Ted Shelton

Supernova

The Bee will be at Supernova 2006 next week (or at least, I will be there representing the Bee...) I decided to throw together a Bee about the event -- http://www.personalbee.com/bee_reader.php?grpno=1309

Destination vs. Journey

From the perspective of mobility, the automobile is the mass-customization post-industrial technology.  Railroads are industrial transportation -- they follow specific fixed paths and travel on time schedules -- they efficiently move large numbers of people at once from a particular place to another particular place.  Railroads helped define where cities would develop and how they would thrive. 

By contrast the automobile allows a single individual to choose his or her own destination, route and time of travel.  The rise of the automobile over the last 75 years has slowly brought about the transformation (if not death) of the railroad, suburbanism which has eroded the importance of cities, and of course free love...

When considering the coming impact of the Internet on mass media, there is a lot for us to learn in looking at the history of the automobile and how it transformed particular aspects of our industrial society in unexpected ways. Where the automobile brought mass customization to mobility, the Internet is bringing mass customization to our media experience.

Revolutionaries and Conservatives
The problem with revolutionaries is that they believe that they can see the future that is coming and, seeing it so clearly themselves, they are then impatient for their vision to become a reality.  Look at Marx.  Go reread Das Kapital.  You'll be surprised at the degree to which Marx's ideas are commonly accepted by our society today, 150 years later.

The problem with conservatives is their visceral reaction to the impatience of the revolutionaries (and to the language these revolutionaries use).  Certainly they have a status quo to defend.  But it becomes especially easy to reject all aspects of the future vision when the revolutionaries insist that the coming change is imminent.  And when the revolutionaries use incendiary language... How ridiculous to think that the world will simply change tomorrow!  The calmer of this group may say "sure change is coming, we just don't know when."  The most reactionary will claim that the revolutionaries are wrong about everything, since they are so clearly wrong about the timing (and their approach).

The human experience of change indicates that both of these extremes are rarely correct.  Change occurs more gradually then we expect but also affects us in surprising ways.  It would have been hard, for example, to have predicted the role in the "sexual revolution" that many thinkers now ascribe to the automobile.

Paradigm Shift
One of the places to look for fractures between the visions of revolutionaries and the reactions of conservatives is in the way in which they frame the subject of their concern.  Recognizing the inherent contradictions in the way that entrenched practitioners think about their area of speciality and the way in which newcomers approach the same issues can provide a lens through which the impending change may be understood. 

Thomas Kuhn (in his book Structure of Scientific Revolutions) called these changes "paradigm shifts" -- the process through which scientists move from disdain through doubt to acceptance of new scientific theories.  This same sort of paradigm shift occurs outside the scientific realm, anytime a group of specialists debates the way in which their field is changing.  Where scientific theories are typically explanation of physical phenomena that do not in themselves change -- our understanding of them changes (hopefully improves) -- the paradigm shifts I am talking about here are changing understanding of social phenomena -- that DO change, necessitating the changes in our understanding.

Destinations vs. Journeys
To carry forward the idea of mobility, one way of understanding the difference today between the entrenched practitioners of mass media, and the revolutionaries pounding on the doors of the establishment is to think about travel as a metaphor for media.  While any metaphor breaks down at some point, they are useful because they provide frameworks for thinking about issues and ideas.

Consider the traditional media practitioner's approach to the value of content. An element of content, whether an article, a song, or a movie, is a destination. The content is valuable in itself.  It needs to be locked up behind gates (copyright) so that a toll can be collected from visitors.  Destinations have unique value - they are not commodities.

Contrast the view of content as a destination with that of the media revolutionary.  Each individual element of content is merely one vista, one landmark, one roadhouse along the way.  What is important is not the destination but the journey.  Content should not be locked up, it should be distributed as broadly as possible, in order to influence travelers, not capture visitors.

Of course neither of these views is perfect.  And a source of conflict between the revolutionaries and the reactionaries is that both sides would like their vision of media to be pure.  But content consumers have always been travelers -- there has always been an element of influencing the traveler in each destination that old media presented to a visitor.  And will always be an element of being a destination in the content vistas that new media offers to passing traveler, intent on influencing their journeys.

But it is in understanding the weight of destination vs. journey that we can appreciate the subtle transformation that media is undergoing in this post-industrial age.  Back now to the automobile.

