The same tenet – above all, be useful – would apply equally well to Facebook applications, iGoogle widgets, and plain old web applications).

Whole Foods’ recipes application not only uses the phone’s location to do traditional store locating, it also allows you to search recipes based on what ingredients you’ve got at hand.

Whole Foods' recipes application provides a store locator, but also lets you locate recipes matching what you have on hand

Sit or Squat (sponsored by Charmin) also takes advantage of location to help you locate the nearest public restroom, but adds community in the form of user ratings and comments. If you’ve ever been traveling in another city and in search of a clean bathroom (maybe even one with a changing table) you can imagine how useful such an app can be.

Charmin's sponsorship of Sit-or-Squat provides a branded presence for them but also adds value for the user

Both applications also, of course, provide a branded presence on the users phone to their sponsoring companies – but that’s secondary to the primary utility they provide.

As you evaluate web strategies and offerings, what role does utility play? What difference would it make for content-centric businesses to shift focus from “create compelling content” to “be useful”?

Useful Arts (Photo by dipfan, cc-by license)

The goal of the presentation- a sanitized (client references removed) version of one given to a client this week – was to talk about:

• Social Media (and specifically how to get started with it)
• Facebook (and other social network applications)
• The iPhone (and other mobile platforms)

It certainly loses a bit in not having the voice over – sorry I couldn’t record it but much of the discussion was really client specific and less useful outside their context – if I get time maybe I’ll do a walk through and record a voiceover.

I tried to place the requested agenda items in the context of what we’ve been calling “The Assembled Web” for the past couple of years, connecting the specific social computing initiatives in a broader framework, one which involves:

1. The convergence of content, commerce, and community – as they grow out of the previous web eras
2. The notion of the Digital Footprint – taking your brand presence (across all three Cs) to where users are, and engaging them throughout the Internet

I hope you find it useful – please do comment here or on SlideShare.

Currently, however, they are running a Campaign to Save Paste, soliciting donations to offset operating losses. What does the need for such campaign tell us about the future of online publishing?

Many people, myself included, got hooked on Paste via the CD-sampler which accompanies each issue and lets you hear many of the artists being discussed and reviewed.

Paste has also made interesting moves to reflect the popularity and primacy of the Internet as a mechanism for discovering music, while still retaining their editorial vision and curatorial role.

First, they moved the sampler CD online. Instead of distributing physical CDs with every copy of the magazine sent to subscribers or sold at newstands, the CD is available for download, with subscribers having accounts and print versions containing a code to access the download. Subscribers who prefer the physical CD can still request one.

Digital VIP

• 12 Free Albums (downloads) selected by Paste editors, plus often bonus albums
• Digital versions of the magazine, including access to back issues
• Early access to the sampler and magazine
• A Paste t-shirt
• The ability to give gift subscriptions (not VIP but regular) to friends for $10

It’s a great program – allowing the brand evangelists to pay more and get premium access, while also enabling them to spread the brand. (Disclosure: Paste is not a client. I’m just a very happy subscriber and brand enthusiast!).

I wish, in fact, that magazines like Mojo and Q, which I often buy in print while in the UK, would emulate this model: keep publishing in print, but let people choose to subscribe to a digital edition and get the tunes which would otherwise come on a physical CD online.

None of this, however, has enabled Paste to completely avoid the global economic meltdown current recession. They’re recently launched a “Campaign to Save Paste,” calling on readers, musicians, and other supporters to help them get through what they’ve described as “a little cash infusion to make up for running at a loss for a while.” (See Save Paste FAQs).

The campaign itself is very well executed, including a letter to readers, a Facebook Group, a twitter account, over 70 tracks (many rare and otherwise unreleased) made available by musicians and labels to anyone who donates, and even banners supporters can take and embed on their own blogs, myspace profiles, and the like:

So what does this campaign, and the model of Paste in general, tell us about publishing in the age of the assembled web?

The pessimistic view would be that it demonstrates that even a small, dedicated, niche-focused print magazine can’t survive. Music, film, and book bloggers have taken over the curatorial role and publish mp3s, trailers, and samples – often with less respect for the strictures of current copyright than a published magazine can manage. In this view, even though Paste was doing everything right they can’t survive without the voluntary donations of supporters. Philanthropic patronage is the only hope of the print publication.

