twopointouch

The fantastic news about the last.fm deal surely proves that you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to score big time. Well done to Martin Stiksel and his team, and screw the naysayers who claim London (and the UK) can’t support Web 2.0 projects. Those guys slept in tents on top of the office for their first three months. They had the courage to do it because they believed in the idea, and now they’re getting the rewards.

Last.fm have a brilliant, clever, innovative service. That’s what’s netted them £140mn (yes, pounds sterling, not dollars). Ideas and Execution make real money; not geography, though I think the London internet community boosts every business that is a part of it.

This isn’t just about London, though. We’re currently having conversations with an organisation about putting on events for a major northern UK city that has over 70 internet startups under its belt. And I can bet that city won’t be in the top three you can name. This is everywhere.

Bubble 2.0? You bet. But Sarbox regulations and similar restrictions in the EU mean there’s no equivalent IPO fever and less real money changing hands. The people that get burned will be the gamblers, not your pension funds.

Unless, ermm…, like me you elected to put your pension fund in high tech, high risk stocks. Hey, I was young at the time!

I’ve been told-off by proper, real-world people twice in the last week or so for not blogging enough. Sorry. Writing about digital media at work seems to have decreased my desire to write about digital media some more once I get home. (To counter some objections, NMK has a ‘beta’ RSS feed here). However, my boss has agreed that ‘blogging time’ be allowed as ‘work time’. Not sure how that pans out when I say, “Sorry, no articles on the site today, but I did do a blog post.” I hope to do better. kthxbai.

Anyway. Tomorrow, I have been asked to say a few words on the topic of ‘Blogging 2.0′ at a roundtable discussion organised by Microsoft and Weber Shandwick (one of their PR houses). It’s a title that I’m sure will make all regular readers cringe and I’ll be equally sure to point out that it was none of my doing. Since it’s a closed event, I thought I’d share my notes here. Hope they make enough sense to be worth reading.

The future of blogging must be connected to why people blog now

• It’s about our current nature [I am a socialist, not an essentialist]. There is currently a human urge to communicate, share and to connect. Most of us [at the event] are professional writers in some sense and feel that more keenly than most perhaps and do it every day anyway, but it’s not just us.
• Equal current human urge to make a mark or be recorded. Symptomatic of our sense of anonymity and alienation in post-industrial world?, though diaries are hardly a new thing.
• As a convenient tool for knowledge management. Search on my blog is faster and better than search on my computer. [shame on you, MS]. Easier to use than a wiki.
• Self-promotion or business promotion. [let's be honest, eh]
• Public spaces that serve a community function (the local pub, the playground, the park, the village square) no longer exist, are thought unsafe or are no longer fulfilling that function. So we seek alternatives. I have found many RL friends through my blog - that wouldn’t happen if I stood in the park: I’d get arrested or something.

And also why they don’t blog

• Too technical/geeky - - not so for very long - every 16 yr old leaving school now has always had the Internet. They’ve had wikipedia since they were old enough to use it - ‘99. I think it will lead to increased usage of solutions like drupal, joomla and b2evolution, if anything.
• Too much effort - well, it is. It’s not like any of us are getting paid unless it gets us a new job or new clients. Adsense not working e.g. Guy Kawasaki
• Nothing to say - my mum, very english, very humble woman wouldn’t want to make her views public in the same way she’d never write a letter to a paper - but it doesn’t have to be a publishing platform, it can also be a communication platform - nearly all east asian blogs, for example, are for friends and family.
• No time/No interest - I think there may be passive solutions.

Paid-for blogging services?

Models:

• Straightforward hosting - I pay something like $6 per month for hosting and $10 a year for domain name.
• But DIY requires intent. Ppl don’t pay for things or put effort into things they can get for free.
• Typepad.com - £5 a month for a hosted service - has been v.popular with pro bloggers but now haemorrhaging users moving to free services like wordpress.com, blogger.com.
• Wordpress.com - pro accounts for more traffic; more control over design. Not going to do it unless funded somehow, though.
• eTribes.com - bolt-ons for extra space and mobile apps; no one I know uses it.

What other alternatives exist/could work?

