Information Pollution
Jakob Nielsen has “Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution,” summarized as “better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that’s easy to find and manage.” He notes that employees waste time looking for information on “bad intranets,” and “many websites alienate users by burying answers to basic questions in useless corporatese.” His top ten is its about setting priorities and giving most of your time to critical tasks. “Unfortunately,” he says, “current information systems [lead] to an interrupt-driven workday and reduced productivity.” The last four of his ten steps focus on companies, including these two that are relevant to our consulting work:
Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language. This will save your customers a lot of time — thus making you popular — and will keep them from pestering you with time-consuming phone calls and emails.
User test your intranet. Clean it up so that employees can find stuff faster, and make the intranet homepage their entry point for keeping up on company news and events.
Companies would to well to focus some of the effort, energy, and money spent on SEO, and focus on content, architecture, and overall usability.
The Internet, Social Media, and the New Economy - Part 1
The old economy is based on the assumption that affairs can be organized so that energy and most materials are available in relative abundance, and that human productivity is the main limiting factor.
But the new economy is grounded in the fact that this assumption is no longer valid. In the new economy energy and materials are, for a fact, expensive and hard to get.
So in the new economy performance improvements in human labor and in materials and energy are valued and sought, with the emphasis on continually getting more and more from less and less - especially with respect to energy and materials, because we have barely begun to realize the possible improvements in this area.
In fact, most new growth in the new economy will derive from activities that either discover and disseminate improvements in materials and energy performance, or from activities that use such discoveries to dramatically shrink the energy and material used to things done. For example, in architecture this trend is now called ‘dematerialization,’ and it is rapidly rising in significance as a concern for design.
This trend has, of course, actually been with us for all time. More and more with less and less has always been a good core strategy for making money. But now we recognize that the accepted facts that underlie and drive most business decisions include the realization that energy and materials resources are expensive and scarce.
What we see happening in this new environment is the progressive substitution of knowledge and human capital for energy and materials. This often shows up as effort to use know how and knowledge producing social networks to reduce costs, i.e. - to substitute knowledge and human capital for finance capital. And it works.
Indeed, the fundamental capital of the old economy was finance capital, with access to finance acting as the primary lever controling growth in the economy. But in the new economy the fundamental capital is human and knowledge capital, with access to information and communications resources, i.e. - to the converged digital media, and with participation in emerging new social networks platformed in the converged digital media, acting as the primary lever controling growth in the new economy.
And the focus of this new capital base is, of course, access to and use of the internet. It is migration of all processes of coordination, communication and control onto the internet, and participation in and use of the emerging new internet-based social media through the creation and operation of digital media based social networks. And I note here that social netorks of various forms have always been the primary engine for the production of both human and knowledge capital, with significant historical examples being the networks of conversation in the coffee houses of Old Amsterdam and London in the 15th and 16th centuries, or the networks of authors and subscribers to scientific and technical journals in the ’70s and ’80s, etc.
So exactly at the moment the investment banks and stock exchanges are failing all around us, as the old economy gives way, the new digital converged media are giving birth to incredible new leveraged means for generating human and knowledge capital, including: crowd sourced instant access to knowledge thru tools like Google and Wikipedia; twitter-based communities of shared interest that emerge, function and dissolve in hours, migration of all business operating processes into the computing cloud, and the accelerating migration of our interface with all this media onto iPhone-like devices that give us continual participation in a globally based engine of social network production.
One big point here is that the actual global economy is not failing or faltering. It is instead - transforming, shifting from the old finance capital base to the new social media base. And those clear headed enough to see the new way are going to prosper.
Another give point is this leaves us with entirely new questions, new lines of enquiry we desperately need to explore:
- How are knowledge and human capital generated? How destroyed?
- What are the implications for capital formation given all the converged media are pull, not push-based?
- How can we mitigate the dislocations of the transformation from the old to the new economic base?