Mass customization of mobility
The railroad, like the printing press, created a logic of a certain kind of network.  Centralized organization, planned distribution, and usage patterns that caused people, goods, and information to follow certain proscribed patterns.  The railroad reinforced and supported the industrial age urge to collect ourselves into urban centers.  Within the city rail transportation could be economically provided to move citizens from home to market to workplace. Between cities, rails could efficiently and swiftly move goods and people (and information) on fixed schedules.  Cities with rail stations grew prosperous and those without disappeared.  The railway station became so important that it established the very definition of time in early industrial society as people had to adjust themselves to the schedule of trains coming and going from their town.

The emergence of the automobile in the early twentieth century, and its acceleration after World War II transformed our expectations of mobility and the very fabric of our society.  Automobiles allow people to live further from markets and jobs.  As a result, suburban neighborhoods develop around urban areas, sapping cities of taxes and jobs.  Larger and more efficient stores evolve, destroying smaller individually owned and operated stores. Ironically mass customization of mobility lead, in many cases, to an increase in the industrialization (or at least centralization) of other aspects of our society.

The lesson here is that emergent technologies tend to impact society in ways that create greater market efficiencies.  Wal Mart is successful because their model allows good to be provided at a much lower cost to citizens than the corner store.  Wal Mart exists, in part, because the automobile allows citizens to travel greater distances to centralized distribution facilities to obtain the packaged good they require for daily life.

Mass customization of media
The Internet is changing patterns of consumption, much as the automobile did.  Consumers can now obtain whatever content they wish, at whatever time they wish.  While mass media provided railroad like efficiencies for its day in delivering people to specific content destinations, increasingly the Internet is being used for journeys that are personalized in ways that mass media could never afford to provide.

In this mass customized media world, new market efficiencies will emerge and erode the value of existing institutions, while creating new opportunities.  The erosion in the cost of distribution and the physical territory that a given media outlet can reach, for example, tends to take value away from the physical assets of printing presses, trucks and newsstands.  However, it creates the possibility of identifying a geographically diverse group of consumers interested in a specific topic, and allows for an economical production and distribution model to evolve.  The result in this case will be more targeted media products that deliver greater value for niche markets.

The Wal Mart of the media space will almost certainly be advertising networks -- Google's AdSense for example.  In the new distributed publishing world, the business of selling advertising can be centralized because it is so inexpensive to distribute the results of these sales to each individual (down to the individual consumer). Just as with the automobile, mass customization will mean that certain aspects of our society will become more centralized.

Where Should Mass Media Go?
There are a number of business models available to publishers, the recording industry, and Hollywood. And there is time for these companies to make the transition, if they grasp the opportunity.  There will be a period during which media consumers still behave in the old ways, follow the old railroad tracks to the city centers, even though they now have cars that allow them to disperse into suburban neighborhoods. Companies can utilize the advantages that they have created in the old media economy to create positions of value in the new media economy.

But it is important to identify and invest in the specific aspect of the new media model where a given specific company can build its new advantages.  Is the advantage in having a deep and specific expertise such that the company can become a topical authority and derive value from that position? Or is it an understanding of and a relationship with a specific audience that allows your company to bring a variety of products to the attention of that audience, thus deriving value from the position as "guide" for those journeys?  Or can your company create value in a segment of newly centralized components of the value chain -- aggregating advertising for example -- such that new economies of scale are realized. Economies that support a mass customized consumption.

These are the decisions that are ahead for media reactionaries and revolutionaries alike.  While it is unlikely that the media landscape will be entirely changed by the time we awaken tomorrow morning, it is also unlikely to take the 50 years it took from the introduction of the automobile to the summer of love...

 

Puff Piece on IE 7

Note to Richard MacManus -- have you actually used IE7? If you had you might not have written this piece in such an embarrasing way. To write that the reason the IE team has taken so long to get 7 out the door is because they "...wanted to really push things even further" is either an embarrassing admision of failure by Tony Chor or a thoughtless repetition of Microsoft marketing speak. The reality is that IE 7 hasn't even caught up with where Firefox is today, much less pusing further.