Some recent trends and ideas that may show the way forward

Microblogging

• Rise of Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook status messages as an alternative to blogging.
• These things are even more intimate than most blogs - trend towards ’self surveillance’, putting all your activity on show.
• They are about maintaining presence and relationships more than anything else
• Rise of the tumblelog - tumblr.com - more scrapbook than anything else - useful and easy to maintain
• Bloggers often run out of steam - 100x more abandoned blogs than active ones - something easier and less stress-inducing required?

Atomisation

• Thanks to the magic of RSS, the basic atom of the blog is the post. These can be remixed and re-assembled by readers/users anyway they like.

This has led to:

• Rise of the Feed Reader and consequent decline of the page view. Subscribers are a more important index than impressions, if you offer full RSS. And if you don’t, then you’ve lost the attention of the bloggerati. Why should you care? They’re linkers.
• Rise of the widget - it’s RSS for ppl who don’t know what RSS stands for. MySpace, Netvibes, Pageflakes - roll your own internet and never leave your homepage. Facebook apps doing the same for that platform. UK gone facebook mad, it seems, in last month or so.

Collaboration

• Blogging platforms are currently poor on this, hence the rise [in some ways] of wikis, which are a nightmare in terms of user experience. Yet I think the collaborative blog has legs. Forums remain a very strong vehicle and are a product of community. How can we bring that community feeling into the blogging platform?
• Current ‘half-way houses’ are weak for this - Vox, Live Spaces, MU Wordpress remains an under-resourced, niche platform.

Passive Activity

• Tim O’Reilly - “the best web 2.0 services are passive” - e.g. Google search, Last.fm.
• We might be able to passively blog - sites that collect all our activities e.g. iStalkr, tumblr, Facebook apps

Dangers/Counter-Forces

• Spam - spam has already eaten email, usenet and many forums - one reason for rise of web 2.0 services is that email has become so very inefficient for so many purposes. Akismet and Captchas do a sterling job, but the spammers are clever bastards.
• Identity/Privacy Crisis Looming - your next phone will have a facebook interface, a colleague suggested to me other day, and I can believe it - BUT we’re used to our identities being linked to contexts e.g. with mates, with the boss, with colleagues, with family, with lovers. Now, intentionally or not, people are mashing all that up. That’s good in a way, but very odd for most of us at the same time.

The other very good - but slightly scary - thing about last night was bumping into Duncan Gough. Duncan and I go way back. I was his English teacher at college. Now, it seems, he’s a proper grown-up with a wife and child and everything. How old does that make me?

He’s not just a grown-up, however. He’s also a pretty accomplished developer working for Cominded and he was telling me about a private project he’s working on called PMOG - passively multiplayer online gaming. The idea struck me as incredibly zeitgeisty.

This is the deal. You install a Firefox extension that records everything you visit on the web. It uses this to create a roleplaying game character. If you visit blogs a lot, then you might become a Seer. If you use a lot of aggregators, then you’re a Hoarder, etc. You get experience points and build up levels and skills depending on which sites you visit. So basically, you end up with a profile of yourself as a web citizen done in a tongue-in-cheek, Dungeons and Dragons-ey way.

Earning ‘datapoints’, the game’s currency, allows you to buy items - which might include a way to suggest that fellow players visit another site. I went to digg with the extension installed, and there was a suggestion that I visit dotherightthing (interesting site, btw). It’s possible to create quests - a trail of clues to sites you need to visit in order to complete the quest and earn more experience and datapoints. These will probably have a learning objective in the most part, but this is also the main opportunity at the moment to monetise the project. There’s the possibility of sponsored quests whereby - and I’m making this example up - visiting boots.com might earn you a special elixir of healing.

So what does this bring together? The fact that so many people are attracted to the likes of Twitter - telling people what you’re up to on a microscopic level a lot of the time. People are also talking about putting up online Lifestreams - pulling together your feeds from Twitter, flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, your blog and whatever else you do online to create what amounts to a moment-by-moment account of your life. I’ve got something like that on my tumbleblog. Duncan feels that there’s a movement towards ’self-surveillance’ - we’re creating and giving up all this information about ourselves that historically would be very private. Why? At a guess, it’s about alienation in the modern, post-industrialised world, a dysfunctional public culture that places personal achievement above community, a sense in geek culture that our lives are online anyway and that this process is giving that some physicality, plus the sense of our identities otherwise being dissolved into the morass of people doing pretty much exactly the same thing as us.