ThreadsML
Marc Canter has revived an idea a bunch of us were talking about five years ago in a conversation instigated by David Weinberger. ThreadML was most simply described as “a standard way for applications to interchange threaded discussions with little or no data loss.” Marc describes the need for this, “an open standard to unite disparate kinds of conversations, threads, IM sessions, comments, tracks, mail lists, etc. These conversations get started on all sorts of service, in many different ways.” It’s “more than just some schema. It’s a system that unites conversations and stores them as ‘memes.’ Here’s a graphic Marc came up with:
I’m wondering who has the time, energy, and grasp to pick up on this and make it happen?
Twitter is useful
For some, Twitter just seems weird at first glance. Why would anybody sign up for a microblogging system with a 140 character per post limit? I personally had no hesitation, because I could see it as a variation on the always-open chat room, the kind of virtual coworking space that so many Open Source projects have used, often hosted by Freenode’s IRC servers, at least until Campfire came along. Twitter is kind of like chat, only instead of a chat room you have a chat network - you don’t see everybody in a particular virtual space, but all the people whose posts you choose to follow, often people in your own social network, some of whom will follow you back. You’re in a conversation that can vary depending you who follow… and it can be even more complicated, with a public comment feed and people who opt out of it, and protected private feeds that you can only follow with permission, and direct messaging that’s one to one. If many people you know and work with are on Twitter, that can be useful. If you have problems that collective intelligence can solve, Twitter’s useful there, too.
Marshall Kirkpatrick posts about Twitter for journalism, where it’s useful for picking up on stories as they occur, for performing ad hoc interviews, and to get feedback on pieces you’ve written. I’ve been using Twitter as a matter of course when I write articles, asking questions of the people who follow me and working pretty effectively with the responses I get. Kirkpatrick quotes Suw Charman-Anderson: “No, it’s not a random sample. But since when are ‘man on the street’ interviews?”
If I could just get all my clients and colleagues to use Twitter, it could be one stop shopping for ideas and productivity.
Rural vs urban use of social media
At Adaptive Path: useful coverage of Eric Gilbert’s work on social media in rural life. [Link]
Eric’s conclusions were that both rural and urban people use social media, but they use it very differently. He found that rural social networks span other rural social networks, creating limited access to social capital for rural people. Borrowing from Larson, people in rural areas say they want to reach beyond their communities, but in practice, they don’t.
The meaning of “the great unbundling”
Nicholas Carr has written the best analysis I’ve seen of the impact of the Internet on the concept and implementation of the newspaper. You might think that newspapers can move online and be the same sort of beast with the same sort of revenue, but Carr explains why newspapers “unbundle” on the net, and this “great unbundling” has serious implications.
When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.
Carr says that longer investigative articles about serious and complex subjects tend to be hard to justify economically online because they’re expensive, yet they don’t generate click-throughs on ads. The ultimate result of moving online might be the loss of expensive, high quality content, if you accept Carr’s conclusion.
I don’t necessarily agree, but there’s much to think about here. There’s a lot we don’t know about the impact of advertising - who’ll be attracted by what ads in which locations? Carr assumes that the longer investigative pieces don’t “sell,” saying
The most successful articles, in economic terms, are the ones that not only draw a lot of readers but that deal with subjects that attract high-priced ads. And the most successful of all are those that attract a lot of readers who are inclined to click on the high-priced ads. An article about new treatments for depression would, for instance, tend to be especially lucrative, since it would attract expensive drug ads and draw a large number of readers who are interested in new depression treatments and hence likely to click on ads for psychiatric drugs.
He doesn’t give a cite for this, and I wonder whether it’s his assumption or supported by real data. I suspect the former. I could just as readily argue that the longer, quality pieces attract well-educated, upper-income readers who are inherently more attractive to advertisers of high-end, expensive products, and those advertisers will spend more money.
