Photo by Peter Wood, cc-by-nc-nd license.

This last weekend I finally got drafted and posted Closing the Books on WordCamp Boston 2011 over on WCBOS site.

Planning WordCamp Boston the last two years has been quite an experience: challenging, at times high-stress-inducing, but well worth the effort. It’s only really been possible, of course, because of the first class team of organizers and volunteers, many of whom worked quietly behind the scenes getting all the hard tasks done, especially in the weeks leading up to the camp.

Thanks are due (much overdue) to my fellow organizers and all the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees who made WordCamp Boston 2011 a great success!

Now, on to 2012.

Here are the slides and speakerrate info for the talk I gave yesterday at WordCamp Boston.

Although the slides themselves are less entertaining without my voiceover, video from the talk will be made available – and I will link to it here as soon as I have the url.

Slides:

SpeakerRate:

Thanks so much for those of you who came, and gave feedback via Twitter. Those who didn’t – see you at next year’s WordCamp Boston?

This year’s camp promises to be even bigger than last years, with content from 30+ speakers spread out over one and half days at the Boston University student union. We’ve even got a pre-conference workshop the Friday before and a reception Saturday evening at the Microsoft NERD center.

If you haven’t already got tickets, you’ve missed regular registration, but you can still get in on late registration (which just means you’re in line after the regular registration folks for lunch and T-Shirts) for just $40.

First, some of the highlights from keynotes by those outside the Magento team:

• Blake Nordstrom, talking about being customer-driven, not just customer focused. Make sure you’re actually delivering something she wants, not just what technology makes possible. He also discussed Nordstrom’s much vaunted customer service, saying “if you’re talking about customer service, you’re not doing it.” Lastly, he touched on mobile-in-store and the fixed cash register as one of the worst parts of the whole customer (and associate) experience – something Nordstrom is actively working on
• Naveed Anwar (@nanwar) from PayPal (with the envious email address geek -at- x.com) talking about mobile commerce, and the extent to which it will be transformative, not just additive to the customer experience.
• Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus (and formerly MySQL AB) talking about the importance of Open Source and new versions of “Open” to the overal eCommerce ecosystem – lack of proprietary lock-in may be the ultimate lock-in, because knowing you can leave at anytime has a way of eliminating the desire to leave – forces competition on service and value.
• Brian Walker of Forrester (blog, @bkwalker) talking about “Agile Commerce.” It’s time to drop the “e” from eCommerce, “but since we’re in L.A., we can’t just drop the ‘e.’ We need to blow it the hell up.” Walker noted that by 2013, “51% of total US retail sales will be influenced by or made online.”
• Warren Adelman from GoDaddy (blog, @asocialcontract), sharing the history of their infamous SuperBowl commercials, and revealing that the first SuperBowl ad very nearly starred William Hung rather than the “GoDaddy Girl” – how the world might have been different had that happened!
• Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital (@Alfred_lin) (and ex-Zappos) describing the history of PayPal and how it grew to success in “Growing a Billion Dollar Online Commerce Company.” (Slideshare link)

Magento themselves announced a number of exciting updates during the conference:

• Release of Community Edition 1.5.01, Professional and Enterprise Editions 1.9 and 1.10
• iPad and Android apps coming to Magento Mobile
• Magento U branded training coming to US and Europe (schedule PDF)
• MagentoGo, an on-demand SAAS platform for small and emerging businesses
• The Magento Go Developer Platform – a PAAS (Platform as a Service) offering for Magento developers

Related links:

• Magento Presentations, Videos, and Blogs from Magento Imagine (Simon Lilly)
• Magento Imagine Conference: Notes from Day 3 (Summa Solutions)
• Customers to Shape Future of Online Shopping, Nordstrom President Says (Business News Daily)
• Magento Conference: Time to Drop the ‘e’ from eCommerce (Business News Daily)
• Magento Imagine: The Death of Multichannel (Exciting Commerce, in German)
• A Developers Thoughts on the Magento Go Platform
• Magento Go (Guido Jansen)
• Introducing Magento Go and the Magento Go Developer Platform (Roy Rubin)

The Magento Go video:

Photos from the official Flickr feed:

During the initial roundtable of the day, the discussion turned to Facebook, and its role as the new portal:

While I can understand the impulse to draw parallels between the role AOL held for many (especially media) companies in the early days of the (commercial) internet, I think we’ve got to be careful to not miss the lesson the portals never properly learned: on the web, everything else is always one click (or one tab, or one window) away.

In other words, Facebook may be the new portal, but does the concept of a portal even make sense in a world of multi-tabbed browsers, multi-tasking users, and multi-device access? If there ever was a world in which a portal could truly be the user’s starting point and the window through which that user viewed everything on the web (already a questionable claim), that day has long passed. Many web users spend significant amounts of time “on” or “in” Facebook, true, but what else are they doing at the same time?

The question becomes more than just academic when you come at it as a large scale retailer trying to create a strategy for Facebook.

JC Penney’s store, which launched just before the holiday season, is a Facebook Application (powered by Usablenet) which enables the whole shopping experience without leaving the social network. As Consumerist put it:

JCPenney just snagged the “anchor store” spot on Facebook, becoming the first retailer to let shoppers purchase crap directly from their Facebook page application through a fully integrated e-commerce platform.

FastCompany was a bit more polite (not sure Penney’s PR likes the term “crap”):

Today J.C. Penney became the first major retailer to make its entire catalog available to shoppers within Facebook—not just to peruse, but to buy.

Starting now, you can purchase any of the 250,000 items that the department store sells online from its Facebook page. The company expects many sales will take place as a result of shoppers seeing items listed in their friends’ news feeds and then clicking through to the product pages, still within Facebook.

The application itself is really quite simple. It relies on approach familiar to most of us from Usablenet’s mobile versions of websites: minimizing / transforming the existing site (server-side) and providing the transformed content to the new context – in this case, presenting a transformed version of JC Penney’s ecommerce site in an iFrame inside Facebook. (So long as you are in a browser session in which you’ve already authorized the app, you can actually load it outside a Facebook context by opening a new tab and visiting https://m.usablenet.com/ma/jcpenney.com/index.html?auth=yes).

Landing Page of the new JCPenney Facebook Store application

When the user clicks on of the categories on the left, the app loads (via JQuery) new content representing the subcategories, on down to specific shelf page and then a product detail page, as you can see in this brief video:

The major problem with this approach is that the application never changes the top-most frame’s URL as the user navigates. Start on the landing page, drill down to Men, then to suits and sportcoats, then to a specific coat. Now, back up to the shelf page. D’oh! If you’re like me, your habit is to hit the back button in the browser (or even the keyboard shortcut for it), but if you do that here, you’re SOL. (If you’ve opened the store in a new tab or window, you may find your back button disabled, depending on your browser – but if the tab or window you are in has a history, back will take you to the last url you visited before entering the store).

The problem is that the app isn’t changing the original url you were on once you entered the store, so no new entries are created in your browser history. This was a problem with frames the first time around, and remains one with this approach. (Aside: in WPBook we handle this by targetting all links to top and creating fully formed apps.facebook.com/app/path style URLs).

Usability issues aside (and yes, there is breadcrumb / back navigation just below the top navigation – but it is easy to miss), my bigger issue with the application is just how non-integrated with Facebook it is. JC Penney doesn’t seem to be taking any advantage of the fact that I’m already logged in to Facebook and have granted the application all kinds of privileges in the process.

When you first load the application, you’ll get this permission screen:

Permissions Request for Shop JCPenney Application

So you’ve granted the app permission to access your name, photo, gender, and “any other information I’ve shared with everyone” – which for most folks is a lot of other information. But then if I go to the “store locator” within the app, it doesn’t offer to use my location from my profile (or ask for the extended permission user_location, which an application can specifically request):

Store Finder inside Facebook - doesn't leverage user_location

So maybe there isn’t much leverage in the store locator inside Facebook – or perhaps it might be better at that point to request the location from the browser rather than from Facebook. But the same lack of integration more glaringly comes up when you go to check out. For example, say I found an LCD TV I wanted to purchase. (The broken image icon in the screenshot occurs randomly throughout the app – seems to be something amiss with the translation into Facebook App in some cases):

Department page for House -> Electronics -> TV and Video

Clicking in to a TV, and adding it to my bag, I then proceeded to click on checkout, and get this screen:

Checkout Process - No Prefilling with FB info?

Granted, the email address I used when registering at JC Penney’s may or may not match the one I used as primary at Facebook, so it is a good idea to not assume they are the same, but why not request my email from Facebook and prefill it for me, so that I don’t have to start from scratch? More to the point, why do I need to register at all? You can check out without registering, and the only difference seems to be associating an email address and password with the account. But given that I’m logged into Facebook and granted the application permission to access my info, why not just allow me to then use my Facebook identity to later access my account? Why do I need yet-another-password at all?

