Chris Locke reflects on Cluetrain then and now. Except “reflects” is way too sober a word. Funny and heartfelt.

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I went first. I talked about exceptionalism, responding to Eli Noam’s challenge at the beginning of the conference that if we’re going to think the Net is going to bring about substantial changes, we have to be able to point to characteristics of it that are different from other technologies that also looked revolutionary but that turned out to be rather prosaic.

Len Downie was executive editor of Washington Post. He’s not going to propose any new form of delivery of the news. He’s not sure the old will die out completely. WaPo is reorganizing itself as a news operation and as a company. They have Facebook and iPhone apps, etc. When it comes to UGC, “this is not a zero sum game.” On WashingtonPost.com you find lots of user comments, participation in blogs, user photos and videos, crowd-sourcing. E.g., Amanda Michel’s “Off the Bus” crowd sourcing, which went through professional editors. (Amanda is now at ProPublica.) They hope the Net will help end the traditional alienation from their readers. And the Net has made their audience bigger than ever before.

The big problem is the loss of classified advertising. Hundreds of millions of dollars lost, hitting local newspapers especially hard. Also, display ads have been driven down. Local news stations are covering fewer stories. There’s less reporting. That’s the problem Len is going to examine in his new academic role at Arizon State.

There are some things the government could do, but not a “bail out,” Len says. Maybe newspapers will become 501C3’s. Maybe they’ll become LC3’s, so they could still be profitable and yet receive tax-exempt contributions. Maybe convert them into endowments, although Len says there isn’t enough money for that: You’d need a ginormous endowment to generate the requisite funds. There are more and more non-profit investigative reporting organizations. There’s a lot going on. It’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen.

Q: How much does investigative reporting cost?
A: At ProPublica, they do it in the best way, and it’s tens of thousands of dollars, mainly for the reporter’s time.

Q: In Germany they’re aggregating news and selling access [I got this wrong] …
A: I’d have to look at it.
Q: Isn’t that what AP does?
A: Don’t get me started. AP is supposed to be a collaborative. If we don’t all charge at the same time, we won’t be able to raise enough money. Alan Mutters [sp] suggests that we all decide on July 4 to start charging. The Obama admin is concerned about the future of news. They’re going to look at loosening anti-trust regs so newspapers can band together, but you don’t want to create another cartel like AP.

Q: If the NYT shut down its presses and went totally online, how would that affect their costs and prices?
A: The Times might save 40-50% of their costs, but it would take away 90% of their revenue. Kindle is great for books but not very good for newspapers. Looking forward to the big multimedia tablets.

Q: The NYT is doing well on the Web. But last year their Web revenue increased just 1%. What’s the future business model?
A: That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Greg Lastowka (law prof, Rutgers) is going to talk about legal aspects of UGC. First question: What is UGC? It’s a fuzzy concept. “User” is an important term because of copyright. Copyright is not about monetizing the works of authors. Copyright is there to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Our Constitutional mention is based on the earlier British Statute of Ann that took control away from publishers and gave it to authors, in order to promote education.

Greg predicts that copyright won’t change very much in the next ten years. Copyright law will probably ignore UGC and be large unaffected by it. UGC will be treated as a problem, it will change the rules somewhat (through litigation), but the fundamental shape of copyright law won’t change in response to UGC (says Greg). Ten years ago, he was more optimistic about it. He thought UGC was a huge social boon that was a very bad fit for copyright law, so copyright law would change to reflect that value. The Web was meeting the goals copyright law was established to meet.

Four changes to get copyright law to fit the Web: 1. Simplify the law. 2. People want credit for their work even when they’re happy to have it spread. People get copyright law mixed up with plagiarism. We should work the attribution right into it. 3. Reform terms of service and their enforcement. 4. Subsidize free access content. Copyright is a subsidy for authors.

Greg was arguing this ten years ago. Not much has changed, although there’s progress in open access to academic work. Why haven’t there been more changes? Maybe because our legislators don’t understand what’s happening. The better, sadder, answer is that Greg’s politics were naive. Copyright law today is realistically about protecting big money incumbents. Dan likes copyright and blockbuster movies, but thinks there should be an ecology that enables them and UGC. We’re unlikely to strike a new social contract that reflects the rights of amateur creators.

Q: To what extent is international trade motivating maintaining strict copyright?
A: Legislators certainly care about it.

Stefaan Verhuist (Markle Foundation) presents his model of UGC: Mediation 3.0. It has three new mediating functions that converge to create a new type of mediation. Those functions can be accelerated and made more valuable by making sure they are cheap, deep, and speed. The success depends on four challenges: the 4 Ps.

