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

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

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

– Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

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

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

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

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

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

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

By embracing the assembled web and participating fully in it.

Assembled Web First Principles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.

The first is Who Pays for Content?: Re-evaluating Paywalls. As described in the proposal:

Everyone knows Stewart Brand’s statement that “information wants to be free,”. Less well known is the other half: “information also wants to be expensive.” If no one pays for content, and no one clicks on ads, how will we fund online initiatives, applications, and sites? What could drive users to pay for content? What has, historically, and how can we learn from that?

I think this is a very timely discussion that hits at the core issues for SXSW attendees – what funds the work so many of us do on the web? What models other than advertising and pay-for-content will work in the assembled web?

The other is What’s in it for me? Open Source and Interaction Design. This builds on the video podcast I did as part of last year’s extended content program. As an open source developer and advocate who has also long been a promoter of the value of interaction design, I want to broaden awareness within the interaction design community about why licensing matters. From the proposal:

Open source advocacy has generally focused on the perspective of developers, for whom access to source code is a real need and the opportunity to change or extend functionality is a practical possibility. But what about the interaction design community? In this talk I explore why interaction designers should care about free and open source software.

You’ll have to register to vote, of course. You can also leave comments here or in the panel picker itself.

See you in Austin in March!

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.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

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

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

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

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

Digital VIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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