A variant on this is the talk about attention metadata - the record of what you’ve done and where you’ve been online. If Duncan was evil, he could sell all this data to advertisers. They’ll know exactly what you do and when you do it - the possibility for almost perfect targeting. The other alternative is to give it to the users - they’re already doing this through a widget you can put on your site/profile to show off your in-game avatar. Those users might even be enabled to sell their own data to advertisers. Depending on how accurately PMOG’s profiles for players can be mapped onto existing market segmentation models, this might be very attractive indeed. At the moment, though, PMOG throws away the URLs you visit once they’ve recorded the impact it has on your persona.

Absolutely fascinating. I’m still level 0 on PMOG, though - I’m using Opera as my main browser nowadays. (Oh -and that’s the thing I forgot to say about widgets - apparently, there are currently 25 main platforms for widgets. And they’re all completely different. Eep!)

I was delighted to attend the Chinwag Live event on widgets last night - perhaps especially since we’re having our own event on the topic next week, it was great to have the opportunity to hear what people are thinking on the subject. The event was extremely well attended and there was some good discussion, especially, as always, after the main panel had finished.

Stand-out quote for me was from a member of the audience, having heard how brands are using widgets as a marketing tool, who said, “err… aren’t these things just a way to get people to go back to your main site?” Nothing new under the sun, Horatio.

Another very interesting reference was to this post on Ventureblog.com by David Hornik about the ‘widget economy’, where the point is made that some widgets have symbiotic relationships with their hosts, while others are parasites. And that this is a challenge to the development of the idea of widgets as a way to create a business:

That challenge is a byproduct of their precarious relationship with the “host” services to which they attach. To the extent those relationships are symbiotic, the combined organism will thrive. However, to the extent those relationships are, in fact, parasitic, the host will need to shed the parasite in the name of survival.

Parasitic widgets are basically out to get you to go to another site. Something that popped up news headlines for example, which took you to a news site when you clicked on them rather than displaying more information in situ.

Symbiotic widgets enhance the site they’re on - things like YouTube videos, maybe something that shows your latest flickr photos, or a music player. Google Adsense for Content is parasitic in the sense that it aims to take people elsewhere, but symbiotic in that it gives a kickback to the site owner if it manages to do that.

Parasitic widgets sometimes seem like the sensible way to make money from the widget model. A media owner flashing up teasers from the site owner’s publication of choice isn’t really giving anything away. It seems like all-win for them. But then again, as a site owner, are you really going to put something up that purely serves as a distraction from your own content? I’d suggest not. Certainly, if you were MySpace, you’d be encouraging widgets that help users make their profile page better, and blocking widgets that send users out of the system. The symbiotic route is a slower burn, but a more secure model.

So in a way, the widget business is a miniaturised version what’s going on with marketing in general over the last ten years. That we’re moving away from a culture in which brands could simply expect to grab eyeballs, attention, custom by virtue of simply being brands to a culture of permission marketing. Where brands realise they’ve got to give in order to receive. The more enlightened brands are going to be saying, “right, we’ll give you this cool doodad that lets you embed exclusive, useful, usable content on your site. Because then we’re helping you and helping your readers. And then there’s a bit more chance that you’ll come back to us when you’re looking for more cool stuff.”

I’ll put the wrinkles bit in a separate post.

Pesky beggars. Haven’t thought about them a lot since I left teaching ten years ago.

Anyway, I just wanted to express some appreciation for Channel 4 and Steve Moore from policyunplugged for organising today’s In The Wild event. It was about how Channel 4 Learning might develop interactive content to replace (in the main) its terrestrial broadcast content. The Flying-Blogging-Scotsman Ewan McIntosh has put me to shame - he has been blogging like the wind today, despite also being a speaker, so I’ll leave it to him to give you an insight into the content. Just two thoughts from me.

