I know I’m late to the PlayForChange.com party, but this is a pretty impressive video, on several grounds. Don’t be misled by the opening; it’s not really just about a street musician.

In a semi-related story, the YouTube orchestra is getting ready to play Carnegie hall. To join, you had to post an audition video on YouTube…

[Tags: music worldmusic globalvoices ]

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I have not unmixed feelings about T-Mobile’s “spontaneous” dance fest in London’s Liverpool Station. (You can see it here. You can see the making of it here.) On the one hand, it’s a very cool event, and people seemed to like it. On the other, I think I’d feel a bit betrayed if I found out that my joyous dancing was actually part of a commercial.

So, overall, thumbs up, and kudos for creativity. But just a bit of pucker of distaste for commercializing the flash mob vision. Not that anyone asked me.

[Tags: flash_mob t-mobile marketing cluetrain ]

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Tim Hwang (twitter: timhwang), one of the founders of ROFLcon, is giving a talk at the Berkman Center. The talk is titled “The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto.” [Note: I’m living blogging which means I’m missing lots, getting things wrong, not correcting mispellpings, and generally making the world worse.]

ROFLcon is an attempt to get everyone who’s ever been famous together in a room. E.g., the Tron Guy, Tim says. He also works with Yochai Benkler who is working on the nature of collaboration. He also works with freeculture.org. He’s also shooting a documentary about the Goatse photo; he is going to find the Goatse guy and those who have been affected by his hideous photo. [Note: Don’t Google the image unless you want to see a guy holding open his own ass. The link in the previous sentence is to a photo-less Wikipedia article.]

He says that as you look at Internet memes and fads, it looks like a random collection of odd things. But this intuition is wrong. “There’s a reason certain memes emerge and when they do.” There should be a relationship of these memes across time and among memes at the same time. Tim calls this the “memescape,” which is a way of saying that the emergence of these memes is not entirely random.

The 4chan paradox: Memes form where people can communicate and share content. E.g., Facebook. It’s a big thing. There we can share ideas, events, comments, chat, etc. etc. “It has every single doohickey you could want.” Now look at 4chan.org. It has many few social tools. You’d think that more memes would emerge on FB. In fact, 4chan is a bigger meme generator. E.g., LOLcats came out of 4chan, as did Rick Rolling and chocolate rain. Memes do come out of FB (e.g., 25 things and the Beautiful truck), but there aren’t sustained communities around these memes. LOLcats on the other hand has a community site (icanhascheezburger.com). LOLcats respond to one another: Ceiling Cat calls forth the Basement Cat. The meme contains its own memes and becomes a self-referential universe. And it spills past its boundaries, unlike Beautiful truck. E.g., the LOLspeak translation of the Bible, LOLbama.com, etc.

Why? It could be just an accident that memes arise more on 4chan than FB. Or there might be a relationship among memes. In Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet,” he says the PC won out because it was open and generative. Generativity means that tech that’s open to third parties allows for explosive innovation. Tim suggests that generativity applies to social systems as well as to hardware. FB is closed in that it tells you what the basic areas are, the info is siloed among friends, and there’s so much there that it’s hard to master. In contrast, 4chan is simple and just a blank space into which you can put any type of content, and the content is open to everyone (not siloed).

The future? Over the next couple of years we’ll see Net culture infiltrate into the mainstream. The global recession will help the Internet culture boom. Net culture is made of supply (people creating content, back and forth) and demand (money, interest, participation). Unemployment gives people time to create memes. He points to a 2007 study that shows that YouTube usage peaks right after lunch before people come back to work. Shirky‘s “cognitive surplus” really means a lot of people with time on their hands (Tim says).

Demand: Do I contract with a real celebrity or with a Net celebrity? E.g., Rick Astley showing up on a Thanksgiving Parade float. More is going mainstream. E.g., Christian Lander has a book called “Stuff White People Like” that is a bestseller.

There are also people. If you’re out of work, you can spend all day online being entertained for free. You can buy cheap goods through Etsy.com. He points to some data that seems to correlate unemployment with Net creativity, although he says that it would need much more research.

The decisions made in code and hardware influence the social space. This suggests some projects that could be undertaken. 1. Environmental advisories: Look at the consequences of behaviors, especially when lots of people do them. E.g., symmetrical info streams: If I see your data, you see m. ineIf people are friending back indiscriminately, what happens when this scales up? Does that dilute FB? 2. Bug tracking. Internet culture is hackable. E.g., Digg. The top 100 users have contributed 50-60% of the stories on the front page. Might be interesting to track these sorts of “bugs.” Could you use this to create an EPA for the social Web, that reports on its health?