Setfaan draws a triangle: 1. Establish relations. 2. Provide a new kind of resource that has value for users and that may be created by the users. 3. Remix. Ensure a relation that creates a resource that may be remixed. Their convergence creates UGC. If you can provide resources that are cheap, deep (the value for its users, related perhaps to a geographical location), and speediness. But it can be hard to be cheap, deep and speedy; that’s the challenge.

The 4 Ps: Privacy (relationship), Property (remix), Public sphere obligations and responsibilities (resource), Push and pull (in the center of the triangle) of information. The push-pull presents the policy challenges.

[Posted without re-reading. Gotta run.]

[Tags: journalism media newspapers copyright copyleft creative_commons marketing ]

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Andres Hervas-Drane
Begins by noting the long tail in the market share of products. There’s empirical evidence that this is happening online. Why there? Standard answer: Supply side. But he wants to look at factors on the demand side that can affect this distribution.

He sets up a case where consumers have difference preferences and come to the market uninformed. In the offline world, search happens through word of mouth. They can search with evaluations or with recommendations. Recommendations come from consumers who searched with evaluations. Word of mouth results in a high concentration of sales.

Almost a third of Amazon’s sales are generated by recommendations. These are generated by users as meta-content, finding consumers who have similar preferences. This is taste-matching and it reduces sales concentration.

Then there are “artistic markets”: that increase the demand for niche producers and results in long term cultural variety.

Peyman Faratin talks about a case study of prediction markets. His main point: Scarcity is at play even in the UGC system. The new scarcity is of attention.

An incentive engineering problem is at foot in prediction markets. When you can’t bet real money, the incentives go down. The reward streams are delayed. You have to search for the market. There are significant transaction costs [which he goes over in some detail, but too hard to capture briefly…sorry]. That’s why prediction markets aren’t going very well; they’re lonely.

Solution: Reward the big hitters. Let them transfer their reputations. Give them content management rights. Rank markets and reputations. “Invisible hand of the algorithm: Recommendations.” Use widgets to let the market come to the user. [I missed the end of this. Sorry!]

Chris Derllarocas talksabout “Your Operations hvae become your New Marketing.” “Every customer is a potential brand ambassador or a lethal bran assassin.” E.g., in 2006, Comcast spent $100 M in advertising, wiped out by the youtube of a sleeping technician. UGC can make or break your business.

Most influential UGC occurs spontaneously and represents non-representative experiences. Companies need to take preventive measures. Consumers use UGC to decide if they should consume a product. Once they have, they decide what to report. Companies need to “Strategically re-engineer the consumption experience to spontaneously provoke the right mix of consumer content.”

Rules: Pay attention to extreme events. Move towards a culture that pays attention to outliers, positive and negative. “Redesign your monitoring practices and career incentives to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.” Also, “reasses yesterday’s yield management practices.” That is, make sure you do not systematically produce a small number of unhappy customers” (e.g., but routinely overbooking, or by routinely selling undesirable hotel rooms at very low rates). Also, get to know your power customers, i.e., the ones more likely to be vocal. They should receive “the special teratment that loyal big spenders used to receive ten years ago.” Also, not sock puppetry. Also, maybe have a Chief Perception Officer.

Q: You’re proposing an operational hit since we won’t be selling all the seats or rooms.
A: Yes. That’s the decision to be made. We need to make these decisions holistically. We don’t have the complete answer, There’s room for innovation.

Q: [me] This morning we heard that the population is not nearly as adept at using these tools as some of us (= me) would like to believe. This afternoon we hear about markets that are adept. How did you hear this morning’s research?
A: It varies by market. And consumers aren’t necessarily savvy. The UGC has effect even when they’re not savvy. You need to tier your efforts, taking account of the consumers’ Web savviness.

Q: How’s it work in other countries?
A: We haven’t done that research. Happy collaborate…

Q: How does this apply to B2B?
A: More limited.

Anindya Ghose will talk about combining textmining with econometrics. Firms want to know if there’s any economic value to social networks and UGC. How can they monetize UGC?

There’s economic value embedded in the content. E.g., product reviews, geo locations, online purchase behavior. His software mines the text and assesses the economic value of, say, a positive review and even more particular comments. E.g., “good packaging” lowers the value by $0.56 because customers expect superlatives. Particular keywords have particular monetary effects.

Hypothesis: The increasing availability of UGC is reflected in sponsored search metrics. And, yes, he found a correlation between the frequency with which key words are used in blogs and their cost-per-click on search sites. He’s researching whether there’s some sort of causal effect, but it’s not an easy problem. Hence, UGC can be monetized through sponsored search.