A more optimistic view, though, would take seriously the version Paste themselves offer. The model is fundamentally sound, subscriptions are growing, and the future looks bright. As they write in the Letter to Paste Readers:

Long-term, Paste will emerge in good shape. Even with the fall-off at the end of the year, 2008 was our best year yet—print subscribers, print ads, online readers and online advertising were all at record levels. Readers (print and online) remain strong. And new advertisers have come on board even in the recession, with more ready when their advertising budgets come back.

In the meantime, we’ve adjusted our business to weather this storm. We’ve cut costs, and we developed a robust online business that’s among the best in the industry. Fundamentally, we’re in good shape and won’t need another appeal down the road.

I have, of course, no visibility into Paste’s finances and can’t really discern which of these views will be more accurate in their specific case. But I truly hope it’s the latter.

Times Reader focuses on improving the user experience of reading the NY Times on your laptop, netbook, or home PC.

Times Reader 2.0 (click for full size)

Using Adobe’s AIR framework enables cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) support, and makes possible offline access (the reader downloads and stores up to 7 days of papers). Intriguingly, the 2.0 version in some ways more closely mirrors the print edition of the paper than the online:

The first version of Times Reader was organized more like NYTimes.com than the printed paper. On the Web, where our readers may not visit every section, we play the same story across many sections. For example, a story about the sale of a sports team- might appear in both our Business section and our Sports section. In print, of course it will appear only once. On the Web, where our readers may not visit us every day, we sometimes leave stories that were published yesterday, or the day before, on the section front. In print, of course we only include today’s news. In TimesReader 2.0 you will now see only today’s stories, and only in the sections in which they were published in print.

(For more info on the new features and thinking behind the design see Sneak Peak of Times Reader 2.0).

As in the previous version, Times Reader provides an interactive version of the NY Times crossword (non-subscribers get an archived puzzle). Finally, this version of the reader adds a “News in Video” view to the “News in Pictures” view from the previous version, as well as a “browse” view which shows pages laid out in a matrix, and allows you to scan through the articles.

The experience of using the reader is actually quite pleasant – columns reflow automatically to fit available real estate, pictures are vivid, and the layout is clearly designed for reading on screen. What you lose, though, is the community. Look at this article view, for example:

Article View in Times Reader (click for full size)

What if, while reading this article, I decide I want to share it with my friends, my colleagues, or my broader social network? What if I wanted to write a blog post about it? Not only do I not have any of the social sharing buttons users have come to expect (digg, stumble upon, facebook, twitter, most popularly), I don’t even have a url (let alone a permalink – it is as though the content had no web representation whatsoever – planning for later articles which might be only available via Times Reader?).

Nothing in the interface points me to the same article on NYTimes.com, though a quick google search finds it as a post on the Dealbook blog, complete with email and share tools:

Article Tools on NYTimes.com Blogs

What about integration with Times People, the NY Times own social network style community? If I were a Times Reader subscriber (at the current $14.95 a month it’s a pricey user experience compared to the web), would I be able to share my activity from inside the Times Reader with non-subscribers outside?

Will the Times Reader find an audience with those who miss the experience of reading the paper in print, and have no use for the community tools? One could argue that the NY Times through its APIs, Times People, and related efforts, offers more than enough community interaction for those who need it.

Is this a deliberate and strategic decision to offer different experiences to different audiences, or just a limitation of the 2.0 release?

Which is more important to you – community interaction or a pleasing user experience? Does it make sense to have to choose?

What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?

Sharing the morning paper (Photo by Marjon Kruik, cc-by license, click through for more info)

One of the most widely read recent salvos in this discussion has been Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” In that post (not surprising a blog post, rather than a traditional article) Shirky argues forcefully that the desire to “save newspapers” in the U.S. is fundamentally misguided:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Shirky places the current economic issues of major metropolitan dailies in historical context, as a revolution perhaps equal in upheaval to the original print revolution following Gutenberg.

Presses, Fort Wayne Indiana
(Photo by Jon B. Swerens, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

In that context, hoping to save the newspaper seems the ultimate act of futility:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Shirky doesn’t mean, of course, that nothing from the era of the newspaper is worth preserving, just that it will take profoundly different forms, many of which we can only begin at this point to imagine:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. . . . For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. . . . No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Shirky’s piece resonated throughout the web, being favorited, shared, retweeted, re-blogged, bookmarked, stumbled upon, and dugg.

The Newspaper (Photo by Cobalt123, cc-by-nc license, click through for details)

A very thoughtful response, from someone with a serious background in mainstream journalism, came this week (also in the form of a blog entry) from Jason Pontin, the Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review: How to Save Media.

