Future Exploration Network | Blog

This is fantastic. IBM has announced that it will voluntarily publish its patent filings on the Internet. The upside is that it is taking the lead in creating a clearer, less confused, higher quality patent landscape. The (potential) downside is that it exposes its technology directions and strategy to its competitors as they develop rather than once they're implemented. The great thing about this kind of leadership in creating openness and transparency in business is that it usually is a ratchet – once it becomes more open, it is very hard for it to go back. There are plenty of businesspeople who hate the idea of open business, and fight it in every aspect of how they do business. Too bad for them. We are shifting to a world of open business at a very tidy pace, and I for one think that’s a great thing. Embrace it, or have a tough and miserable time fighting the trend.

Back in November 2003 I blogged about a social networking project within Microsoft Research called MyWallop. At the time, fuelled by what I call the first phase of social networking, I speculated that something like this could become an opt-in part of Windows, unleashing an extraordinary ability for people to create useful connections across all PC users. The social networking space has – for now – moved on to focus on the big succcess stories like MySpace, which are based on personal expression, social identity, and entertainment, rather than business or utilitarian links (a space which has not gone away and will return in a different guise). It turns out that Microsoft sat on the project for several years, then finally decided to spin it out, with the expectation that it would be able to do better outside Microsoft’s walls than within them. Given what’s happening with some of Microsoft’s other initiatives, a wise choice. Wallop has now raised $13 million in venture capital, and just released the product in beta, with the intent of taking it to a full release early next year.

Wallop has a significantly different business model to other social networking sites. They have decided to eschew advertising, despite the massive deal MySpace won with Google. Instead, they charge members for the ability to customize their personal space. The personal spaces in MySpace’s are very basic and difficult to personalize extensively. As other commentators have noted, Wallop’s positioning is closer to CyWorld, which has had massive success in South Korea and recently launched in the US. CyWorld enables members to personalize their spaces to mimic their own homes, or create fantasy rooms. However in Wallop, members can also make money – if visitors buy the entertainment or features they have selected to place on their site, Wallop takes just 30%, leaving the rest of the revenue to the member. The idea is that the space becomes a marketplace for a wide range of digital expression, across music, avatars, art, animation, and more. Significantly, the entire site was developed in Flash, which enables Flash developers to create and sell artifacts within the site. In short, Wallop is a very interesting experiment to see whether people will both want to build networks in this environment, and spend money on content there. I think it will do at least fairly well, as it represents a real alternative to the existing social networking sites, but the critical issue here is scale. How well it does will significantly impact which way the social networking space evolves from here, as companies uncover what business models work or don’t work, and copy and refine the ones that do well.

Jay Rosen has just announced that Reuters is giving $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, which provides a more structured model for open source journalism, bringing together amateur and professional media creators. The money will be applied to hiring a full-time editor for the site. Jay gives some background to why Reuters is choosing to support this project:

Part of the background to the gift is a speech given March 2nd 2006 by Reuters CEO Tom Glocer to the Online Publishing Association. It was called “The Two-Way Pipe.” Glocer said the news industry “faces a profound challenge from home-created content-– everything from blogging and citizen journalism to video mash-ups.”

In 2005 he and his colleagues were worried about a shift in power they saw coming, but “it was about the consumer as editor,” Glocer said. “You get the news you want when you want it, either pulled by something like an RSS feed or a Tivo box or pushed by the media company.” This was a legitimate demand. And while companies like his are still catching up with that demand “our audiences have already moved on-– now they are consuming, creating, sharing and publishing.” Consumers as producers! That’s a power shift more confounding than the explosion of choice.

His puzzle: “If users want to be both author and editor, and technology is enabling this, what will be the role of the media company in the second decade of this century?” As Scott Karp pointed out (his blog is about the next era in publishing) Glocer’s answers to that question weren’t very revolutionary.

But some of his observations were keen. “On the day the Tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists positioned around the world, mercifully none were on those beaches,” he said. “On that fateful day we also had 1,000 stringers around the globe – but none of them were there either.” The only way to get the story was from amateurs to whom the tools of media production had been re-distributed. His conclusion: “You have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the story completely.”

NewAssignment.Net is explicitly joining traditional and social media in creating a “pro-am”, or professional-amateur model. For example, amateurs can collectively be given fact-checking tasks, or issues identified by amateurs can be passed on to professional journalists. For a long time I’ve believed that what is happening and will happen is a merging and integration of traditional mass media and emergent social media. In our Future of Media Report, we explicitly discussed how the “professionalism” of traditional media both provides standards and expectations, and is also a limiting box. NewAssignment.Net looks like a particularly promising model, though the details are not yet clear. However irrespective of how successful it is, the space in which it is playing, of bringing together the resources and capabilities of amateurs and professionals, is where much of the action will be moving forward in the world of media.

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the Influence conference run by Phil Sim’s Mediaconnect. The event brings together media and other influencers (I believe I’m labelled a “new media influencer" there) and corporates, discussing current trends in key technology sectors. I’m on the Web 2.0 panel tomorrow, so I thought I’d briefly capture here my introductory comments, on my chosen topic of User Filtered Content.