[Posted without re-reading. I have to prepare for my unprepared comments. I’m on a panel that’s supposed to be reflecting on the day.] [Tags: ugc ugc3 marketing cluetrain advertising textmining advertising prediction_markets everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Scott McDonald of Conde Nast gives the lunchtime talk. He reminds us of how big CN is: magazines, websites, events, digital apps.

His numbers show that lots of people are creating content.

UGC issues for “traditional” [the quotes are on Scott’s slide] media: Brand compatitiblity (vs. “snark/coarsening”. Commoditization of content (all gets treated the same). Value as “listening post” (media can hear their readers). DRM when everyone is an aggregator. Monetization.

Advertisers are reluctant to jump in, Scott says. They worry about brand. UGC video is cheap and plentifu. but it’s not selling. The CPMs are deeply discounted. Ad revenues are not going to UGC and marketing execs are pessimistic about this; only 22% think UGC is a “high-growth opportunity.” 73% of advertisers say they definitely will not run ads on UGC.

So, what are the other models? You can incorporate UGC on a site as a “retention device.” [CNN’s turn-the-channel “iReports”?] Authentication fees on microblogging sites? E.g., Twitter charges DominosPizza to assure that it in fact represents Dominos Pizza. How about sponsorships on crowdsourcing sites such as Digg? E.g., at Reddit, maybe a sponsor could be an “amplifier” that announces that each thumbs up counts 5x. [Wha??? Wouldn’t that destroy Reddit’s credibility?] Finally, there’s cross-platform marketing. Only 10% of visitors to a mag’s site are subscribers. So, cannibalization isn’t a worry. But how do you make money on the web site? Ads only work for very big sites. But,” online subscriptions sales are sweet.” People who subscribe that way have higher value than subscribers through other means: They’ve sought out the mag, they pay with a credit card, they are more likely to take an automatic renewal contract, they get added to the email list, etc.

He points to Conde Nast examples of UGC. Contests for designs, NYer caption contest, GQ tips on good grooming. [These are as much UGC as a man-in-the-street interview.]

He points to Reddit, a CN site. He acknowledges the bad language on the page. It produces no subscription revenues. They’re starting to have sponsored posts that still can be voted up or down.

Q: Are people dropping subscriptions because they can get the content for free online?
Scott: In general, no. The conditions for reading mags are special, e.g., reading one on the subway to create zone of privacy. [A good e-reader will destroy this.] For news mags, that’s more of an issue.

[Tags: ugc ugc3 conde_nast media mainstream_media advertising marketing ]

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John Horrigan of Pew Internet and American Life, gives a “non-Koolaid” presentation. He says that about 12% of Internet users have a blog. The percentage of people doing some form of content sharing is not increasing much at all. The demographics says that 18-24 do the most sharing, and then it goes down in pretty much a straight line. The change over time is not distributed evenly across age groups. Younger adults are turning away from the 6 core UGC behaviors, the 24-35s are increasing. The rest: not much change.

But people are increasingly going to social networkingIf UGC is migrating to rules-based environments, is it a good bargain? On the one hand, good governance can build sustainable mechanisms. OTOH, bad governance is a risk, so you want an open Internet.

Q: A decrease in activity among younger folk? Because they were so heavily involved initially?
John: They’re going to social networking sites instead of maintaining their own sites. But UGC is still an important activity to them.

Q: The changing behaviors as people age and how that will effect UGC?
John: Impossible to answer because we don’t know how the tech will change.

Mainak Mazumdar of The Nieslen Company begins by looking at blogging topics. It’s quite diverse he says. Next: size. Wikipedia has many more topics than Britannica. Also, social networking is very big: Member communities are #4 on most visited lists, after search, portals, and software manufacturers. #5 is email. Social media is big everywhere. (Biggest: 80% of Brazil. 67% in US.) The US is showing comparatively slower growth in “active reach of member communities.” Time spent in CGM has been increasing. So is the time spent on social networking. 35-49 years are the fastest growing audience for social networking sites. Teen consumption of SNS is going down, because they’re going more and more mobile. Mobile will be huge. TV will be big. People are watching more TV. Big media companies are doing well. “Becoming a mother is a dramatic inflectin point and drives women to the Web in search of advice and a desire to connect with others in her shoes” (from the slide).

Is the Net a game-changer for research companies? He compares it to scanner data in the 90s and online surveys in 1990s. In 2000s, perhaps [perhaps??] social networking will once again change the game. Reasons to think the Net is a game-changer overall [i.e., exceptionalism] : Pervasive, sticky, generational.