Assuming I didn’t already have an account at JC Penney’s, and clicked Register, I get this (after an initial screen for email and password):

Billing Address page for Checkout

The only thing defaulted here is the USA, which I think is not because I’m in the USA but because it is the only allowed option. On to payment then, let’s use a credit card:

Credit Card Info

To me this feels very much like ecommerce circa 1999 – multistep checkout with a broken back button, no useful defaults (couldn’t we at least assume the name on the card might be usefully prefilled with the name I gave two screens ago? Editable, sure, but blank?), and changing look and feel – note that the buttons on the credit card screen are suddenly blue where they’ve been (somewhat) consistently red or grey.

My larger point, though, isn’t just to critique the usability of the application. First to market doesn’t always mean best-to-market, and I’m sure the usablenet solution (which simply translates the existing store, requiring no significant platform effort on the retailer’s part) offers a compelling time-to-market advantage.

My point is that we need to question the very purpose of Facebook stores: Why is it supposed to be useful to me as a consumer to browse the entire catalog and make a purchase inside Facebook?

I get that retailers want to be where the audience is – and I’m a big proponent of distributing your digital footprint throughout the web. But what such stores fail to do is customize the experience to its context. What the user wants to do in Facebook is not the same as what the user wants to do on JCPenney.com, and (equally important) what the technology enables is different.

What retailers need to do in looking at Facebook as an opportunity is innovate: create opportunities for user experiences that take advantage of the Facebook ecosystem, both in terms of technology and user expectations. Just as mobile application developers have come to understand that what makes sense on a phone or a tablet isn’t exactly the same set of functionality that makes sense on a web application designed for desktop browser use, F-commerce developers and designers need to prioritize and understand that subset (or maybe it is a superset, entirely new) of functionality that makes sense in context.

We need, in other words, applications actually designed for use in Facebook, not more retailers putting their whole store in an iframe-based application just because they can. I think this is why virtual goods based applications have so far proven much more successful than real-world goods in Facebook: they’re native to the platform, and designed directly for it, not “adapted” to it.

Gilbane Conference Boston

Although the Gilbane group has a different three Cs that I’m normally talking about (Content, Collaboration, and Customers rather than Content, Community, and Commerce) I’m looking forward to this year’s Gilbane Boston.

I’ll be part of a panel in the “Colleagues and Collaboration” track, about Social Publishing:

C5. Social Publishing: Strategic Content as Social Objects in the Extended Enterprise
Thursday, December 2, 9:40 – 10:40

Content has always been a focal point of interactions amongst employees, business partners, suppliers, and other members of the extended enterprise. However, the emergence of enterprise social software has placed a renewed importance on strategic content that serves as collaboration objects in digital interactions. This panel will discuss what types of content are strategic social objects in the extended enterprise, why they are important to business performance, and how they should be managed.

Moderator: Geoff Bock, Senior Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Outsell’s Gilbane Group

Jerry Silver, Senior Product Marketing Manager, EMC Documentum xCP
John Eckman, Senior Director, Optaros
Doug Gaff, Director of Technology, NPR Public Interactive

Should make for an interesting conversation – now that content is increasingly distributed (and re-distributed), how does the ‘extended enterprise’ start to blur into the ‘web at large’? Do ‘enterprises’ interact over content differently than regular people do?

Can one make the case that LOLCats are ‘strategic content’ and can serve as ‘collaboration objects’? Or, are the only collaboration objects of use to the enterprise the plain old boring ones like material safety data sheets, TPS reports, and org charts?

Music Hack Night photo by glacial23 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/glacial23/4326074965/

(Via Charles McEnerny of Well Rounded Radio)

Two events coming up in October in Cambridge dealing with music, social media, and hacking: Rockshop 8 and Music Hack Day.

First, on Wednesday, October 6th from 7-11 PM, is “Rock Shop Boston #8: A Social Media Experiment.” Part of the Future of Marketing set of events throughout the week:

At Rock Shop Boston #8, we’ll start off with a panel of musicians talking about using social media and the web to manage their careers and then live performances from Lagoon, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, RIBS, and Aaron Perrino (of The Sheila Divine + Dear Leader) Attendees will have “all access” in documenting the evening through social media, including photography, video, blogs, microblogs, etc. . . . The evening is FREE, sponsored by JitterJam, and you can RSVP at http://rockshopboston8.eventbrite.com.

Rock Shop 8

You can also check out the Rockshop series and a number of other interesting events under the Future of Marketing umbrella on their full event calendar.

Second, on October 16th and 17th, Music Hack Day is back:

The main goal of Music Hack Day is “to explore and build the next generation of music applications. It’s a full weekend of hacking in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related.” See some photos and watch a video about the even at http://boston.musichackday.org Last year was terrific…even for non-hackers!

Music Hack Day Boston is also FREE and you can RSVP at http://musichackdayboston2010.eventbrite.com

Yes, it is two days long and still called Music Hack Day. Real programmers start counting at 0. Photos from last year’s event:

Hope to see you at one or both of these events, though my own travel schedule may interfere.

The Fail Whale in Legos - Photo by Bjarne Panduro Tveskov - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tveskov/3387394098/

The 140 Characters Conference in Boston yesterday started off with three strikes against it, in my mind:

1. No coffee. I’ve greatly cut back on my own caffeine addiction, but who starts a conference at 9am on a Tuesday and doesn’t serve coffee?
2. No wifi. Well, there was Wifi, but I couldn’t ever get on any of the available networks.
3. No power. Well, there was power in the building, but the power cops facilities people from the venue would not allow attendees to plug in to the wall outlets, as the cords crossing the aisle represented some kind of hazard.

That’s a steep uphill climb for any conference to overcome, but it turned out to be well worth it. The saving grace was not just Boston’s always active, engaging, welcoming, and supportive social media community (as embodied in folks like @pistachio, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, CS Penn, and way too many more to name them all) but also excellent editorial curation and content pacing.

Favorite panels for me included “Investing in the real-time web” with @bijan, @leaddog99, and @ScottKirsner – which got best quote of the day:

(This was from an article quoting a “Silicon Valley Investor type” – and got the best laugh of the day, despite the fact that the whole conference was witness to the strength of the “Real Time Web” broadly and the tremendous impact of Twitter in particular – including local startup oneforty ).

Also excellent were panels on the “real time news” phenomenon (@universalhub, @dabeard, @mleccese, @kordmiller, and @tmcenroe – with counterpoint later from Jeff Cutler on the difference between “citizen journalism” and “citizen reporting”), a panel on the impact of real-time and social on Health, and a music panel matching @amandapalmer with @matthewebel, @spinaltap, and @cyberpr. Although no music was planned, an impromptu version of the Sesame Street theme on iPad did occur, taking advantage of the talent on the panel.

Christopher S. Penn happily scrapped the talk listed on the schedule – a likely valuable but a bit sleepy “How To Measure Internet Marketing ROI in the era of the Real-Time Web” – and instead geeked out on comic superheros, arguing that the real time web gives all of us super powers and reminding us all that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

The crowd also heard @dewittn‘s story of being one of the disappeared children of El Salvador, and the story of @andydixn, YouthTurns.com, and social media barn raising in Nashville.

Ultimately it felt a bit like Twitter itself: sipping from a fire hose, sampling from a veritable flood of interesting talented people driven by both mission and entrepreneurial spirit to leverage the tools the internet provides (including but not limited to Twitter) to make their mark on the world. The trick being to connect with those folks and carry the conversation on beyond the conference, beyond the twitter-stream and into real projects. (But isn’t that the real trick of any conference?).

Check out the full schedule and as expected tons of coverage via twitter under the hashtag #140conf.

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

Think Outside the Box (Photo by debaird™, cc-by-sa license)

On the distribution front, one of my favorite track sessions was “Joining the Party: Publishers Can Play and Prosper in the Social Media Sandbox,” during which Alan Levvy from BlogTalkRadio said:

Of course content’s got to be everywhere, because audience is everywhere.

I also found Sang Kim’s discussion of how communities built by brands can leverage personalization (another much hyped technology of the late 90s returns) to really encourage folks to engage, by recommending groups and discussions that seem relevant based on user profile or user action before registration.

In one of the keynotes, Darrell Huston from Microsoft showed off what they called a “multiscreen” experience branded for Harry Potter – on Web, XBox, Surface, and mobile phone. Interesting stuff, albeit quite clearly a product demo of the Microsoft World. (I couldn’t help but tweet out a link to the Surface parody which came out at the same time as the original product).

The whole notion, central to the Assembled Web, that the days of artificial scarcity, ignorance arbitrage, and driving eyeballs to sites are over was heard throughout the conference, really. The world now is all about getting your brand, your content, and your interactions or transactions in front of people where they are.

The goal is to be ubiquitous and useful, not to interrupt and distract – and this is true whether you’re a consumer brand, a business-to-business enterprise, or a media company.

Ubiquity (Photo by Mike Willis, cc-by license)

On the innovation front, another good track session was the horribly mis-titled “The Most Creative Social Media Campaigns of 2009” which really covered best practices and lessons learned from social campaigns, but also broadened into an interesting discussion about generational gaps. I worried at first this would descend into a “the kids are crazy” versus “the old folks don’t get social” discussion – one I particularly hate as I’m demographically old but behaviorally young in that equation – but it actually evolved into a nuanced discussion of mentoring, cross-generational understanding, and the business of retaining the creativity and innovation of a startup while scaling into a bigger more established firm.