There’s also the question of the click-through vs the ad impression. In general, we get more specific data from web advertising than from newspaper advertising. A newspaper organization can deliver hard data about how many papers were sold or distributed, and they might do additional research about who’s reading what sections of the newspapers, but it’s hard for an advertiser to make more than an assumption about the actual commitment of attention to a newspaper ad. Click-throughs on the web are a more precise measure, considered a better metric than an impression. An impression tells us the ad was served, but, as with the newspaper, we can’t make any correlation with actual attention. In fact, the ad may have been served but blocked, just as television ads might be skipped by viewers with DVRs.
We’re getting better at analyzing conversions and we’re going deeper with the analysis because we have the necessary tools and data to support better intelligence about aggregate behavior. Advertising is less about hitting the most eyeballs - it’s qualitative and niche focused. I.e. as an advertiser I’m okay with fewer impressions or clicks if I know I’m getting attention with the right audience. One thing I think we’re learning is that our assumptions are just that - we’re not always good at predicting what will work. We had to believe our assumptions about advertising in the past, lacking more precise metrics about what worked. The results we actually see in an environment where we can get better metrics and indicators can be surprising. What I’m saying is that we’re just beginning to learn what “sells” online.
The unbundling part really means that it’s harder to sell the news source, formerly a newspaper, as a whole, but an established news source will still have the advantage of an established attention base and, by virtue of that authority, decent page rank on search engine results pages. A New York Times or Washington Post will grasp the strategic differences in moving from bundled paper to unbundled bytes, and I suspect they’ll find rationales for funding good, expensive hard journalism in those stories’ contribution to reputation and page rank, if not in precise click-throughs for the specific story - though it’s still possible that there’ll be signficant click-throughs with the kinds of advertisers you’d associate with Sunday morning talk shows on television - companies that will spend significant dollars to reach an upper-income niche.
Yahoo, Google, MySpace form Open Social Nonprofit
Yahoo made the OpenSocial commitment, and with Google and MySpace, agreed to form the independent nonprofit OpenSocial Foundation (for the moment still hosted at Google).
From the foundation proposal: “… the OpenSocial Foundation will be structured to include both corporate and individual representation, and to foster a transparent and participatory community for the purpose of providing equal access to specifications published by the OpenSocial Foundation, at no charge.”
“I want a river of news”
Jeff Jarvis (via Twitter and his blog) turned me on to the existence of “feed wars” - in the world of constantly updated news feeds, Facebook is losing (because it’s too slow) and Twitter is winning (because it can be, at least via IM, so immediate). Another question buried here: to what extent do people want “a river of news,” as Jeff says, and to what extent would they prefer a well-filtered trickle. I like the river, myself, but I’d like to see research - I think people like Jeff and I who can surf big waves of information may not be the norm.
The Economist on social networks: Everywhere and nowhere
The Economist has published a very good consideration of the social network space called “Everywhere and Nowhere.” The article aligned well with stuff I’ve been thinking about, and inspired me to write a point by point response. (I put text from the article in italics, followed by my comments.)
Web-mail has certainly not become a business. Admittedly, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other providers of web-mail accounts do place advertisements on their web-mail offerings, but this is small beer. They offer e-mail—and volumes of free archival storage unimaginable a decade ago—because the service, including its associated address book, calendar, and other features, is cheap to deliver and keeps consumers engaged with their brands and websites, making users more likely to visit affiliated pages where advertising is more effective.
I think this misses the point about Google’s strategy, which is about gathering, storing, processing, and ultimately monetizing knowledge about users and their behaviors. The more services Google offers, the more knowledge they acquire. Some worry that Google’s “reading their file,” but this assumes an application of human intelligence to the knowledge base that Google’s building. It’s all semantic, handled by machines, and focused on three things: “organizing the world’s information,” being useful, and finding subtle and reasonable ways to monetize processes and services. Gmail is extremely valuable in this context.
Social networking appears to be similar in this regard. The big internet and media companies have bid up the implicit valuations of MySpace, Facebook and others. But that does not mean there is a working revenue model. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, recently admitted that Google’s “social networking inventory as a whole” was proving problematic and that the “monetisation work we were doing there didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped.” Google has a contractual agreement with News Corp to place advertisements on its network, MySpace, and also owns its own network, Orkut. Clearly, Google is not making money from either.