Q: [chris seghoian] Most of 4chan is porn. It works because it’s anonymous. The postings there would get you banned from Facebook. 4chan is the primordial soup of the Internet. I’d argue that it’s the freedom to be horrible that enables the memes to grow.
Tim: I agree.

Q: Digg was distorted by companies trying to get their stories promoted.
Tim: That’s an argument for an EPA for the Web. I’d like to make this sort of distortion public.

Q: [ethanz] I like the environment metaphor. But what’s optimal? The EPA says that lead in drinking water is a bad thing. How does the Web EPA figure out what is desirable? And you’d be trying to model something that is changing so rapidly. I don’t believe in your correlation of stock market and creativity, but I think you’re right that it correlates to economics; you might do better with case studies. But the environment is all about homeostasis, whereas the Net has no homeostasis.
Tim: Yes. But thinking of memes as a system rather than as random jolts online might be valuable.

Q: [jason] Is the audience expanding? Or are those who are involved getting more active?
Tim: The population is expanding. And the audience is growing.

Q: [me] So many of the memes are distortions of mainstream culture. Chuck Norris, LOLcats, Marmaduke Explained…
Tim: Yes. Some are more distinctly their own, e.g. XKCD.com references mainstream but is its own. It’s still a game that it has yet to be resolved.
Ethanz: People are now coming out of this fan culture with their own culture. This is the nascent new crop of natives. They’re mastering their craft.

Q: [judith donath] With LOLcats, if you didn’t keep up, you lose track. E,.g., if you didn’t know Ceiling Cat, you wouldn’t get the Basement Cat joke. There’s already this tension between being non-obvious (so they are a boundary between those who are in and out) and being obvious enough. LOLcats changed rapidly to keep that boundary at the right space.

Q: [chris s.] You mentioned good memes. But there are also griefers who post flashing jpegs at epileptic forums, Anonymous actions against Scientology, the Sarah Palin hacker…
Tim: There’s a universe of evil of memes that parallel the good memes. Even in the days of BBS, there were communities online that did bad stuff. Benkler talks about the Net aggregating fringe things and making them a big thing at the center.

[lokman] How do the economics affect the culture?
Tim: Clay Shirky points to the Power Law distribution of blogs. True for Net culture. The celebs who think of themselves as big celebs had the most trouble at ROFLcon. The Numa Numa guy won’t show up for less than a few thousand dollars. Will Net culture maintain its character?

Q: [jason] How do you decide when something becomes a meme?
Tim: We battle with this. We take “meme” really broadly.

Q: [eszter hargattai] How does this energy and time could be turned to other activities? E.g., let’s have people learn more about Africa?
Tim: There’s a code of honor on 4chan: You should do things for the luls, i.e., for the fun of it. I haven’t seen good models for channeling the energy towards something socially productive. Still, you might be able to use the mechanisms/lessons to produce something more useful.

Q: [elsa] Net culture lends itself not only to LOLcats but also to more political and global news. But, do you have thoughts about the generational issue. Our gen was the first to grow up with the Net. Is there a shift in cultures?
Tim: Are we only talking about the geek universe? There’s a whole universe not captured by this. So, when you zoom out, it’s hard to tell if Net culture only applies to a relatively small pocket.

Q: Why do some micromemes become popular?
Tim: Most social media experts are either talking about one case they know about or they’re completely anecdotal. There isn’t enough quantifiable work being done.
Ethanz: MediaCloud is trying to figure out what political memes come out of the blogosphere. Could you do research that would enable you to spot, say, 4chan memes that are about to take off?
Tim: A recent paper said that some pairs of memes are in a predator-pray relationship.

Q: [joel] PennyArcade was just two guys in Seattle and is now a business. The professionalization is interesting. Can we reverse engineer what might become a hit? [Tags: ]

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Ethan Zuckerman has a fantastic post about Paul Simon’s South African collaboration. It’s a long, complex story that Ethan tells with his usual clarity and gusto, but it’s not about Paul Simon so much as about the nature of paths between cultures. The simple is complex because cultures emerge from (and shape) history, and history is everything there is plus some more on top of that.