Again, later, on the main stage, the discussion kept coming back to the notion of innovation as being that which will distinguish the survivors from the causalities in this difficult economic market. (If the theme of day one was that this is an age of uncertainty, I’d say the theme of day 2 was that innovation is the way out of that uncertainty, or at least the best possible response to it).

There was a panel which asked whether Madison Avenue had a future or not, but given that it was composed of senior agency execs, it’s not too surprising that they felt it did – so long as they kept the focus on getting rewarded for innovative new ideas.

Personally this made me wonder why it is that we so consistently associate innovation with startups – is it just a strong pro-entrepreneurial bent to US business culture? Is there something about an organization of more than say 50 employees that makes it impossible to innovate? (Or is the magic number more like 500?) Was the undercurrent I was feeling more about a suggestion that large advertising agencies can’t or don’t innovate, because they’re too focused on media planning and traditional creative?

Innovate (Photo by Uncleweed, cc-by-sa license)

Her slides are also available, as are other videos from the conference.

It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

• Nate Aune of Jazkarta (Plone / Zope / Python)
• Elie Auvray of Jahia
• Michael Wechner of Wyona (Lenya, Yanel, Yulup)

Here’s the description from the official program:

There are many open source content management solutions available today, reflecting a wide variety of capabilities and costs, and organizations of all types are more willing than ever to consider them in place of, or along side commercial CMSs. This session will look at some of the pros and cons of deploying open source content management systems in terms of licensing, costs, maintenance, and functionality to help you determine if they are an appropriate option for your organization.

In addition to all of that, I also hope we’ll talk about how the adoption landscape is or isn’t changing for open source in the CMS space, innovation and standards compliance in open source CMS, and how open source projects can make user adoption easier or more effective.

What questions would you like to ask this group of speakers? How do you see the landscape changing for open source projects in the content management space?

Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:

Its a great idea, and I’ve already found or created events for all my conferences coming up. (I’m tempted to create events in the past, as a way of adding conferences where I’ve presented to my LinkedIn profile. The “add an event” flow doesn’t seem to prohibit that, though I haven’t followed it all the way through yet).

I wish the recommendations (which events they suggest you might want to attend) were a bit more precise, but I guess that’s a result of relying on things like “industry” set in your profile (mine is set to “Internet” which must be hard to match on), or job title (“Next Generation Internet Strategist” is not on many event planners’ lists of target job titles), or even education (my educational background is pretty varied and not neatly tied to what I do now). I think it’d be great to allow me to configure the app to add some tags of interests – and maybe let me choose how recommended events get sorted (date, distance, relevancy, or some combination thereof).

It would also be good to have a simple way to get an event’s URL – for now I’ve been to the event’s “page” and clicking on the “Share” link, then pulling the short url out of that message. That results in a url looking like this: http://events.linkedin.com/pub/12514
Rather than one looking like this: http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1&_ch_panel_id=3&_ch_app_id=30&_applicationId=2000&appParams={%22from%22%3A%22my_events%22%2C%22go_to%22%3A%22events%2F12514%22}&_ownerId=2757022&completeUrlHash=gXn-

I assume the nasty url is a result of OpenSocial, in the sense that the hosting site needs to know which application to load and then pass info to the application – but since they are already creating url aliases, why not expose them more directly?

These suggestions aside, it’s a welcome addition which makes LinkedIn much more useful, especially to those not in job-seeking mode.

(If we’re not connected on LinkedIn and should be, here’s my profile).

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker – no one can resist alliteration – it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):

Managing User Generated Content

The age of content being managed only by authorized professionals is over. Users expect to contribute to, rate, review, recommend, filter, tag, and moderate their experiences on the web. What does this mean for designers and content management professionals? How do you encourage appropriate behavior and discourage spam and vandalism, without completely reverting to non-participation?

Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden

(Dual talk with Joshua Porter). This talk will cover 3 basic ideas: 1) What Managing Identity means these days and why it is important 2) Off-the-shelf technologies that help you manage your Identity 3) A DIY (Do-it-yourself) approach to managing your Identity…how you can roll your own identity services using existing pieces

The first is really an updated version of this talk from Web Content 2008, which seemed to go over well.

The second is inspired by r0ml’s series of OSCON talks over the last 3 years: rambling, philosophical, and entertaining in addition to being educational and thought-provoking. I’m sure I’ll fail to live up to his example but have fun in the process. I tried to update the description in the panel picker but failed – here’s what I was trying to add:

The context for me is in trying to articulate why free and open source projects have historically found it difficult to recruit / retain / attract designers as contributors. (Or, depending on your point of view, why open source projects have been so inhospitable to the design-oriented contributors who show up).

Thesis: Open Source and Design are philosophically incompatible.

Open Source is about enabling anyone and everyone to share the same code base. Open source pushes markets toward commodity status, leveling the playing field by making the same technology available to all. Design, by contrast, is about differentiation; standing apart from the crowd and being unique on the basis of creative innovation.

Besides, Open Source projects are ugly, and only engineers can use them. Well designed, beautiful, and easy to use projects have always come from proprietary approaches.

Antithesis: Open Source and design are profoundly similar in core beliefs. Open source and design are both based in solving problems based on known patterns. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe some very small portion of “design” is about differentiation, but design is much broader than that subset. Also, many open source projects differentiate and innovate – sometimes on ease of use.

Besides, many open source projects are now actively pursuing design contributions, running usability studies, encouraging themes/skins, and working to compete with proprietary software on both “eye candy” and ease of use.

Synthesis: How can open source projects benefit more from the talents of the design community (across visual design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and branding)? How can designers and design communities benefit from the lessons of free and open source software?

The third is a joint talk with Joshua Porter, whose book Designing for the Social Web is a must read. He’ll be talking about some of the “off the shelf” services available to help you manage your online identity (like Chi.mp), and I will be talking about the DIY approach, assembling together from free and open source software an online identity management toolbox.

I had thought about calling it “From Content Management to Community Management” or maybe “Content Management is Dead” but ended up instead with: “Upload, Tag, Share, Discuss: Content Management in the Age of Participation.”

Here are the slides – note that the last slide is full of credits for photos (creative commons via flickr) and links for sites referenced. Can be hard to see in small size so you’ll need to either full-screen it or download the file (which you can do at slideshare).

| View | Upload your own

Seth had some nice things to say about the presentation: Web Content 2008 Notes.

So did Deane at Web Content 2008: Day Two.

Thanks Guys!

It was really a great conference: not heavily vendor driven, no “expo floor” you have to walk through to get to the food, small enough that you could actually mingle with and talk to the attendees. My only wish would have been to have spoken earlier, maybe even Tuesday am, so that people interested in my talk could have known who I was before the conference was basically over. I also would have come in to Chicago Monday night to catch more of the opening keynotes.

I got in late yesterday due to some flight issues, but managed to catch three good presentations.

First was Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting (who co-manage the conference along with The Content Wrangler). He spoke on the “new rules of marketing”:

| View | Upload your own

Although this was, to be honest, a pretty well known story for me, Silverman’s presentation wraps it up nicely into some actionable rules. (It probably didn’t help that I’m reading Groundswell at the moment – review to come – and know most of the books and articles Silverman draws on pretty well).

Then I saw Darren Barefoot do “29 Web 2.0 Tools” session. No slides for this, just a highly interactive session. Barefoot put the names of 29 tools up on a clothesline, and basically let the audience drive the discussion, talking about each tool as it came up.

It’s actually a very effective format – might have been good to have someone working with him who had an internet connection and projected the sites on the screen as he discussed them – wouldn’t want it to detract from or compete with the discussion but it would help the audience visualize. I don’t know if it si a good sign or makes me a new media douchebag, but I was familiar with all 29 tools.

Finally, Seth Gottlieb presented on the Open Source, Java-based CMS market:

| View | Upload your own

Seth’s slides don’t really adequately cover the value in his talk – much of which is in the color commentary he offers live. If you haven’t already, you should check out his report as well.

I’m presenting later today – will post those slides here as well.

It’s part of the larger Glassfish project, and uses Apache Shindig as an OpenSocial container – they demo’d OpenSocial widgets running inside Drupal and MediaWiki – all running inside a Java Application Server.

Video:

This could be a compelling option for those looking to run their own open social containers. It isn’t available in source code form yet, but you can sign up here to be notified when it is available.

Here’s his slides via slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

Most of Vander Wal’s focus was on relatively minor improvements which can be made to the user experience (interface and context) of such services which have dramatic impacts on leverage: both in the sense of increasing use and in the sense of making that usage more useful. (Maybe too many words with use at the root there, but I think you get the meaning).

For example, providing what he called “Easy Tagging” which simplifies the choices available to the user, increasingly the likelihood of action.