There was a great comment from a chap from Caspian Learning about this whole digital native / digital tourist idea. The idea that the grown-ups don’t get it and the kids do. The truth is that most kids do get it and are natives; a lot of adults don’t, but probably the sort of people who are likely to be reading and writing blogs are fairly clued-up. Since my fortieth birthday, I’ve become strangely alert to anything that smacks of ageism and this idea of two cultures is frankly ageist. Can we stop using these sorts of generational ideas of a digital divide, please? We don’t talk about media natives and media tourists, do we? We talk about whether people are ‘media savvy’. Same thing goes for new media and social media. However, do feel free to mock me for being the sort of cove who still uses the word ‘chap’.

Second, what is Channel 4 and its like going to do? They have a remit to provide an educational programme. But they also have an internal mantra to be edgy. They know that mainstream television isn’t really reaching ‘the youth’ any more and so they have to do something online, instead. Historically, they’ve made that educational programme about the things that the mainstream curriculum doesn’t really do very well at. Managing Editor of Channel 4 Education Janey Walker showed us a showreel of very impressive programming that tackled topics such as anger-management, homophobia in black culture, sex education and media skills.

How do you re-make or re-invent that sort of content online? I think that it will probably mean a step back from the idea of typical online content for children. You can’t make a Flash game that helps kids address anger-management, for example, unless it was a very boring one. Flat pages of text and graphics are basically the same as a textbook online and won’t appeal. Producing videocasts and podcasts of the existing content would be a step forward, but doesn’t help them come up with new ideas.

But games are not all the same, at the same time. Making games (perhaps like Perplex City Stories) that marry populist narratives with difficult learning was suggested as one answer to bringing the curriculum into education. But that’s not really been Channel 4’s angle on the area - could you make one about black homophobia or sex education? I have played some weird games in my time, but that would stretch the limit.

I guess that the way forward means involving the kids themselves in the programme. Marrying the mass appeal of something like Bebo with a documentary focus. But no, I have no idea what that would look like. And I have no idea how they could communicate about the sort of issues addressed by the ‘Batty Man’ documentary (can’t find a proper link). But I guess that they could initiate a conversation about the issue, and as an educational tool, that might actually prove more powerful than the traditional model of broadcasting information.

New recruit Matt Locke (speaking at the NMK Forum BOOK NOW *cough*), who is taking on the task of commissioning the content for the channel’s interactive content, clearly has an interesting and testing time ahead.

Spent the morning at Internet World and will be back tomorrow. However, for anyone who didn’t go today, let me give you the benefit of my initial reconnoitre:

1. Don’t arrive first thing. Such was the excitement that greeted the opening of the doors that there was a real scrum to get through, akin to Top Shop opening to Kate Moss collection yesterday. Sail through 30 minutes later would be my advice.
2. They have a ’system’ for printing out your name badge from your internet registration number. If you arrive during the scrum, someone will nick your badge to avoid waiting an extra minute for their own. That means you have to go back to the entrance and fill in the form again. By this point, you will be fuming - see point one, above. [If anyone meets a version of Ian Delaney who appears well-dressed, youthful and physically fit, give them a clip round the ear from me].
3. You might want to drop the laptop. No power sockets and no free wi-fi will turn the thing into a pointless burden after 2-3 sessions.
4. If you go to a seminar, do sit next one of the PA speakers. The place is really loud and people on the second row of some sessions I attended were complaining that they couldn’t hear.
5. This is very much a business conference/show. Don’t expect too many geeks in heavy metal t-shirts and trainers. Do expect a lot of suits. The Web 2.0 display area contains 5 tiny coffee tables. Email DM companies, on the other hand, command half the hall.
6. Plan your seminars. They were the main thing I went for, yet I ended up missing a couple that I really wanted to go to. One due to identity theft, but one due to poor planning. There are as many as six on at the same time. The Keynote stage was really packed for every session, but some of the other sessions are really good and have lots of spare seats to spread out on.
7. If you are meeting anyone who doesn’t have their own stand, make better arrangements than ‘I’ll ping you an email’. See point 3.
8. It’s in Earl’s Court 2 - so West Brompton is a better stop to aim for than Earl’s Court, all other things being equal.

See you tomorrow, perhaps, when I’ll have dropped that AC/DC t-shirt. I really had the feeling that the event was geared towards ‘mainstream catches up’ rather than ‘come and see the cutting edge’, but am happy to be proven wrong.