Few can combine his simultaneous grasp of details, his breadth, and his ability to synthesize context. There’s also his vast heart. Read the post. Only Ethan could have written it.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman paul_simon bridgeblogs blogs south_africa culture ]

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Eva Sollberger talks about SevenDaysVt.com, about being “stuck in Vermont” videos. The videos don’t make the newspaper a lot of money but it does help “brand” Vermont and Burlington. Shes done 122 of them over the past two years. Highly edited. Highly viewed. One person, a bunch of videos, making a difference.

[Tags: f2c f2c09 vermont ]

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A: When you get 104,003 questions for the President.

I applaud the Obama administration for soliciting online questions for the President’s online town hall. And they let us all see the questions that our fellow citizens (of the US and the world) were submitting. Excellent!

But if you get that many different questions, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you really got far fewer unique questions. If people can’t easily find the question they had, they asked it again. This dissipates the votes on the questions as well.

I don’t know how to fix it other than by manual intervention, or possibly automagic natural language processing, or some such. Or maybe you could show people questions like the one they just posed (through just a little bit of automagic NLP) and offer to let them vote for those questions rather than pose their own. This might cause some clustering around questions: Why ask “You, dude, when are you going to make pot legal? PS: You can come by our place in White Plains any time if you do.” when you’re shown that the question, “Do you support the legalization and taxation of marijuana?” already has 983,455 votes?

[Tags: obama egov egovernment e-gov ]

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Jeff Gates posts about how the Smithsonian American Art Museum is facing the fact that it’s a long-tail phenomenon:

Our Web statistics showed that the number of visitors to our top ten sections paled when compared with the total number of visitors for all other pages, even though only a few people viewed each page. The challenge: how could we make it easier for our online visitors to find things of interest even if that information is buried deep in our site?

He continues:

Museums are changing. Like many other organizations, our hierarchical structure has historically disseminated information from our experts to our visitors. The envisioned twenty-first-century model, however, is more level. Instead of a one-way presentation, our online visitors are often interested in having a conversation with our curators and content providers. In response, many of us at American Art have been looking for ways to engage our public by designing applications that promote dialogue. By encouraging user-generated content and by distributing our assets beyond our own Web site and out across the Internet, we hope to make our content easier to find. In doing so, we are trying to fulfill our long tail strategy. In order to succeed we will need to approach our jobs differently.

And that’s just the introduction.

Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has expanded on its successful 15.7M views Flickr experiment and is now posting material at iTunes and YouTube.

Among the items Web surfers can expect on iTunes and YouTube are 100-year-old films from Thomas Edison’s studio, book talks with contemporary authors, early industrial films from Westinghouse factories, first-person audio accounts of life in slavery, and inside looks into the library’s holdings, including the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and the contents of President Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night of his assassination.

This is all getting just too cool. Time to put the toys back on shelves behind glass

Nah.

[Tags: smithsonian museums libraries library_of_congress everything_is_miscellaneous long_tail ]

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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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It’s the first International Ada Lovelace Day, when we celebrate women in tech by blogging about a woman in tech. My choice this year is Wendy Seltzer. This list of projects she’s been instrumental in of course does not tell the whole story, but it’s a good place to start.

Wendy graduated Harvard Law with a ticket to high-priced everything, but instead has dedicated her legal skill and deep technical understanding to preserving the Net as a place for free speech and free culture. She was a lawyer for EFF for years, an original and sustaining Berkman fellow, a careful observer of ICANN, the heart, head and hands behind ChillingEffects.org, and someone who never hesitates to pitch in when there’s a way to keep the Net open to all.

Wendy is modest and shy, and will undoubtedly be made uncomfortable by my singling her out. But, hey, what are friends for? :) Wendy, it makes me happy to know you are working for us all, and even happier to call you my friend.

[Tags: wendy_seltzer ald09 ada_lovelace_day adalovelaceday eff women_in_technology copyright copyleft ]

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Vincent Rossmeier has a solid interview at Salon with Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution.

I’m going to interview Andrew as a Berkman event on Wednesday night, 6pm at Griswold Hall, room 110, at Harvard Law. Andrew is certainly a partisan, but he’s also an insider whose book is quite candid and direct about troubling episodes in Wikipedia’s history. I enjoyed his book and look forward to talking with him. (He and I will probably talk for 30 mins, and then we’ll open it up.)

[Tags: wikipedia andrew_lih ]

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