From an outside perspective I have to sit here and think that the IE7 versus Firefox development race is going to go down in history as one of the great examples of how the open source community is not only able (as in Linux) to duplicate well understood stable product categories, but is actually able to innovate circles around a commercial product. Firefox is more stable, more secure, handles questionable HTML much more gracefully, has more built in features... but perhaps the most important thing about Firefox is the open plugin architecture which means that 100s of innovative applets have been built that extend Firefox in ever imaginable way. The closed box mentality of Microsoft simply cannot compete.

Furthermore, insisting on a proprietary browser strategy now hurts Microsofts attempts to promote the development tools and server strategy. I, for one, will not even evaluate Atlas (Microsoft's Ajax development kit) because I don't trust them. Sure, it works great on Firefox today. But the market keeps evolving. What happens when Firefox adds something that Atlas doesn't support? What happens when IE adds something proprietary that Atlas DOES support? Divergence. Lock in.

The best thing that Microsoft could ever do for itself is ADOPT FIREFOX AND ABANDON IE. First of all they could have a huge marketing win by proving to the market once and for all that they have no intention of hijacking Internet standards with their own proprietary browser. Second, they could save a lot of money by not perpetuating their own browser development team, and the few people they did keep on that project could make contributions back to the open source community gaining Microsoft further accolades. Finally, they could actually have a good product.

Executive Summary

Working on a new executive summary to describe the Bee to potential investors and found myself writing something more philosophical and appropriate for this blog space... so here you go:

Warren Buffet remarked at an investor meeting that newspapers are a business “in permanent decline.”  In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch observed that “…the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.” By all accounts, the newspaper industry, a $50 billion per year business in the US alone, is at the cusp of an enormous transformation.  And the coming changes reach far beyond daily news and into every kind of news publishing enterprise.

“Everybody is a network,” writes Jeff Jarvis, a longtime newspaper editor and now media consultant.  He goes on to describe how the centralized news networks are collapsing and a new kind of network is emerging:

“Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit.

Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid."

The Internet has fundamentally, radically, changed the economics of information distribution. Certainly the cost of distributing content is dropping to zero, but it is even more important to look at how roles in the information distribution process have been turned upside down.  Murdoch summarizes the history of media as a “…highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know.” We are rapidly moving toward a future in which the news we care about comes to us through the social and business networks we participate in.  And our reading behavior will in turn inform “editors” (whether human or computer) what we should know.

The Personal Bee is about social media.  It is about the coming fractalization of the news media industry, the empowering of social and business networks to become participatory consumers of news content, and about how attention will be aggregated and monetized in this new distributed publishing world.

Open letter to Pete Cashmore at Mashable

In response to Mashable's note on The Personal Bee.

Pete --

Thanks for the fair observations on our current state of progress with The Personal Bee.  By the way I am a regular reader of Mashable and find your writing always insightful and interesting.  This case is no exception -- you are right that we are working toward serving a mainstream audience (not the geek audience). 

Many Web 2.0 companies are trying to launch with a "bang", throwing exciting features out to the "53,651" in order to get their first 25,000 visitors...  Perhaps this is all influenced by Seth Godin's really interesting book Purple Cow in which he argues that companies must have extraordinary products.  But I think that the problem with a "bang" is that it is over almost as soon as it begins.  There isn't even a long tail...

My approach might better be thought of as a snowball.  Yes we launched "so early that it was practically unusable" but by doing so we received an enormous amount of useful feedback on what was most important to people and what would be most important to our business model. Sure, we could have tried to do that behind a fire-walled beta.  But a core part of our product value is what we call Social Media and behind a private beta, social connections break down quickly.

Now we are in the second phase of our test process -- the site that you describe (fairly) as "clunky."  This version has allowed the snowball to grow in size and speed.  We have learned much more about what is important to our users and to our business model.  Phase 3 is just around the corner - in early June.  And we already have started work on Phase 4.

I would love to talk to you more about why people want to create Bees.  Or even why you might want Bee content to appear on Mashable.  Please feel free to contact me anytime to talk about what the Bee is and is becoming.

best

Ted Shelton, CEO
The Personal Bee, Inc.

Who will pay for the news?

Tom Foremski offers an important set of thoughts on a burning question for new media in his post today "Cherry Picking Advertising and Not Paying For the Journalism" The core question of Tom's post is, who will pay for a free, independent, objective, high quality news media in an age where advertisers spend their money with third parties like Google and Craigslist? In a media where the edges are monetized, what will lie in the center and where will it come from?