Q: Is TV watching growing on all screens or just on the living room screen?
Mainak: Time spent watching TV content on a TV.

Q: Maybe SNS have surpassed email because email was used to listserves to serve the social function.
Mainak: We’re talking about how long you spend in Outlook + Web mail. We install monitors that report on how long you spend in each application.

Russ Neuman: Be careful of projecting out from the current tech. It can be disrupted easily.

Q: Older people are entering SNSs. I call them “parents.” To what extent will that change what started out as a youth movement? Is the move to mobile a move out of the SNS as they become mom and dad’s spots? [Oprah is on twitter.]
A: Yes. Some younger teens are going straight to mobile and circumventing the Internet.

Eszter Hargittai talks about the role of skill in Internet use. Yes, young people use digital media and spend a lot of time online, but it’s true that they engage in lots of online activities or that they’re particularly savvy about the Net and Web tools. So, the idea of “digital natives” is often misguided.

She’s particularly interested in the skills people have and need. Her methodology: Paper and pencil surveys to avoid biasing towards those comfortable with using Web tools. 1,060 first year students at U of Illinois. Most of the data comes from 2007, although she has some pre-pub data from 2009. The question is: What explains variation in skill? Gender, education and income predict skill. “The Web offers lots of opportunities but those who can take advantage of them are those who are already privileged.”

This has an effect on how we intervene to equalize matters. You can’t change socio-economic status. And it turns out that motivation doesn’t seem to make much of an effect. You can only be motivated to do something that you already know is a possibility. She shows new data, not ready for blogging, that show that very small percentages of users have actually created content, voted on reviews, edited Wikipedia pages, etc. The number of teenagers who have heard of Twitter is quite low. [Sorry for the lack of numbers. I’m not sure I’m supposed to be reporting even these trends.]

Mainstream media remain strong. Eszter points to the media story about Facebook users having lower grades. Eszter looked at the study and finds it to be of poor quality. Yet it got huge mainstream play. Eszter tweeted about it. She blogged about it. The tweet led to a co-authored paper. Even so, the mainstream probably won’t care, and most of the tweets are still simply retweeting the bad data. The Net is a huge opportunity, but it’s not evenly distributed.

Q: A study found that people online are lonely. It was picked up by the media. The researcher revised to say that it’s the other way around. It wasn’t picked up. The media pick up on the dystopic.

Q: Your data reflects my experience with my students. They don’t blog, they don’t tweet. There’s a class component to this.
Eszter: We measure socio-economic status. Why does it correlate? We’re exploring this. We now ask about parental support of technology use, rules at home about tech use, etc. So far we’re finding (tentatively!) that lower-educated parents tend to have more rules for their kids.

Q: What happens when there’s universal wireline connection?
Eszter: As the tech changes, the skill sets change. The privileged stay ahead, according to my 8 years of studies.

Q: What skills should we be teaching?
A: Complicated. Crucial issue: The evaluation of the credibility of sources. There’s an extreme amount of trust in search engines. That’s one place we need to do more work. And librarians are highly relevant here.

Q: How do people use the Net to learn informally, e.g., WebMD?
Eszter: There are lots of ways and types to do this. But, first you need to know what’s on the Web. You need good search skills, good credibility-evaluation skills.

Cliff Lampe talks about how Mich State U students use Facebook. He presents a study just completed yesterday, so the data isn’t yet perfect. 97% of his sample are FB users (although Cliff expresses some discomfort with this number). Mean average of 441 friends; median = 381. Ninety percent of these they consider to be “actual” friends. 73% only accept friend requests from people they know in real life. Most spend just a little time (under 30mins) at FB per day. About half lets their friends (but not everyone in their network) to see everything in their profile. Almost everyone puts a photo of themselves up. Vast majority have a photo album. About a third think their parents are looking at their page. Overall they think they’re posting for their college and high school friends.

He talks about Everything2.com, a user-generated encyclopedia/compendium that is 11 years old. Why have people exited? Research shows they left because other sites came along that do the same thing better. Also, changes in life circumstances. Also, conflict with administration of the site. There’s a corporitization of some of the UGC sites. He also has looked into why new users don’t stick: They don’t glom onto the norms of the site.

Q: Are reasons for exiting a negative network effect? More than 150 and the network deteriorates?
Cliff: We see that in Usenet. But not so much at Facebook where you’re just dealing with your friends.

Q: Any sites that have tried to drive away new users?
Cliff: Metafilter has a bit of that. Slashdot has a “earn your bullshit” tagline.