The user filtering landscape
+ The primary focus recently has been on the explosion of user generated content, with Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube and many others just the vanguard of an immense wave of content creation, unleashed by accessible tools of production and sharing. We are moving towards a world of infinite content, further unleashed by the vast scope of content remixing and mashups.

+ With massively more content available, we need the means to filter it, to make the gems visible in vastness of the long tail. Fortunately, Web 2.0 is in fact just as much about user filtered content as about user generated content.

+ As far more people participate in the web, as technologies such as blogging, social networking, photo sharing and more become easier to use, the collective ability of the web to filter content is swiftly growing, and will more than keep pace with the growth in content.

User filtering mechanisms
Clicks indicate popularity of specific content within a site (with many caveats).
Links are stronger and more valid votes on the value of content.
Ratings provide explicit opinions on quality.
Tags describe content with words, locations etc.

Web-wide and site-specific filtering
There are two primary ways of implementating user filtering: taking data from across the web, and from within one site.

+ Google’s PageRank is a seminal example of web-wide user filtering, where people’s aggregated linking behaviors enable people to find relevant content. Technorati more explicitly shows how many blogs link to other blogs or blog posts, to indicate their authority. Techmeme draws on the timing and relationship of new links to uncover current conversations.

+Amazon.com’s book recommendations kicked off site-specific user filtering, notably by identifying related titles. Slashdot was for several years the primary site that enabled communities to select stories and rate each others’ commentary.
In two years Digg.com has reached over 1 million daily visitors with its core model of user filtering of content. Copycats or similar sites such as Reddit, Meneame, and Shoutwire have abounded. Finally AOL-owned Netscape launched a Digg copy, providing mainstream media endorsement of the model.

+Content sites such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Odeo all embed user filtering as core features of their services.

What’s next for user filtering
+ Effective user filtering will have increasing value, and there will be more plays in this space. Network effects will apply strongly to site-specific filtering, however this will not preclude new players with better models gaining traction quickly. The move by Netscape to hire active raters away from Digg is an attempt to accelerate shifts.

+ Social search engines such as Eurekster and Yahoo!’s Search Builder indicate the next level of sophistication of search, enabling filtering aggregation of specific communities rather than the web at large.

+ Tools such as Last.FM and Yahoo!’s Launchcast will, with permission, use extremely detailed personal taste profiles to provide content filtering for individuals.

+ New mechanisms will emerge that draw on people’s web activities, tagging, specific communities, and combine these perspectives in various ways to create more refined user filtering. This filtering will increasingly be designed to be relevant to people with particular interest profiles and individuals.

Tom Mohr, formerly president of Knight-Ridder Digital before its sale in June, has just published Winning Online – A Manifesto, proposing that the US newspaper industry should merge into a single industry-wide network, at least for its digital assets. He suggests that there is $4 billion of additional revenue to be gained by 2010, primarily by gaining targetted advertising. Part of Tom’s argument starts from the fact that in the US market, all but a few newspapers are local. It is important to note that there are very different dynamics in just about every other country in the world, where the newspaper markets are dominated by national players, so this is a particularly US view. Other key aspects of his case are the combined power of the newspapers’ advertising salesforces, and the negotiating power they have collectively, for example being able to withhold their content from the content aggregators such as Yahoo!. However Tom’s last point is that this collective work will take leadership. Indeed. In a network economy, leadership is required to show the potential of collaboration, and to bring participants together to create and share collective value. Having closely studied similar situations across many industries (for example FXall, RosettaNet, XBRL, CPFR), I simply do not believe that the industry structure or the participants in the US newspaper industry will allow this plan to make any headway. Reflecting on Tom’s piece, Don Dodge thinks that newspapers and magazines will die as soon as their current readers die. No way. E-paper will revitalize them in a new form. Don is in a minority of people who are happy to read news and entertainment sitting in front of a screen or on a portable device. Once the current print publications are digital, they will have a new lease of life.

A piece just out in the New York Times covers the current array of music collaborative filtering services (though it doesn’t call them that), including Pandora and Last.FM. I’ve written about these numerous times in my books and blog, including my initial thoughts on discovering Last.FM in 2003 (still love it!) and a comparison between Last.FM and Pandora. The article refers to a report by Gartner that predicts that by 2010, 25% of online music sales will be driven by collaborative filtering engines. That’s a high figure, given that social networks and personal recommendations will always be at the heart of individual musical discovery, but I do agree that much of the way new music will become visible will be through these kinds of tools. To review, the concept of “collaborative filtering” is that we collaborate to filter the virtually infinite possibilities we face. This is largely done through tools that compare our tastes with those of others, so we can benefit from what people with similar taste to us have discovered. The magic of this is that it becomes far easier to find what we like (be it entertainment, information, or anything else) in a world of infinite choice. One of the most important impacts of technology has been to uncover creative talent, since access to either high-quality production or distribution is no longer a barrier. This means we have far more entertainment choices than ever before. The growth of the “long tail” is vastly enabled by software that provides recommendations for things that we love, that we would never find otherwise. These collaborative filtering services are fundamental to the way the future media landscape will unfold. Progress on these for the last decade has been slower than I would have hoped, but it is picking up, and the promise is there for all of us to find far more music that we love.