I reject part of Tom's hypothesis in which he states that amateur journalists are by definition amateurish. I do not subscribe to the theory (closely held by journalists) that only journalists know how to report. In fact, I think that mainstream media (MSM) has proven countless times that their "professional" ranks are full of amateurs. And there is increasing evidence from the blogosphere that high quality reporting can be done by people whose jobe title and training are not "journalist."

But the broader question is still valid. Aside from who will do journalism, who will pay for journalism. f course, depending upon the kind of journalism the answer is easy. The hardest category to address is political journalism, or journaism which is challenging the establishment (whether business or government) since those entities are powerful and would prefer not to have this kind of journalism occur anyway.

I have been thinking about this a lot and reading a very good book by Stephen Mitchell -- The History of News. One of the interesting insights is that the thing we all call "old media" is very new -- sure, it has been around for most of the industrial age. But the media was a very different animal in pre-industrial times (that is, for most of human history).

Before we had an "independent" and "objective" media we had partisans paying for journalism. Economic partisans paid to find out things important to their businesses (did the spice ship sink on the way back from India?) and political partisans paid to influence social perceptions and thus events. Of course there were also the minstrels who sung of anything entertaining and were given dinner and a little change for their efforts.

Having grown up with a free, independent, objective media I have come to assume that this is valuable and important to upholding our democracy. But my experience of the media's inability to challenge the current administration in Washington points to the flaw in that thinking. Perhaps a more partisan press would actually be a benefit to society.

And whether we like it or now, with the demise of mass advertising, it looks like we will see the demise of mass media, and with it the economic motivation to produce an "objective" news product. We may come to expect news in the future to be subsidized by those that have an opinion they wish to present.

YubNub Bee Search

Sitting here at MashupCamp I have added the Personal Bee search to YubNub as an experiment. The A9 guys would like us to add it to OpenSearch as well... but for now I have done a simple implementation -- just a search for a text string on all feeds in the Bee database and all date ranges. Later I will go back and add the ability to specify a particular Bee (a collection of feeds around a topic) and a specific date range...

If you want to give it a try, go to YubNub -- http://yubnub.org/ and use the command "bee" and your search string. For example:

bee mashupcamp

Will give you all articles in all feeds with the word mashupcamp...

Mashup the Mashup

Anyone who wants to include the Mashup Camp Bee phrase map can use our widget... here is the code to get the top 10 phrases:

<script language="JavaScript"
 src="http://www.personalbee.com/bee_reader.php?grpno=353&format=embed&nphrases=10&narticles=0"
 type="text/javascript">
</script>

Here are the online docs for our widgets...

Mashup Camp

I am spending today and tomorrow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, attending Mashup Camp, a gathering of 300 people all interested in how the next wave of the web is going to be one in which we mix things together... I created a Bee of blog posts and articles coming out of the conference, initialy for myself -- but then realized that others might be interested to see it, so here it is:

Mashup Camp Bee

If you use it and have comments on the Bee, I'd love to hear them!  Email me at:

tshelton (a) personalbee.com

Death of Media?

This morning I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch fame. In addition to discovering that our paths had crossed in an earlier life (he worked on WhoWhere's abortive run at going public while he was at Wilson Sonsini as a lawyer) we had a great conversation about the Personal Bee and the category of next generation news discovery tools.

One of the interesting topics that we tangeted off into was whether products like the Bee would be the death knell for old media. Michael took the position that the Bee (and Memeoandum and others) were an enormous threat to traditional newspapers and media companies.  I have a somewhat more hopeful view.

There is no question that a failure to grapple with the new interaction-rich, re-mixable, reader-powered media tools now coming to the market will doom particular media companies.  But at the same time, these traditional news-gathering and publishing enterprises do have valuable assets and advantages, and some of these companies will come to understand how to utilize these resources within the new media world.

Perhaps the best way to put this is, if you mean that the old ways of doing business within the media production and distribution value chain are dead, I agree.  If you believe that this necessarily dooms all of the old media brands and businesses, I disagree.  Certainly some companies will fail to make the transition (some already have failed).  But some will survive and make the transition and become even bigger and more vibrant than before.