At slide 35, he begins to get into what I think is the best part – pointing out where the tools are “too simple” – where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.

I’d love to see an open source implementation take the lead here on implementing Vander Wal’s recommendations. Time to revisit the idea of Scuttle as a Drupal module, ready for deployment in an intranet context, integrated with user info, profile, and taxonomy at some level? Anyone working on this already?

Last night was the third Ignite Boston, at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. Ignite is an O’Reilly Media sponsored series of events in various cities around the US. Lots of O’Reilly authors, editors, and various Friends Of O’Reilly gather to talk about tech stuff and generally geek out.

Highlights of the evening (for me):

• Juhan Sonin on Interface Design Tenets – looking to create a Strunk & White equivalent pocket reference for interface/interaction designers. (There’s a wiki just getting started)
• Benjamin Mako Hill talking about Selectricity, a free and open source framework for managing elections / polls etc. Also can be used freely as a hosted offering.
• Craig Freifeld talking about Health Map, which is a visual mashup of emerging disease reports – a sort of crowdsourced (though they use mainstream news reports) epidemic tracker.
• Jesse Vincent‘s Web 2.0 is Sharecropping, a quasi-rant about the limitations inherent in not owning your own tools.
• Lucy Mendel talking about Buy It Like You Mean It, which is a non-profit organization aimed at bringing rich information to consumers at the point of purchase about the social impacts of the products they are considering: environmental concerns, labor relationships, etc. They’re starting with the chocolate industry and she mentioned their impending launch party at Taza Chocolate in Somerville next Tuesday.

There were lots of lightning talks – so not being on my highlights list doesn’t mean the others weren’t good, just that they didn’t resonate with me as much.

Lowlights: The “keynote” speakers were excepted from the 5 minute lightning talk rule. I think that’s a mistake – not that what they had to say wasn’t valuable, but both were just too long for the crowd and the environment. Standing in a hot, crowded pub is not conducive to listening to a lengthy talk on a subject which may or may not even be relevant to you.

Also, unfortunately, Fish Fishman’s planned “5 minute mixed reality magic routine using Second Life and the Ignite audience” didn’t materialize. Always difficult to do any kind of live demo requiring connectivity in an unpredictable environment – I was looking forward to that one, if only for the “I’ve not seen that before” aspect.

Thanks are due to Microsoft for the free (as in beer) beer, though I don’t know that one-drink-ticket-per-pre-registered-attendee is exactly what I was expecting from such a large sponsor. I thought the open bars of the bubble-era Internet were back, but I guess folks are being more cautious this time around. O’Reilly also raffled off tons of books, through out shirts, and the like.

Looking forward to more Ignite events in Boston down the road.

Enterprise³ consists of three separate, but related, components:

• Enterprise Web and Information Management Conference – a conference that provides technology managers and IT staff with a detailed guide to selecting and implementing technology and product innovations in Web 2.0, portals, collaboration, information management and access, enterprise search, and service-oriented architectures.
• Enterprise Portal and Collaboration Business Summit – an event designed for business users and technology managers that employs case studies and best practices to show attendees how companies today are gaining business benefit from the latest enterprise portal and business collaboration technologies and products.
• Microsoft SharePoint in the Enterprise Forum – this forum provides IT staff with the information they need to deploy a Microsoft SharePoint environment that can be integrated with enterprise-level information management and business collaboration systems.

I’ll be participating in two panels. The first is “Stump the Consultant,” in which a series of consultants (including me) get asked the same question and their answers are rated. (An iPod and noise canceling headphones create an isolation booth while the others answer so that we can’t hear each other’s answers). Should be good fun. Wonder if I’ll get any SharePoint questions.

The second is on “Facebook in the Enterprise,” which is a panel moderated by my former colleague Jarrod Gingras, now at CMS Watch:

Key topics will include security, enterprise IT concerns, “viral” effects, custom applications, privacy, networking, and information sharing.

Fellow panelists include Toby Ward (CEO of Prescient Digital and author of the Intranet Blog) and Kyle Arteaga (VP of Communications at Serena, which relies heavily on Facebook as its intranet). You can read Toby’s take on Serena’s Facebook Intranet here.

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass”

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.

Participating on the panel with me will be:

• Bob Bickel, Founder and CEO of Ringside Networks
• Dr. Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia

Thanks to the conference organizers, I have one free full conference pass to give away. (Full conference pass is $1895 currently and $2095 if you register on site).

To get the pass, contact me. I will choose at random from those who contact me by the end of day Sunday, 5/11.

I also have a number of discount codes which you can use to get a free demo pavillion pass – which gets you in to the demo pavillion as well as “selected keynotes and sponsored sessions” – or $100 off a full registration.

Now (via LaughingSquid) you can watch the video. It’s Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, on the “cognitive surplus” as a characteristic fueling mass collaboration.

Interestingly, this seems to break my facebook app. No longer resizes the iframe to the right size? Something is trying to call location.toString() and getting denied – my guess is that Blip.tv is trying to track where the video was embedded and facebook doesn’t allow apps inside iframes to access parent location.

You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo videos at Blip.tv or put this rss url into Miro and get a channel: http://web2expo.blip.tv/rss

You can stay inside the humor, enjoy the meme, and celebrate the cultural profusion – which is pretty much what day one of ROFLCon was all about – or you can try to set a context, understand what is going on in the humor, and analyze what the memes tell us about the culture(s) from which they originate, the culture(s) in which they succeed or fail, flourish or thrive, or even about the nature of cultural transmission itself.

The hope of ROFLCon, for me, was always that it would bring together these two modes: bringing academic, critical analysis into the same space with Tron guy, the Mozilla fox, Cheez, and other meme-originating microcelebrities:

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.

Day one essentially was devoid of the analysis and critique part. Weinberger’s intro did provide some context and implied a potential critique (the motivation behind some kinds of cultural meme spreading being hateful, condescending, patronizing, etc), the panels on LOLCats and the mis-titled “Pwning for the good of mankind” got stuck inside the memes.

While the LOLCat panel was well moderated, and interesting, the level of analysis stopped at speculations about what “cat people” are like. The panel:

PANEL: LOLCATS: I CAN HAZ CASE STUDY?: How do you see the development of the LOLCat? What do you think people will think of the LOLCat when they look back in 30 years? (Room 34-101)

Moderator: Alexis Ohanian
Panelists: “Cheez” (I Can Has Cheezburger), Martin Grondin (LOLCat Bible), Ryan and Arija (LOLSecretz), Stephen Granades (LOLTrek), Adam Lindsay (LOLCode)

Lots of wonderful sites I love – LOLCode and the LOLCat Bible in particular are creative take offs on the original ICHC.

During the Pwning for Mankind panel:

PWNING FOR GOOD OF MANKIND: How did you start doing what you do? What motivated you to use internet culture against established forces? What allowed you to mobilize attention against the non-internet world? Did it happen unintentionally? (Room 34-101)

Moderator: Lana Swartz, Comparative Media Studies, MIT

Panelists: Dino Ignacio (Bert Is Evil), Leslie Hall (Gem Sweater), Justine Ezarik (iJustine), Ji Lee (Bubble Project), Eric Schoenborn (ACLU)

Unforunately, the only real evidence of social critique was provided by the ACLU representative who brought up net neutrality and the daily battles against censorship, political repression, and the elimination of privacy on which folks like the ACLU and the EFF focus. (Ok, maybe the Bubble Project’s agenda to limit outdoor advertising is a social critique, but it was only briefly discussed). I don’ really know the Gem Sweaters project, but she never broke character or tried to explain what it might be about, other than getting people to wear gem sweaters.

I think Tron guy’s funny too, and I am a tremendous fan of LOLCats, LOLDogs, and every other manifestation of the LOL meme. But I came to a conference not to just surf the web and laugh about the absurd, creative, wonderful, insipid, profound, politically repugnant, progressive, mess that is humor on the web.

I’m hoping day two will restore the balance a bit. Based on the schedule, there’s some good reason to hope. (Not that only formal academics can do critical analysis, but they’re more likely to have those chops than, say, iJustine or the Million Dollar Web Page guy.

Drupalcon Boston 2008 takes place from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center. There will also be a Drupal Code Sprint on March 7 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge.

Drupalcon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss & advance Drupal, and to network with other Drupal community members. With sessions targeted at everyone from novice to expert attendees, Drupalcon is where you go to advance your understanding and use of Drupal.

Note: Deadline is Today, Feb 11th, for submitting proposals.

AIIM Expo will be held at the same time and location, and Drupalcon attendees can visit the AIIM Expo Hall. For full access to AIIM Expo, separate registration is required.

Tracks & Sessions:

• Marketing and business
• Design and user experience
• Site building
• Community and core
• Showcase and case study contest

Review the conference program and submit your own session proposal.

Conference Events:

• Job fair
• Industry networking
• Conference Social at FELT

Cost & Registration:
The cost to attend Drupalcon Boston is $195. This covers four full days of intensive sessions and tutorials, networking and social events, lunch and a t-shirt.