Q: Are your students alone or with others when they are online? Are they aware of the technology?
Cliff: The rise of the netbook has had an effect. Most of my students experience social media as a group activity. But a lot of them are not that savvy. They generally don’t know how Wikipedia operates. [Tags: sns social_networking facebook exceptionalism tv wikipedia environment ]

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Dan Hunter of NY Law School begins with an informal talk called “UGC: From Threat He disagrees with Eli Noam that the end game will be commercialization. [Ah, the exceptionalist battle is joined!] He thinks about UGC as amateur media, focusing on the motivation of the users. His question: Is there a role for commercial providers, outside of providing the infrastructure? The content will increasingly be provided by people whose motivations are non-commercial. (He shows Wolf Loves Pork at YouTube.com. Very cool.)

It’s important to not think this is about traditional media forms, he says. It includes virtual worlds, collaborative games. People are living out their lives in these environments. UGC is not something separate from our lives. It is our environment.

Amateur work is crowding out the commercial, he says. E.g., YouTube, music, user reviews at Amazon etc. Most of the money is in the infrastructure, not the content: Blizzard providing World of Warcraft, Google, etc.

Q: Google lost $500M this year on YouTube.
Dan: If you’re suggesting there’s no money in infrastructure…We can’t yet know if that’s a blip, a market indicator, etc.

Q: Two examples that support your case: 1. Orpheus Orchestra has no conductor. 2. YouTube orchestra is collaborative.
Dan: Sites like Wikipedia can be quite bureaucratic. There’s a range of examples, some totally spontaneous.

Q: Wolf Eats Pig actually ends the other way around, which is a bad moral and is very worrisome for Japanese society.

Next, David Card of Forrester Research presents research. [I’m not going to try to capture the numbers.]

Social networking is becoming ubiquitous, but the “creative stuff” is still a minority behavior and is not growing at the same pace as social networking, watching videos, or writing reviews. Budgets for social marketing are still pretty low because the value of it is unproven. [His data actually show that few people can prove profitability from social marketing but a majority think it is valuable]

Social network business models: It will be like air (cf. Charline Li). Or it’s a walled garden. Or it’s a media model. The portal model faces threates from Google and social networking sites. AT SNS’s people view photos and videos, keep up with friends, etc. They’re not consuming much professional content there. Marketers should “tap entertainment media, then build out social marketing promise.” Facebook’s “Beacon” idea was powerful but ineptly handled. [Beacon: When buy something, it asks if you want to share that news with your FB friends.] Money is more likely to come from the audience than from authors; the real social marketing potential is untapped.

Q: Opportunity: Harvesting social networking data for customer relationship management. [Doc Searls: This one’s for you! :)]
David: Lots of people do this. P&G. Fox. They bring in the audience to get feedback. “If you get them into real product development, that’s a nirvana.” Although you have to be careful that you’re not handing design to a niche market of your most enthusiastic customers.
Q: Keeping track of the metadata about the types of info makes this huge market of info usable.
David: Do you mean Amazon ought to make its customer available to others?
Q: No.

Q: The virtual is piercing the physical, ending up in offline retail.
A: Interesting.

Q: What guidance for employees active in these spaces, so they feel free to express their ideas but also potentially censorship?
David: Forrester analysts have personal blogs as well as company blogs. Neither are reviewed. We have policies that say you should think about what you’re saying. But if it’s too heavy handed so that employees look like shills, they won’t get a very big audience. You have to play by the rules of the medium — uncensored, rapid response (e.g., WholeFoods responds instantly, even if it’s an intern in a closet sometwhere) — authenticity, etc. It’s a delicate line.

Robert Cohen talks about business adoption of virtual worlds. He points to the broad use of interactive sites by children 7-12, suggesting that we’re seeing a deep change. There are over 100M subscribers to the Barbi site and 100s of millions of Habbo users. This may portend a generational change.

He points to three waves: Content-centric, Surface [he’s using a Microsoft chart], and immersive. He’s interviewed 50 vendors about how virtual worlds will be used. It has the potential to affect the way business operates (he says). First, it enhances training and teamwork. Then, more interactive corporations. Over the next tend years we’ll see collaborative corporations (among suppliers and product developers) and “modern guild system firms” (“highly technologically competent firms that come together to collaborate on projects”). He points to oil companies using virtual worlds to model environments for training, exploration.

Q: The press is reporting that SecondLife has stumbled in growth and development. And how can we get from Barbi style product focus to a platform approach?
Bob: There’s controversy about this. BTW, Mitch Kapor is working on putting your photo on your avatar and making the movement more realistic. SecondLife also has bought a company that does business operations. But IBM has shown a way to connect virtual worlds through a firewall. But SecondLife is trying. There’s a lot going on i n Europe.