Pontin refuses to accept Shirky’s diagnosis, and declares the patient very much alive. He concedes that a number of practices of traditional print media have not helped in the current crisis – artificially inflating circulation, ignoring and cultivating a certain editorial disdain for ‘reader feedback’ – but also argues that there is strong and continued demand for well written, editorially curated content, and that this will continue to be the case in the future.

Newspaper stands in Cambridge MA (Credit will_hybrid, cc-by license, click through for details)

At some level, Shirky and Pontin are firing past each other, without realizing that in many ways they agree. Pontin takes issue with Shirky’s assertion that the root cause of the current crisis is that “printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run,” noting that most publishers have leased presses for the last several decades, and that the real cost of production is in all the other, knowledge-worker-driven work involved in producing a print publication:

The printing press stands here as an objective correlative for the material production and distribution of media. Shirky and Winer’s real error is that the physical is the least of it. The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures, which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only within complex organizations, mostly businesses.

While the point Pontin makes is certainly valid – the printing press here stands in for a whole set of organizational and bureaucratic structures which make large scale coordinated efforts possible: namely, the corporation. But that’s exactly Shirky’s point, and reading Shirky’s blog post in the context of Here Comes Everybody, it seems clear that he’s not ignorant of the large scale organizations (in corporate form) which made possible traditional production. What Shirky is arguing is that the large scale traditional newspaper is no longer the only – or even the most effectively adapted – method of organization capable of serving the needs newspapers historically served.

Newspaper stand in downtown Chicago
(Photo by Chris Metcalf, cc-by license, click through for details)

Where Shirky paints the newspapers (and by implication those who hope to “save” them) with a broad brush as ostriches with their collective heads in the sand, or unthinking luddites hoping to be spared the reality that times have changed, Pontin has a tendency to dismiss Shirky (and Winer, the other target of most of Pontin’s barbs) as outsiders from (gasp) the new media world:

Among those who write about new media, a fashionable consensus has emerged . . .

And:

This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. . . . Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

I don’t know (or care) what “business of media” bona fides Shirky or Winer bring to the debate, but it seems an unnecessary and unnecessarily self-conscious rhetorical circling of the wagons to keep the fanatical, evangelical, and insurrectionist outsiders from upsetting the publishing world’s self-image.

The Internet is not a Newspaper
(Photo by Mark O'Brien, cc-by-nc license, click through for details)

That said, Pontin’s set of recommendations seem utterly reasonable, well-fashioned, and on target (they also seem not too far from what Shirky might suggest, if he were focused on what publishers should do rather than on what will replace them). He breaks his recommendations into three major sections: circulation (subscriptions), advertising, and editorial.

For circulation, he accepts that print circulation must be allowed to shrink to “organic” levels, which will be much lower than today. Publishers need to determine how to deliver subscriptions to new devices in addition to print, as well as learn how to provide multiple subscription offering in ways which are sensible from the users point of view, including potentially a la carte or story bundle based pricing. Finally, he argues that printing and physical distribution should be done less frequently.

Newspaper and tea
(Photo by Matt Callow, cc-by-sa license, click through for details)

In relation to advertising, Pontin concedes that advertising has traditionally been “oversold,” and that classified ad revenue will never again be significant, sounding rather like Shirky (or even Winer):

Classifieds, except in the very narrow sense of job listings in professional publications, are no longer part of the business of publishing. Get over it.

Instead Pontin suggests publishers look to Google’s keyword based advertising model and increasingly accurate audience measurement online, as well as exploring custom advertising and microsites:

Among the most promising advertising forms for media companies is custom advertising. In these arrangements, a publisher works directly with an advertiser and its agency to create a unique campaign, attached to a particular editorial event, that targets a publisher’s audience and integrates all the publisher’s platforms, often with a microsite that harvests sales, leads, or whatever else the advertiser values.

Finally, in relation to editorial issues, Pontin concedes that editorial hubris is a barrier publishers must overcome to make significant progress:

As I rose through the editorial ranks of various magazines, I was encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers. We disdained the market research our publishers commissioned, telling ourselves that readers didn’t know what they wanted. But electronic media and social technologies have had a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, disappointed readers can abandon a publication with a click of a mouse or stab of a thumb, and at the same time they have strengthened readers’ proprietorial sensibilities.

Readers expect, in the two-way medium that is the Internet, to be able to respond and influence the publications with which they interact, not just consume the publications they read:

One of the things that some readers say they want is to be able to post comments about stories as well as their own stories to the Web sites of media companies. Often, such readers want to be able to communicate directly with one another, using social technologies. The readers who want to do this are not very many, but they feel strongly about the subject, and become angry if they suspect editors wish to be “gatekeepers”. Editors must welcome such readerly participation, and should open their editorial departments to the wider world.