To register for Drupalcon, sign-up at http://boston2008.drupalcon.org.

Sponsorship:
Affordable sponsorship packages are available for companies who would like to show their support of the Drupal Association and receive visibility in front of hundreds of Drupal developers and enthusiasts. To learn more about sponsorships visit http://boston2008.drupalcon.org.

Panelists:

• Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group
• Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting
• Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City
• Jim Nail, Cymfony

Description:

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can “count” engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

—
Notes:

Jim Nail – Cymfony is a brand monitoring company – tell enterprises what users are saying about them.

Maury Giles – GSD&M Idea City – ad agency / interactive agency in Austin. Background in political campaigns, where measurement is paramount.

Stacey Lynn Schulman – new to Turner. Previously at Interpublic group – consumer experience practice. Measurement in the old media are well understood and stable. Walks through history of shifts in measurement – movement into multi-network world (cable), move to “people meters” in households, etc.

Bruce Leichtman – based in Duram NH. Boutique analyst firm focused on future of entertainment. To understand the future we need to begin with the present. Talked about needing to avoid the sample of one problem. We don’t represent the masses – need to focus on quantitative research across broad audiences.

—

SF – Place to start. The Writers’ Strike.

BL – The writer’s strike over the 4.6 billion in revenue that could occur – but the hockey stick curves aren’t real yet.

SLS – We don’t know how big the pie will be – but that doesn’t mean that writers should have a piece of the pie. We have difficulty really quantifying this stuff – especially when it comes to fusing samples across media. People starting online then watching tv, rewatching things they downloaded, etc – we don’t have any way to capture this information reliably across channels.

MG – For me it comes down to how you measure success. Are we going to stick with eyeballs, audience size, etc., or can we adjust to a different way of measuring to understand the control users have. The old paradigm, based on eyeballs, is falling apart – rather than tracking the diffusion of media throughout channels, we focus on what is enabled by all these niche audiences. If we focus on the impact of content on niche audiences rather than mass media – it’s not about how many people we reach as opposed to our impact on niche markets.

JN – the challenge is that those hockey stick graphs are just opinions expressed in numeric form – the real discussion should be not about the size of the chart, but about what assumptions are made to generate them and what direction they indicate things are changing. But we cannot forget about the consumer and how rapidly they change, which is a slowing effect on change, no matter how much the technology changes. This has to come down to the number of times something is viewed, downloaded, etc – not a flat fee since we don’t know how much revenue this will generate.

—

SF – Is it someone’s fault that their isn’t a viable revenue stream?

JN – The networks have been in control for 50+ years. As their control and revenue stream erodes, they are struggling. It isn’t anyone’s fault it is just a fact of life.

BL – 6 minutes of video/day is the mean number in terms of what users are viewing. People talk alot about the YouTube phenomenon, but not much about “Don’t Forget The Lyrics” – but that is still something which got more eyeball time than YouTube did. It’s more about evolution than revolution.

SLS – When I was on the agency side, clients just wanted to be on the next big shiny object.

JN – I call that the GMOOT – get me one of those.

SLS – What happens is that the industry gets this sense that everybody is in these spaces and that they have to be in these spaces. But that’s because 80% of their mindshare is on that big shiny object. But the reality is that 80% of their dollars are in that traditional media, because thats where the audience is. They want to see these new bright shiny objects expressed in terms they understand – which means they want the market numbers they get for traditional media.

JN – During the bust, people were pointing at companies which spent money online going out of business failing and saying see – online advertising doesn’t work. At the same time, however, the % of time people spend online keeps increasing – the percentage of consumers media consumption online outpaces the marketing spend.

SLS – the flipside of the bright shiny objects crowd is the lean back arms crossed posture – the marketing folks who don’t even believe anything new is important or signficant. Yeah, but everytime I put that commercial in old media I sell X amount of Y.

BL – but as we see these things evolving, old media is not dead. We just saw the largest cable event ever in history – high school musical 2. Audience segmentation is important, and we can’t think that we are the audience.

JN – Appointment TV isn’t dead – it is just that the user is setting the appointment.

–

SF – Jericho / CBS. Fans rallying for a show. But also fans saying we’re watching, how come our eyeballs don’t count?

SLS – Engagement is the beginning of that. Trying to determine how much people like a show based on how much they talk about it. When Lost first was being talked about, everyone thought it wasn’t going to work – but our analysis of buzz said that it was going to work. In that case it turned out to be right. But there are also small, highly engaged audiences in some cases – Veronica Mars, The Office, Friday Night Lights – these are shows which ranked very high in buzz, but small in audience. The small engaged fan cultures are something we should be looking at. We also can’t forget that consumers are themselves channels – they are distributing content as well.

MG – The content seller has a need to validate the value of the content. What we’re trying to do is measure engagement in a context – what role that engagement has in the decision cycle of the consumer. Is it having an impact on how they purchase?

BL – if it doesn’t sell, today, tomorrow, or at some later point, it isn’t worth it for the agency.

JN – but branding does work. People deny it, but we’ve seen it time and time again – they may see an ad on toilet paper, and then later they pick that brand in the store – without even knowing it.

—

JN – people don’t like to talk about advertising. But they do talk about what is important to them, and how they talk about what’s important to them, it helps you figure out how to engage with them and how to position your products and where to position your products. Criticism is a useful metric because users who are critical of your product they tell you that because they want you to get better. Engagement is about also listening – you have to let go of that total control and develop a relationship with consumers where they help create.

SLS – We need to question this notion that as a marketer you have a portfolio of brands. What if we thought instead about having sets of consumers whose needs were meeting. What we have, what our asset is, is the consumers we are serving, not this portfolio of products we’re trying to sell.

JN – the control marketers or advertisers ever had was always a myth. We never had the control we classically thought we did. Now we can see that co-creation of meaning happening in much clearer ways. You cannot just surround people with integrated marketing messages and think that we control the conversation.

BL – Between DVR and On-Demand, about 5% is when the user wants it – the other 95% is viewed on the schedule created by the networks. Even that push is due to it being pushed by providers (cable box integration, dish integration) not end consumer demand (stand alone TiVo box). Even as the number of DVR’s grow, the % of viewing which is time shifted, it will still be only 15% of all viewing time even when we have 50 million DVRs in households.

—

Audience questions:

Q: When you make predictions about audiences over time, how do you account for the aging of the audience over time as well?

BL – My forecasts are based on demand and supply – in a 3-5 year time frame those issues don’t impact as much.

SLS – But it isn’t always about studying a single generation across time – the millenials have an impact across time, but when you project their teenage behavior over time, don’t assume they don’t change.

JN – it’s valuable for how to connect to them now, not what they will be like in 30 years or even 10.

—-

Q: What about the kids market? What kind of research are you doing in terms of how to reach that audience?

SLS – More difficult because there are restrictions and regulations about doing research with children, especially in the context of trying to sell them stuff.

—

Q: What about users recommending things to each other and how you can track that?

SLS – recommending products is something being enabled in facebook. It isn’t about the reach of one distribution mechanism but the reaggregation of all the various sums.

JN – 80% of word of mouth is still offline, so even measuring online word of mouth is only a proxy for the recommendations people make. If you think about the never ending friending report about MySpace, the revelation in that report to me was the importance of the widgets and portability – people putting that widget in their profile is so much more important than having your own brand page or banner ads.

MY – You also have to be very careful about that “facilitate” role – if you’re actually creating it and pretending people popularly / virally created it you’ve got a problem. I love the Nike/Apple iPod integration example – if we can provide a real service that happens to also be branded that is the loyalty solution. Facilitating the experience in order to drive to real results. The goal of the campaign is to have a specific impact on consumer behavior and that behavior might include telling friends about something, subscribing to a feed, etc.

SLS – Mass media isn’t going anywhere, even as we hear alot about fragmentation.

BL – We hear about how cable is beating broadcast – well, there are 4 broadcast networks and 100 cable channels – shouldn’t cable beat broadcast? Those 4 channels are still very dominant and that reflects something about human nature and centrality of shared experiences.

—

Q: Other than word of mouth, what other engagement metrics do you see.

MG – Some of the softer, traditional metrics from branding and advertising – it’s about what makes people think, feel, and act – and thinking and feeling are hard to measure, especially when the “act” comes much later.

JN – It’s about return on marketing objective. The right measurements are different in different places – growing awareness, repositioning a product when it relaunches, etc – those are valid metrics in different cases. It isn’t alwyas about specific ROI – there are things you do in marketing which lead to future sales, which you should do, and you have to do them whether they can be directly tied to sales or not.

MG – The thing that fascinates me currently is using complex scientific approaches to create virtual environments and test in them based on metrics tracked over time – you create virtual agents and introduce different stimulous and then see what emerges. Basically become predictive, rather than reactive – it isn’t just about measureing how effective this last campaign was, but predicting how effective the next one will be.

—

Q: What about an open, transparent approach to measurement? It is frustrating that we (users) have no access to how things are measured?

Great idea, but unlikely to happen – lots and lots of money in this space and lots of investment in how it is done today.