[Posting without rereading so I can go to the break. Sorry.] [Tags: ugc ugc3.0 user_generated_content exceptionalism virtual_worlds second_life social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Doc Searls is giving a Berkman lunch called “The Intention Economy.” [Note: I’m live-blogging, missing points, paraphrasing badly, making spellping errors, etc.

He begins by talking about some problems. E.g., “the people vs. Comcast.” Customers are unhappy. “Comcast can’t fix itself alone.” Or, customer loyalty cards that are the Green Stamps of our time. “They leverage something that’s broken about e-commerce.” E.g., the Harvard Co-op gives a 10% “discount” if you join. But they make you enter a ton of personal data, the same data you enter at every other e-comm site. Or public radio: Everyone in the room listens, but only about half give. Doc would like to be able to give to support particular programs.

The problem in all these cases is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is not about relating. “The problem is that most big businesses think that the best customer is a captive one.” “That’s why the free market is still your choice of captor.” But “we’re now about three minutes into the Big Bang” when it comes to the Net. The challenge is to “prove that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one.”

So, Doc has started Project VRM (vendor relationship management) to provide ways for customers to drive relationships with vendors. “With VRM, the individual is the point of integration for his or her own data” and is also the “point of origination of what’s done with” that data. There have been VRM meetups across Europe and North America.

VRM is an open source project (although there are some commercial projects underway also). Doc talks briefly [too quickly for me to keep up] about some of the people involved. Likewise for projects: Personal health info. “Personal RFPs” where a customer sends a query to vendors for bids on things the customer wants to buy. The user wouldn’t give away any unnecessary info. Also: Making terms of service readable and user-focused.

Doc spends a little more time on creating a new business model for free media that isn’t advertising. Free media first means non-commercial media, but ultimately for blogs, etc. The model is temporarily named “PayChoice,” and is based on letting individuals pay how much they want when they want for what they want. The Public Radio tuner is one result. 1.3M have downloaded it into their iPhones already. It turns your iPhone into a radio tuned into public radio. It enables listeners to hold up their end of relationship. The “R” button lets a user pay for what she wants. But it’s not just for paying. It could also represent an intention to buy, and intention to sell, etc.

So, what happens when customers get real power?

– “Customers get their own pricing guns” [i.e., the “guns” that print out price labels].

– “The intention economy” will get real because it’s based on what customers really want, as opposed to the attention economy that’s based on guesses.

– “The advertising bubble will burst.” There will still be ads, but they won’t be the “communications method of first resort.”

– “Cluetrain will finally be right.”

Q: What about eBay?
A: There are lots of sites that do this, but why should we only have sites? Your eBay reputation is only inside eBay. Why should it be stuck there? We want service portability.

Q: What will be the method conveying your desires to companies? A third party service? A non-profit?
A: On the public radio tuner, the “listen log” keeps track of what you’ve listened to. Ideally that would sit on our own computers in encrypted form. Some of that we’re solving with Ian Henderson’s personal data store, some with Lukas’ The Mine. But let’s say we have that solved. Right now, we use “third parties,” which generally live on the vendor’s side. We see a fourth party business, driven by users. E.g., with music, it’d be good to be able to set a price on the music you stream. Some fourth party business will pull that money together. We’re working on a chapter-based association for user-driven services.

Q: So you create sort of a DNS service…?
A: One model is RSS. It’d be good to be able to advertise your needs, possibly through RSS. Maybe it’s tag-based, maybe it’s anonymous.

Q: What do you envision for traditional companies dealing with this?
A: Let’s we have our own loyalty card. As customers inject more intelligence into the marketplace about what they’re willing to say about themselves, we’ll see things like fact-checking of vendors’ claims against us; it’d be cool if the customer could as a data backup. I don’t see a downside for traditional customers. More intelligence and more good will in the market will benefit everyone. It’s a fallacy to think that people only shop on price. Starbucks proves the contrary

Q: [me] Situate this in micropayments and tipjars, and identity management.
A: We’re doing micro-accounting, not micropayments. Small payments are accumulated. Micropayments haven’t worked for anyone except the phone company, and they abused it. WRT identity: I’ve been interested in that for a long time. Along the way, Andre Durand (of Jabber) once said that we have to get identity worked out. Identities are given to us by other corporations: what the DMV, the library, Visa (etc) tell us who we are. Andrew thought this was backwards. We have to reverse it. I now think that that’s important, but it’s separate from VRM. There are times when identity isn’t used at all. My wife about 15 years ago asked why we can’t take our shopping cart from one site to another. And when I was working with the ID management folks, my wife said she wants less identity, not more. Adriana Lukas’ The Mine project is intended to work independent of any identity system. The whole identity movement is a separate thing that overlaps VRM somewhat. VRM isn’t part of the identity space.