I suspect Google really is making money on its deal with MySpace, and even if not, it’s still valuable in the context I described above. Orkut didn’t work because it didn’t have social gravity to hold users. Early social networks like Friendster and Orkut had early surges of activity as many users came onto the systems and four or invited their friends. The activity of building yourself into a social network was fun and exciting. However once you were done adding people, there wasn’t much left to do, so you would drift to the next social network platform and start over. Eventually users grew tired of platform-hopping, and the term du jour was “YASN” or “yet another social network,” as in “WFT? It’s YASN.” MySpace and Facebook have worked so far because they’ve found ways to engage users past that first flush of network-building enthusiasm. It’s actually very plausible that they will be profitable as ad-based systems, if users continue to stick and do more stuff in system (thereby be exposed to more ad impressions, and click through some percentage of ads served).
Facebook, now allied to Microsoft, has fared worse. Its grand attempt to redefine the advertising industry by pioneering a new approach to social marketing, called Beacon, failed completely….
Beacon’s still there, Facebook is still growing, and Facebook is still selling more and more ads. I wouldn’t count Facebook out because of any one clueless blunder.
So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility….
A point we’ve been making…social networks will be critical for business, but that doesn’t mean that social network platforms will be lucrative. I do believe that high-volume leaders (MySpace and Facebook) will make money from advertising, and it’s pretty clear that this is the year advertisers take the web seriously again because - another point we’ve been making - unlike the 90s, we really do now have a critical mass of adoption. It’s not hard to imagine the web as the next television, where ads are concerned, and at the moment social network platforms look a bit like high-rated television networks. Facebook is like NBC’s Thursday night television in the 80s and 90s.
Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on….But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing?
For months I’ve been saying that Facebook is the next AOL - a gated community that works for a while, but ultimately can’t be open enough to sustain prominence. This is probably true of MySpace, too… at the moment, both systems are growing and capturing mindshare… will this last? Steve Case once told Bruce Sterling at a party that he saw the Internet as a “seed community” for AOL. That was clearly hubris. If you understand the semantic web, the potential in data portability and application portability, and the promise of a system like Ning, you can see the handwriting on the wall. The Economist quote’s Forrester’s Charlene Li: “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social.” Social networks will be anywhere and everywhere, and the data will be interoperable with many kinds of systems and platforms and devices… and proven, simple, accessible technologies like email, IM, SMS, blogs etc. will continue to rule, untethered to any particular platform provider. MySpace and Facebook will still be there, but so is AOL. So, for that matter, is the WELL, the seminal online community that’s rocking on after over twenty years. The WELL has never gone away, and it doesn’t lose money, but it’s never made anybody rich, either.
The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users.
A dean that the University of Texas McCombs Business School was telling me earlier this week that the students don’t do email anymore. “That’s something their parents do, they all use SMS.” I suspect that’s an exagerration, but I wouldn’t bet the bank on email. Everybody still uses it, and will use it, but it’s also pretty broken. IM is a safer bet, as is Twitter, which is increasingly important to my network of friends and colleagues. The Economist quotes David Ascher of the Thunderbird project, who says “e-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network.” I’m not so sure - in my world, email is a deluge, and if it’s a network, it’s full of strangers, including roving gangs hoping to rip me off.
One last quote from the Economist article, the last paragraph: This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimise what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.
I would add that it makes sense to be platform-agnostic, and focus more on who you know, who you need to reach and get to know, and how your social network - not the platform, but the actual set of people that you know, and people they know - is relevant to your strategy. We’re also thinking a lot about how to optimize effective online collaboration and address internal logistics (e.g. operations, cost control) using approaches mediated by social media, and technologies that make social networks increasingly visible.
Ning v2
Gina Bianchini demos the new version of Ning (found on Ning’s blog).