–

Q: Consumers as a channel for us to think about – what about Bebo Channels? Couldn’t the revenue in that space be shared with the writers? (Back to the WGA strike).

SLS – In terms of the writers strike, it is very layered here. It is just more complicated than simply saying because ads are there it is therefore profitable. It’s all too all over the place at this point to know what we can and can’t support from a cost/revenue perspective. Even the sites the networks are building have a hard time competing with bittorrent, file sharing, and other mechanisms out there which provide more control – so they are having a hard enough time creating the ability to actually get online distribution they control rather than the distribution users control, let alone worrying about paying more to be able to do it.

BL – but it also isn’t necessarily all incremental revenue – is this in place of other syndication later? Does the value of the show in broadcast, in rerun, in syndication, diminish as it is spread more broadly online?

—

Q: Are there any specific metrics you’ve seen advertisers believe which demonstrates people paying attention to ads?

SLS – IAG and the rewards tv model – there is a measurement here in which the user needs to recall copy points, but is the expectation it is setting real? This is an example of a metric the industry has accepted largely accepted because there is nothing better.

MG – What we’re trying to do is connect to the metric which really matters – incremental improvement in revenue. Skin in the game, tying marketing/advertising to how the company actually does – if we fail to have a positive impact on your revenue that puts us in a different position to worry about these other intermediate metrics which ultimately connect to improved company performance.

—

Q: What about online versus offline: we tend to think of offline as about brand awareness and online about direct action – but online can also be used to build brand awareness, can’t it?

MG – the interactivity of being online can still be a brand building experience – so the actions users take (click here, send this to a friend, whatever behaviors you offer) *are* part of building awareness and brand recall.

JN – TV is still very influential. What online can ad is reach to the lite tv viewer once you pass the point of inefficiency in tv.

SLS – Although TV is seen as the reach medium, remember that things are changing. In an on demand environment more options are available – TV may be growing into a medium which offers more interactivity . . .

JN . . . and those studies were all done on banner ads – as we get more online video, so both are evolving toward each other in terms of capabilities.

–

Q: Any case studies which surprised you about the impact of various kinds of media? Times where what happened was unexpected?

BL – High School Musical. The mass still does exist. How Disney was able to move that across media – an album, a show, a skating tour, etc.

JN – I’ll give you three: MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook. All of these really took the world of tracking influence by storm as places for people to express how they feel about various products and ads. A fourth is the people talking about their ads in advance of the superbowl – the tradition was to keep things quiet and try to make this big surprise. Instead, as folks were sharing info about their ads in advance of the big show – but we found that they still had the same influence.

BL – AppleTV as a great case study. 2 million by the end of the year? Now they won’t talk about it. Now it is Steve Jobs hobby – the case study was already written – people don’t want a standalone box.

—

Q: Any other outside examples in terms of measuring engagement, which didn’t originate in media but come from other fields?

SLS – check out a company called Neuro focus. Measureing brain waves to measure engagement.

MG – swarm theory, chaos theory – these worlds are increasingly relevant. Studies of complex biological systems and how they evolve – marketing is increasing like an organic system.

—

Q: Problem established. Tell us how you are addressing it

BL – not my problem. I’m trying to help understand the consumer and clearly define where we actually are not just where we are going.

SLS – our biggest challenge is trying to figure out how to keep commercial minutes relavant to content minutes. (New ways to get advertisers involved in the content, new ways to keep consumers engaged and get them to see messages from advertisers without interrupting your primary reason to be there).

MG – we’re focused on studying how the consumer engages with the product. Dynamics, triggers, stages of decision making – looking in depth at what “reachable moments” exist to influence that behavior.

JN – one of my notes from this panel has been SLS on the reaggregation of meaningful sums. In the future it isnt going to be who is the audience of this tv show – at the end of the day it is about reach and impact, regardless of the channel or mechanism. Advertisers want to reach a certain number of certain kinds of people in a certain timeframe with a message – they don’t care what *channel* is used – so maybe again it is aggregation from a lot of smaller more passionate audiences.

• Convergence Culture Consortium Blog
  • FoE2 Opening Remarks
  • FoE2: Mobile Media
  • FoE2: Metrics and Measurement
  • FoE2: Fan Labor
  • FoE Day 2 Opening Comments
  • FoE2: Advertising and Convergence Culture
  • FoE2: Cult Media
• License to Roam
  • Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green Opening Remarks
  • Mobile Media
• Isabel Walcott Hilborn on Day One
• Ad Pulp
  • Brand Narratives Will Benefit from Transmedia Storytelling
  • Really Smart People at MIT Actually Study Advertising
  • Content for and from Portable Multi-Platform Network Devices
  • Reporting Live from MIT’s Media Lab
• Talent Imitates, Genius Steals
• Fallon Planning
• Raph’s Website
  • Futures of Entertainment 2: Fan Labor
  • Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media
• Media Maven
  • Cult Media Panel
  • Fan Labor Panel
  • Fan Labor Part 1
  • Beginnings of FoE2
• Media Is Culture and It’s Converging

I’ll add others as I find them – or leave a comment. I’m using the tag foe2 for what it’s worth.

Panelists:

• Marc Davis, Yahoo!
• Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting
• Alice Kim, MTV Networks
• Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Description from program:

Beyond the launch of shiny new devices, the mobile market has been dominated by data services and re-formatted content. Wifi connections and the expansion of 3G phone networks enable pushing more data to wireless devices faster, yet we still seem to be waiting for the arrival of mobile’s “killer app”. This panel muses on the future of mobile services as devices for convergence culture. What role can mobile services play in remix culture? What makes successful mobile gaming work? What are the stumbling blocks to making the technological promise of convergence devices match the realities of the market? Is podcasting the first and last genre of content? What is the significance of geotagging and place-awareness?

Notes:

Alice Kim – lots of interesting challenges.
– How do we get compensated?
– How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis – an MIT Media Lab alum. Early Stage Products at Yahoo! focus on Mobile
– in the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
– Nokia N95 – which unlike the iPhone is programmable easily
– Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live – that’s what gets me up in the morning

Anmol Madan – a PhD student upstairs (Media Lab).
– Research interest – computation models on how people share things in media
– Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai – VP of Wireless/Mobile at Turner
– I mostly live on a plane. 90% of our research is outside the US.
– The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind.
– We can learn a lot from other geographies

–
JG: How do we account for how far behind we are?

Bob Schukai – he’s got more phones than anyone else at the table – I counted seven, I think. (Of course none of them work since there is no cell phone coverage here).

7 different standards, from which we’re still suffering.

In the US, we’re still talking about coverage. Standards are definitely an issue.

Marc Davis -But it is also about business model – bundled data is huge leap forward, and this is one place where we’re ahead. The iPhone isn’t just about the UI but about the bundled unlimited data. Then there’s the challenge of mobile development.

Internet, Telecom, and Content industries all fighting over true mobile innovation. The one thing we share is an interest in advertising.

Alice Kim – we all agree standards are an issue, business models are an issue. Less than 25% of those who are on data plans access mobile video on a regular basis. The consumer behavior just isn’t there either. Is there an opportunity to leverage some of the ad budget to subsidize the cost of content delivery to mobile devices?

Bob Schukai – but we’re still building for coverage not bandwidth – text messaging is where the margin is, which is low bandwidth.

Marc Davis – carriers have an effective monopoly on messaging via the phone – once you get IM on the phone you no longer need SMS

Anmol Maden – I think the big issue is interoperability. It’s an order of magnitude worse than the PC 15 years ago. This leaves users dependent on the carrier networks which they should not have to be. (Bluetooth, Mesh, Wifi – these will help solve the issue but are opposed to carrier business models).

JG: but will we ever get beyond walled gardens?

Marc Davis – we will. Think of the history of IM. As we move into social applications, you have to be able to reach out beyond the end of your walled garden. We will shift from a walled garden model to an open internet model.

JG – how does the shift from Walled Garden to Open Internet get sold as a business model? Why didn’t we get the real internet is the first place?

Bob Schukai – the carriers see that off-deck plays are going to be huge. They understand the walls are coming down fast. Initially it made sense because of the limits of handsets which couldn’t handle web content.

Anmol Maden – the ideas here are coming from startups and 17 year olds in finland – not coming through the on deck models from carriers.

Marc Davis – another challenge has been the lack of an interface – why didn’t we get the web? We didn’t have a mouse on the phone. This was a significant barrier – the UI paradigm of web browsing and using a phone are different. Both are evolving, which is why things are changing – new phone interfaces, new web paradigms. It is just about to happen – we are at the point of convergence. Back in the 90s Media Lab paper about Data Cameras – but the iPhone is the realization of the Data Camera. It isn’t just about consuming content but also creating it.

Alice Kim – for a while we liked the walled garden. That’s what seeded many content providers’ mobile organizations. We’re experimenting with mobile device oriented productions. Short series, etc. American Idol’s vote via txt. This is in a sense a realization of the old “interactive tv” model, but the buttons were on the phone not the TV Remote. So we’re experimenting, but we’re also waiting to see where real interactivity comes from, technologically.