What happens on the aggregate level? A lot of CRM is about companies aggregating anonymized data and using it for recommendations, etc.
A: Companies will continue to gather intelligence about us. Companies can improve that. Amazon’s recommendations are the best, but they’re still broken. Your kids use your computers and your recos go off track. Or you buy one book and Amazon thinks you’re interested in the category. Those recos are still guesswork. And they don’t know what only you know, and what’s outside their system.

Comcast is actively providing what I don’t want because they want to sell more on-demand. Do you see VRM breaking down those monopolies?
A: Cable TV is really broken. We have Verizon FIOS. The TV is fantastic. But they only provide 20MB for Internet. For us that’s backward. I tried canceling, and they came back with an offer that reflects their real costs. But we don’t watch TV, so we still said no. I offered to pay a la carte, but nope.

Q: What are the enabling technologies for VRM? If companies still haven’t figured out how to do this, what do you have to provide?
A: Money. If there’s money left on the table…We’re doing field of dreams here.

Q: Thinking about Linked Data/RDF for putting this data out in a much richer way? It’s the rich, decentralized model you’re looking for.
A: The short answer is no, but the longer answer is sure. We’re in touch with those folks. It’s a matter of who shows up.

Q: Is this more generational?
A: I don’t know. It’s whoever shows up. We need to make stuff that benefits everyone.

Q: What about characterizing the ecosystem you’re trying to build with certification levels of VRM? Companies could advertise that they’re at different levels of VRMitude.
A: We have a draft of this, on the wiki: ProjectVRM.org We also want a list of core principles.

Q: How do you balance the explicit data sharing in advertising intent (“I’m looking for a car”) with the fact that sites are selling that data to vendors?
A: The whole VRM idea came out of one use case: car rental. The variables are never what they’re offering. E.g., I want to be able to get a car that plays MP3 CDs. As more customers can advertise their needs, it will change those businesses, and probably discourage the profligate sharing of information.

Q: What about customized fabrication, i.e., making products in response to customer desires. What does this do to branding?
A: Some companies are going to succeed by giving people what they want. We’re all different and want different things. That’s what the Net will come down to eventually.

Q: Insurance companies and lendors have competitive vendors markets. Imagine that for car rentals…
A: That’s an example of a personal RFP. It’s an example of a substitutable service.

Q: Individuals will never be on an equal basis with, say, Verizon. What about collaboration?
A: I avoided that. We don’t want to start with the collective and move to the personal. We want to start with the personal. We need lots of individuals doing VRM for it to work. We want this to be a victory for Verizon as well.

Q: It’s going to be hard to get businesses out of the captive customer mindset. Is VRM a pipe dream? Will companies fail and VRM-ish ones arise?
A: All of the above. Some leopards won’t change their stripes. They’ll also have to wake up and smell the coffee.

Q: What about the cultural domain? NGOs?
A: Huge opportunities. Britt Blaser is working on Government Relationship Management. A lot of great opportunities came out of the Obama campaign. There’s a great outfit in the UK with a site called fixmystreet.org: post photos of potholes and the local gov’t patches them. Being able to express what you’re looking for will work with any type of organization. Take Relationship Management and stick another letter in front of it. We want the demand side and supply side to get along. [Tags: doc_searls vrm ecommerce business public_radio ]

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Jeff Howe of Wired is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on his book Crowd Sourcing. (He coined the term in 2006.) [Note: I’m live blogging, making mistakes, missing stuff, paraphrasing inappropriately, etc.]

From the beginning, he says, he’s been ambivalent about crowd sourcing. His book is a series of stories showing crowdsourcing’s promise and perils. The book is short on quantitative data, he says. As he was finishing up the edits, he came across a survey of 650 iStockPhoto.com photo contributors. iStock was one of Jeff’s main examples, a stock photo agency that undercut competitors by 99%. They were able to do this because amateur photographers were willing to upload entire libraries of their photos. iStock culled them. iStock runs its corporate decisions past the community. The survey showed that contributors had a rich mix of motivations. He’d like to revisit this question.