Kudos to Pontin for making the shift to Web 2.0, and understanding that “readerly participation” is not only a necessary concession but can also be a welcome one. (I can’t help but note though that the tone has not entirely changed: some readers say they want to be able to post comments? “Readerly participation” as a phrase is itself a bit dismissive, like “amateur photography” or “hobbyist programmer.”).

In essence, Pontin’s recommendations are entirely reasonable: focus on delivering valuable content to interested audiences through media they choose, adding the interactive capabilities (both in terms of community interaction and richer multimedia) and targeted advertising that those new media make possible. This will result in smaller editorial teams, smaller and less frequent print publications (likely also fewer of them, though Pontin doesn’t make this point explicit), and an increased reliance on advertising-supported, free, digital content.

Future City, Illinois
(Photo by ILMO JOE, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

If anything, the challenge to Pontin’s proposals may be that this is too little, too late. Newspapers as an industry have had over a decade to effectively respond to the opportunity that new media represents, and have broadly failed. While undoubtedly there is a future for content centric businesses online (and even for newspapers, in whatever form they might take), it does seem at this point that many existing business will disappear in the process. Thus Shirky may have the last word:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

In the end, whether the “structures optimized for digital data” are the same “publishing companies” reorganized, made more efficient, with an infusion of digital thinking, remains to be seen.

Two quick announcements this week which bode well for OpenID:

1. PayPal joins the OpenID Foundation
2. Facebook joins the OpenID Foundation

It’s fantastic to see the largest and fastest growing social network (in the US anyway) and a major online payment provider both joining the momentum behind the open stack and the assembled web.

See also:

• PayPal Joins OpenID Foundation
• 5 Reasons Why Facebook + OpenID is Good News
• Facebook joins OpenID Foundation: So What?
• Facebook | OpenID group

Hybrid (photo by Burning Image)

Late last week, Plaxo and Google unveiled an implementation – currently in limited testing mode – of OpenID and OAuth working together to create an improved user experience. In essence, the implementation affects Gmail users receiving invites to join Plaxo Pulse. They call this a “hybrid approach” and I think it will have a significant impact as it significantly simplifies the flow.

Plaxo created a custom landing page, based on knowing that the user received the invite at a gmail address, which means that the user has a google account, which means that the user also has an OpenID. (It wasn’t clear to me if the landing page is triggered by a query string parameter or wholly different url embedded in the invite itself, or by a referrer check or the like).

Given that knowledge, the landing page offers just two choices: one big button labeled “Sign up with my Google Account” and a non-graphic link which says “Or, use another address.”

If the user clicks “Sign up with my Google Account,” they get the optimized flow, and get a consent page served by Google which tells the user what they are being asked to consent to, including their gmail address and a request to allow Plaxo to access their Google contacts.

What’s great about it is that when the user accepts, they’ve used OpenID to authenticate to Plaxo based on their Google Account, and they’ve used OAuth to authorize Plaxo to access their Google contacts – but the process never mentions either standard. It’s two great things which are even better working together, and it creates a better user experience.

Technology, like design, is at its best when it disappears.

Peanut Butter Cup Heart (photo by Bob Fornal)

Of course, similar kinds of behavior can be accomplished through Facebook connect – but the difference in this case is that both Plaxo and Google are big supporters of the concept of the “open stack.” All the technologies involved are open, in the sense that they can be implemented by any party (and in fact have associated open source libraries in multiple languages to ease that implementation). To top it off, the whole implementation itself is being released as an open source project called step2.

This means that the same approach – requesting an OAuth token (access to some particularly scoped functionality, like Google contacts access in this example) as part of an OpenID authentication exchange – can be (and most certainly will be) used by Plaxo with other webmail providers, by Google with other social networks / membership sites, and in contexts where neither Google nor Plaxo have any involvement.

For more info:

• Plaxo Blog post – “Introducing Two-Click Signup“
• Google Data APIs blog post – “Bringing OpenID and OAuth Together“
• Watch Google and Plaxo developers discuss the integration on Episode 26 of Social Web TV (and then subscribe to watch the whole series – unfortunately not yet compatible with Miro so you have to go to the site to watch)
• Check out the step2 project on Google Code
• Google’s Federated Login API may be the simplest way to add OAuth and OpenID interaction with Google