JG: How can we make smarter devices by taking advantage of the social-ness?

Marc Davis – it is important to remember what a modern phone really is. A programmable, portable, location aware, video camera, connected to the internet. The real opportunities have to do with leveraging what makes the phone a new medium for content production. Think about the opportunities of large scale production.

audience – why do you call it a phone?

Marc Davis – the primary reason people carry these is to make a phone call from anywhere.

Bob Schukai – you can try to call it a portable multimedia computing device as Nokia does (in finnish accent) but most people call it a phone.

London 2 bombings on 7/7 and photos from them – first large scale location aware event where those photos were the best reporting of it.

Marc Davis – the new diegetic realm that mobile makes possile is storytelling in the physcial world – what mobile will make possible is stories that live in space and timeout in the real world. What does news look like when there are 50,000 streaming mobile phones in a real time event? Real time, geo aware, time-aware content production across the planet.

(Demoing Zone Tag)

Bob Schukai – your life isn’t private anymore. This is fraught with anxiety. I think there is going to be a backlash as part of this – it won’t be all fun.

Anmol Maden – what if we think of phones as behavior recognition devices, not communication devices. What if your phone is aware of your routine, your friends, your movement through time and space. How you use this potential awareness is what is most interesting but also most potentially troubling.

JG: How do we get there? How do these location aware social apps actually get created?

Marc Davis – “the new vegetarian restaurant all my friends like that I’ve never been to” example – this isn’t an app it’s a gift. People are going to have to own their data – but if we’re getting people what they want when the want it, it will happen.

Bob Schukai – there’s a demographic bit here too.

Alice Kim – but that same demo (under 35) is also most anti-commercial, at least in terms of old forms of advertising. Millenial demographic is part consumers part producers part curators – more innovative in terms of content production. New forms of advertising will have to be created to meet them.

JG: Will the unease about location awareness be less important for “entertainment” contexts?

Marc Davis – fire eagle – an open platform for location awareness (desktop and mobile) with privacy built in. Granularity matters a lot – and should be user choice. Knowing I’m in Cambridge, or the Boston area, versus that I am in *this* auditorium is very very different.

ZoneTag demo – flickr map of phots. And this is with folks taking the time to drag images on to a map (like me). Tagmaps at research.yahoo.com – tag cloud over the map. A map of collective human attention – which is what media is really about.

JG: Where is innovation coming from?

Marc Davis – there’s lots of innovation – bringing it to market has been the difficulty.

Anmol Maden – the presence of location awareness (and availability of it to the OS and applications) is growing rapidly now.

Bob Schukai – the real innovation to me is where you are breaking the business models. Putting Skype on the phone, removing roaming charges for data access (X series phone?) across Europe. Until we see this kinds of stuff happening we will keep halting process and takng way too long to get new innovative apps into the mainstream.

Marc Davis – this also comes back to Bob’s original point about the US being behind. In Japan, all the phones have GPS. But the best behavior and intention understanding mechanism isn’t the web it is the phone – and that’s why eventually we will break these barriers.
—

JG – what about Apple and Google’s entry to the market?

BS – the significance of the iPhone is that Apple set the terms of the deal. They controlled the carrier. That’s a big cajones move Jobs put out there and god bless him for it – you’ve got to break the business models to make real innovation. Google, I don’t know what to say about that yet – how good are their intentions? They want to be open, they talk about openness, but they have real impacts on content producers. What will happen when Google buys spectrum?

AM – we also should talk about the innovation of people writing apps for the iphone despite active antagonism from Apple. From a Google / Android perspective it seems like they are trying to solve the right problems but it is too early to tell – lets see what actually gets in the hands of users.

MD – so the iPhone is like .1 % of the market, and Android hasn’t achieved distribution yet. Scale matters. You need to be able to get to lots of people to have a real business model. Things have to become more open, and things which were differentiation become commodity, and new differentiators get built on top of them. We also have to be aware of the lower end of the scale – very inexpensive cell devices that are text only, in places like India.

AK – The iPhone was a wake up call, or a call to action. It was the first time the focus was on the user interface. It isn’t a great mobile data experience but it showed carriers that users really do care about the mobile interface. We need to come at this from the user perspective – it isn’t about product silos which is what content companies and carriers have done (ringtone storefront separate from SMS separate from IM seperate from email) but thinking about consumer friendly experiences. We’re also really happy to see Google entering this marketplace – we’re looking for scale that Yahoo! and Google can bring and aggregate. Their entry will be game changing, and will have to increase the voice consumers have collectively in the industry. Everyone is announcing that they are “open” but until that gets scale it doesn’t really matter – Android becmes just another platform to develop on.

—

Google buying spectrum?

BS – Google getting spectrum will be good for consumers.

MD – owning just part of the spectrum will not make the whole carrier base open. But what Google and Apple are doing (in different ways) is they are force factors – they are pushing and nudging the industries in certain directions. I think Android will ultimately have more impact than spectrum. But they also will have to be very careful about how they treat privacy and trust. They have high risk here of violating user expectations – openness and participation has to include trust and privacy.

AK – we also have to recall Google as the advertising powerhouse, allowing individual site developers even small scale to be able to monetize – they had a giant impact on the web in this way and that may have impact on mobile as well.

MD – search is key to watch in mobile. Yahoo One Search is actually winning in mobile space.

————

Audience questions:

Note from audience: openness is not all the same. Different license / distribution arrangements are different in key ways. Not everything called “open” is really open and as an app developer you run into that in actually trying to get apps on mobile devices right quick.

Q: There’s a lot about information delivery – but when does this get entertaining? Immersive, personal, and fun?

MD: We’ve seen some interesting experiences in augmented reality and the story world. Connecting the physical world and the gaming world – knowing where someone is and having that impact the game or the story.

AM – part of the challenge here is the network effects. There have to be enough users to create critical mass.

BS – Depends a lot on where you live. The Korea example – 70 minute commute is the average and people actually watch tv on their phone. We’re really a driving culture – so the entertainment is the “backseat babysitter.” We have a culture which encourages the short from – small pockets of attention between meetings, or waiting in line for a plane, etc.

Q: How do you see user generated metadata?

MD: That’s the beauty of mobile. The phone adds the metadata – so I don’t have to do it. That’s metadata. Mobile will be the breakthrough for media content.

Q: But what about corporate created media? When MTV or Turner create content, who owns the metadata?

AK: There is metadata we create – for a number of specific search providers. Then there is tagging, which users do. We want users to become cocreaters but we also have brand equity in what we’ve created.

Q: What will the impact of hyperconnectivity? (GPS, location aware, always on devices).

MD – we see this already with Flickr’s impact on photography. It’s not about beauty so much as “status-casting”

BS – but that awareness comes with privacy issues. The London camera surveillance network – that’s a tradeoff people made. But they won’t accept that on cellphones. It has to have the user control.

AM – as you get more media and better metadata, you also need new techniques for attention management – how do I decide what is relevant and what filters do the systems to provide to help.

MD- the FireEagle “hide me” button – big giant piece of the infrastructure which is absolutely critical.

AK – The cultural connection is important to. The clarity about what people expect to share and expect to keep private is shifting. People broadcast their locations, their tastes, etc – twitter, blogging, etc. What constitutes privacy changes.

MD: big shifting from “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog” to real people and real lives. People are living their real lives online.

Q: Where is voice in all this?

BS – there is a whole user behavior thing which has to change. People are willing to walk around with bluetooth headsets in their ears, but not willing to use voice command like “call fred.” People will sign up for text messages but not sign up for audio messages. There’s also the language issue – trying to do all the dialects in India is difficult.

MD – moore’s law is helping us here. This gets better as the handsets get smarter. We are going to get there, but it will take time.

—

Q: Granularity of privacy. All good for power users, early adopters, etc. But when it goes mainstream people won’t take the time to look under the hood. What role does media literacy play and who is responsible for it?

MD: We have a responsibility to make systems that people feel comfortable using. (Parallel – credit cards. We all use them, but they know an awful lot about us and they sell it. We exchange that for convenience). Designing social software architecturally that enable zones of intimacy and zones of privacy is crucial.

–

Q: What work is going on to understand how content is actually consumed in order to create better delivery (for example, curriculum from universities which could be distributed this way)

BS – this is one of the important advantages of off-deck content creation and distribution – because that lets people other than carriers get access to user behavior, including user media consumption behavior.

AM – this is certainly an active research area for lots of people – context and environment is important to how people consume.

All the content creators are looking at consumption patterns – but the context of the question seems to have gotten lost and turned into how content creators from *media* can get better consumption – not the educational / activist piece.

–

Q: Politics has been noticably absent from the discussion. What about the questions where privacy overlaps with the political realm?

Marc Davis: (Sous-veillance – surveillance from below). There are terrifying possibilities here for the CIA, NSC, etc. But there are also tremendous potentials – to allow collective action to be possible, to enable massive bottom up collectivism. Providing the power to individuals to act as a collective. The PC brought the computer power of corporations to your desktop. What we’d like mobile to do is bring the power of collective action to non-military, non-corporate entities.