Jeff gives his 45 minute book talk in 20 mins: He got interested in crowdsourcing by watching Myspace. “User generated content” doesn’t begin to tap the change that’s taking place. (Plus, he adds, he hates the phrase.) He spent a night searching for user-generated anything to show that it was about more than teenagers making “content.” E.g., John Fluevog Open Source Shoeware names shoes after designs contributed by users. He wrote an article for Wired in June 2006. The term took off.

As an example, he tells the story of the Two Jakes who created a crowdsourced t-shirt company, threadless.com. It created a community of designers and people who like to vote on designs. Revenues in 2007 topped $30M. The community provides the designs, does the marketingt, and Threadless has a mechanism that lets them gauge how much they need quite accurately.

iStockPhoto was bought by Getty, and revenues have continued to climb…over $100M in 2008, with 50% profit margin.

Another example: The way amateur ornithologists have transformed the way ornithology works, Current.tv, the Elements restaurant in DC…

Why did crowdsourcing happen? Lots of amateurs, open source, tools, online communities. The cardinal rule of crowdsourcing: “Ask not what your community can do for you, etc.”

Jeff ends by asking about the study of iStock contributions’ motivations. 80% of iStockers religiously visit the site. The study shows the primacy of the financial motivation. Only 4% of the contributors make their primary living off of photography. The forum gets 37 posts per minute. 80% consider their work profitable, and 20% consider it extremely profitable. iStockers are largely not out to make friends or to network with others. iStockers are unsure that other iStockers can be trusted. This runs counter to how the company portrays them.

Q: I just had a logo made for $250 through LogoTournament. 30-40 designers worked on it from all over the world. The contestants all see one another’s designs.
A: Anectodotally, people seem to love it. There’s also CrowdSpring and 99Designs.

I used worth1000 for cover design. The Berkman folk loved it, but when I posted about it, I got flamed.
A: I understand that crowdsourcing is disruptive. It’s an emotional subject. Creatives can shape the transformation by embracing it.

Q: Your examples largely focused on highly creative forms of work. People do these things on their own as hobbies. How about crowdsourcing that has people transcribing podcasts via MechanicalTurk. Are these two types of crowdsourcing the same phenomenon?
A: MechanicalTurk is for repetitive, boring tasks. I don’t know how to encompass this. This makes the motivation for crowdsourcing more complex. That doesn’t dismay me.

Q: Is the difference about passion?
A: My catchphrase is that passion is the currency of the 21st century.

Q: [me] You position this as a contradiction. But it’s not if you define crowdsourcing as the action of a crowd, etc., and stir in economics: Those with leisure will do it for passion, while the rest will do more boring tasks for money. Unless what matters to you, and to the media that took it up, is that it’s a statement about human motivation.

Q:[eszter] You’re putting too much faith in the study. It’s only 1% of users and the methodology isn’t necessarily rock solid.
A: I called iStock’s founder and he has the same problems with the study.

Q: When I got the book, what was exciting was the possibility of solving altruistic problems. Do you have any examples?
A: GlobalVoices. Transcription services from a mobile phone for nonprofits.

Q: ReCaptcha is a great example. Also, spamornot.org.

Some of the crowdsourced stock photo sites are scams.

Q: Is crowdsourcing exploitative?
A: Sure could be. Professional stock photographers certainly think so. [Tags: berkman crowd_sourcing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I thought Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer last night was a righteous misfire. Stewart was on his high horse, but Cramer was on his little Shetland pony. The result: It was hard to watch.

Stewart was making an important, broad point: Mainstream financial journalism as embodied by CNBC fails the most basic tests of journalism overall. These folks knew better, but give us bread and circuses. Right on, Jon

But feisty, cocky Cramer came onto the show as a Stewart fan, and just kept agreeing and apologizing. I thought ultimately that was pretty disingenuous of Cramer, but it left Stewart looking like a bully. We wanted to see Stewart tear into William Randolph Hearst, but Hearst sent Dear Abby in his place. Except — to mess up the metaphor — Cramer does epitomize CNBC’s tabloiding of financial news, Cramer is a financial insider who knows better, and Dear Abby would have put up more of a fight.

[Tags: jon_stewart jim_cramer cnbc media journalism financial_news ]

You can see the entire, unedited interview here.

The Daily Show runs an anagram contest. The phrase to be anagrammed at the moment is: “Envoys to Afghanistan and Iraq Are Named”

Here’s my best attempt: “On the QT, Iran damns any gain of area saved”

And yours?

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I read David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man” when I was a kid and was greatly impressed, I think by the subtlety with which humans could be influenced. It was also quite entertaining. Here’s David Susskind’s hour-long interview of him from 1983.

(Thanks to Richard Pachter for the link.)

[Tags: david_ogilvy advertising marketing ]

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