Bob Schukai – you think it is bad here, try it in Europe. They have gotten better, from the point of view of controlling roaming costs inside the EU and such – but there are going to be big companies who control access. The UK has a “lite touch” regulatory approach. We need more proactive policy not reactive regulation. That said, there are times where mandates are critical – part of our problem now is the laissez-faire approach the FCC took to wireless in the first place.

—

Q: What about China, the Internet, Telecoms, and Privacy?

BS – some challenges in China – they have created their own standard, which is a problem, and it is difficult to interact as a western company in China.

MD – it is difficult to work with the Chinese Government. If you want to operate in that country, you face restrictions on how you can operate. Yahoo!s actions there were not specific to Yahoo!. What the Chinese government does to operators is untenable (speaking as an individual not for Yahoo!) – but not operating there simply isn’t a real option. Engaging is better than not engagine despite the challenges.

BS – you have to also understand just how quickly, radically, and fundamentally things are changing in China. That doesn’t mean what they are doing is right all the time, but it is understandable the tensions they face as they try to evolve from life under Mao to live under hypercapitalism – there are tremors as that happens as they try to prevent the nation from falling apart.

—

JG – what’s the next thing to watch for?

AK – Entrance of Google, Yahoo, etc onto the mobile device in addition to / instead of the “on-deck” play. How media companies will get back to direct-to-consumer approach.

MD – The ability of developers to get access to the mobile platform in a significant way will be the big change, in addition to location awareness. Solving the distribution problem. The kind of distributed innovation Von Hippel talks about can start to happen in the mobile space.

AM – The other thing I’m really interested in is this concept of mining people’s behavior for their own uses – how apps come to understand users behavior and know how to improve applications as a result.

BS – IMS – internet protocol multimedia subsystem – this is a bit further out in time but not so far. As more and more devices have IP addresses, what does that mean? Connecting from any IP device to any other IP device and what impact that has is the big thing.

http://convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/2007/program/index.html

Opening Comments: Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green

Henry Jenkins
Joshua Green

Longer panels in order to encourage substiantial conversation.

http://jellyfish.media.mit.edu/backchannl/

Starts with TV of Tomorrow – Tex Avery 1953.

Did You Know that 4 out of 5 people now own television sets.

Early attempt to imagine the future of entertainment – already seeing there some of the conflicts we’ll talk about today.

Currently imagined futures – interactivity through VR.

Yet a different kind of interactivity is happening – the Simpsonize Yourself campaign as an example. But really there were few core models – so we call it personalization but it isn’t very personalized.

They also pushed the TV world into the real world – turning 7-11s into Kwickie Marts.

Also CSI episode on Second Life – where people are encouraged to continue the experience there.

Wii remote as a significant new interface. It isn’t just high end graphics which can change the interaction model.

MSNBC Newsbreaker – interactive game?

Of course gaming hasn’t gone away in traditional sense – Halo 3 example. Complex diarama which is touring the country as a kind of musuem piece. A faux veteran reflecting on this war which never happened – saving private ryan version in game space.

Heroes as an example of blurring the line between mainstream and fan media, embedding transmedia content – use of Ninth Wonder comic book in the show lead people to the site where lots of comics were. The interaction between what’s on the air and what isn’t is richer in this show than many others.

The Buffy comics as another season of the show (post-cancellation). Supernatural, Battlestar Gallactica – all overlaps between comics and TV.

Transmedia branding – the Geico Caveman. Ad to web series to Sitcom.

The Minority report clip – personalized content in the extreme. Ends with that surveillance camera.

Personalization as a mixed blessing – tailoring, micromeasurement. Facebook and targetted ad campaigns based on profiles.

Hokie Nation memorial around Virginia Tech memorial.

Graphic of apps – IBM Many Eyes chart – Top Friends, Frun Wall, Superwall, SuperPoke, Video, iLike.

NBC’s break with iTunes and move to amazonunbox. They get perhaps more control over their content. Also Hulu. Hulu will also point to content produced NOT by NBC and Fox.

Writers Strike video – promotional purposes only. Streaming video. DVD rate for digital downloads. Being distributed on YouTube. (Don’t rely on network news to tell the story of why writers are striking against the networks).

But youTube reflects the tension of the times.

Jenkins – what will be the effect of going into the primary season with both Colbert and Stewart are silent?

MIT Romney won’t debate a snowman – but candidates use all kinds of cartoons to discuss election issues – we aren’t allowed to use it to speak back?

Four Eyed Monsters – these new distribution mechanisms do allow independents new ways to get movies out – using online communities to schedule screenings in meat space of the film.

Soulja Boy.

Luminosity – the Vogue/300 parody. Taking content from television and mixing it up – vidding – started out as something done with 2 VCRs and a patch corde. Luminosity’s remix of the filme 300.

luminosity.imeem.com – 20 funniest videos of 2007 – mostly female artists, 20 year history of a do it yourself community which will be shown at USC. Luminosity can’t name herself because she appropriates, yet she is one of their biggest fans and drives interest in them.

FanLib as the example of the tension – this is the year where the implicit contractions in the social contract have emerged.

Harry Potter – a contradiction in the sense that it is one the most MASS culture phenomenons you can imagine. And yet most of the analysis is that mass media success will give way to long tail, niche markets. Is this the last gasp of mass media power?

What about Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore? Is she enforcing some kind of reading on to the fan fiction which will be written after the fact? She is announcing a reading many fans in fact had – but what happens when that becomes the authorized reading?

HP Alliance – Harry Potter as teaching kids how to be activists – get young people involved in the process of political change, inspired by the interest Rowling has created.

Rodenberry demod star trek at a convention even before it aired on tv – so the fandom started even before the show.

Josh Green – the re-emergence of craft as a media phenomenon and a mechanism of participatory culture.

Android and the open handset alliance.

The folks at Skype arguing for access to the handsets using the same ruling which enables users to attach things to phone lines.

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.

Today he’s one of the keynotes at the Forrester Consumer Forum

Notes:
——

I’m here as the token EggHead of the event. I always go where no humanist has gone before.

If you want to understand the web now, you need to hire humanities grads – the questions about the web used to be technical questions, but now they are social and cultural questions – the kinds of things studied by liberal arts grads.

Describe Web 2.0 in 2 sentences or less:
“You make all the content. They keep all the revenue.”

Convergence culture is a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms.

Along with convergence culture is participary culture – he actually used this slide:

Which is user generated content which originally came from this presentation.

The question now is really what can I do with your product.

We hear about people worried about losing control – the reality is you lost it long ago. Consumers can take your content and remix it and share it and publish it almost as publically as you can. You can sue, and shut a few people down, but the genie is out of the bottle.

The ability for “us” to control and remake content and republish it at an equivalent quality and fidelity as large media brands is fundamentally and radically different than previous eras of media.

But large media and brands have a place as well -all the parodies of the mac ads circulate in part because everyone knows the original.

There’s also great innovation going on here in terms of fan practices and how they are cocreating value.

There are all kinds of low cost experiments which remix the raw materials our culture provides and you can support and cultivate these in dialog – not shut them down.

Four Eyed Mosters and collaborative curating – creating a market for your product before it is even released.

Wizard Rock – over 200 wizard rock groups using myspace to create music with reference to Harry Potter – a whole genre of widely listened-to music that did not exist before it came bottom up, not top down.

Any platform that can be used to trade cat pictures can bring down a government – Ethan Zuckerman.

The fundamental questions are all about what this new participatory and convergent culture will be like.

The story of Fanlib – a company which wanted to create a commercial portal to distribute fan fiction – and some of the fans are revolting – they don’t want a commercial entity to run this.

Fanlib committed several obvious mistakes – 80% of the fan fiction writers are women, but the ad campaign was all men. The company told fans it wanted to empower them, but to corporate rights holders they were telling a different story – complete control, staying within the lines.

The community didn’t like the idea of things being regulated, commercialized, and brought into the lines.

Example of Stephen Colbert – but his studio sends a cease and desist to YouTube – different parts of the same company have different ideas of what this means. That is the current state of convergence culture.

One quick plug at the end for the Futures of Entertainment 2 conference.

Q: Is copyright dead?

A: No, but it is evolving. In the future, companies will have every right to protect their content but every incentive to let it go. It isn’t that they don’t have legal right but they should not use it.

Q: Is participatory culture even across the world?

A. Not even, but global. When the media folks went after Harry Potter fan fiction in Poland and Thailand, the kids in the US knew about it immediately. In some ways this group is more connected and interactive than anyone else. But there are other countries which are clearly left out. This is a global phenomenon, but not one in which everyone in the world participates equally.

Q: To what extent should brands try to control / engage in negative discussions about their brand?

A: You can’t shut it down. Your best response is to do something about what you’ve done that people are criticizing you for. If it is a misperception get out there and correct it – if it is an accurate criticism change the behavior.