Archive for the 'Attention economy' Category

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Rethinking copyright and its scope creep

Published on July 8, 2009 in Media, with 0 Comments. Tags: , , .

Modern copyright has been influenced by an array of older legal rights that have been recognised throughout history, whose legacy development may be harming our future. It traditionally protected the moral rights of the author who created a work, the economic rights of a benefactor who paid to have a copy made, the property rights of the individual owner of a copy, and a sovereign's right to censor and to regulate the printing industry. I'm not going to say copyright is dead, but perhaps now irrelevant, given the evolution of media. As I've argued before, access to information is more valuable than ownership and modern copyright law doesn't recognise this fully.
Is copyright a little fuzzy?

Rethinking media
Media, content, and other related words essentially are words that reflect human expression. When you read a book or a newspaper article, it's another human being expressing something to you. That expression in turn, generates an experience for you - such as (but not limited to) interpretation, entertainment and reflection. You can't "capture" media and lock it in a jar - you can only remember it. No one can own the individual words in a body of text because no one owns a language. But that power of provoking emotions in other people is powerful and outright scary if you truly realise the power.

We are now seeing a dramatic evolution in the media landscape. The disruptive influence, of what was called "user generated content" yesterday and now called "social media", is making us rethink the media in our world. The thing is, it's the same thing as any media - it's human beings expressing themselves. The only difference now, is that the means of that expression has changed - less so technologically and more so the actual process - to one that is many-to-many.
This image is copyrighted

Rethinking value
Social media is about discussions rather than broadcasts. It's about the producer and consumer of the information interacting. Everyone has an opportunity to respond to my blog post here, and sometimes I respond. Other times I don't, but that doesn't matter because it still impacts me and future readers of my blog post with an alternative perspective.

What we are seeing now is a move way from the mass production of media, and a growth in the mass socialisation of media. It's not about how many people you can push your content to, but how engaging your content can be. The economic models supporting content are still evolving, but it's engagement that pays the bills. An engaged reader will be more receptive to advertising (which is increasingly important as advertising performance is now more accountable) and for the subscription model of content, engagement is what retains a customer. To retain a readership, you need compelling content.

However this old media adage about compelling content is changing. The socialisation of content isn't just about pushing content, as insomuch discussing it. It's about building a community of people that are passionate and interested: an expertise network where value comes from being in the same place as others that are like-minded. An example of this can be see with Read Write Web, who have created an exclusive community manager community. GigaOM, another innovator in the media space, has done the same thing for premium content that runs in parallel with its popular (free) blogs. Compelling content is now about building compelling communities. Copyright works well for static objects - but not so much for people interacting freely.
RWW aggregator

Rethinking copyright
This is a complex subject and I by no means am being definitive here. But I simply want to raise a question of what really is the value of copyright? If content is an expression that generates an experience in a human, then specific types of expression need specific treatment. And if compelling communities are now a new form of engaging with content, requiring a lock down on the content produced may actually hurt value. As another form of content, news has value in its immediacy and is useless a day later as the news is constantly evolving. There's no value of copyright there as 'time' is where news derives its value from - not long-term protection.

Should copyright be dead? No, that's not what I am arguing - rather, it needs a rethink of what exactly it's protecting, with its scope reduced. Like a parent protecting a child, if you protect them too much, they might never actually experience life, be happy and potentially ignorant to future dangers - which is what a parent is ultimately responsible for. The aggressive remarks of newspaper executives I've heard in the last month about being more aggressive in their copyright may not be the right solution. Protection of assets is valuable only when it enhances future value.

Let's be careful we not lose sight of what we are protecting and why.
Copyright is for losers

Can the newspaper industry please stop their damn whining

Published on June 26, 2009 in Media, with 0 Comments. Tags: , , , , , .

Google is not a blood sucking vampire. In fact, the newspaper industry is a spoilt little brat.

Search engines such as Google and aggregators (like the constantly criticised techmeme) provide a huge amount of economic value for the newspaper industry. They enable discovery by people that are not regular subscribers to their content. They provide traffic, which drive up the page views, that enable them to sell inflated prices for perceived access to an audience.

Newspapers put their content on the web for free by their own choice. They have plenty of ways of excluding their content from being freely accessible, either through a paid wall or technology conventions like the robots.txt...But they don't want to completely do that, because they lose the traffic.

Subscription models will be the future revenue model for content. One where people will pay for constant access to a particular information provider (as fresh access - not static objects - is where the real value comes from in information and especially in news). Of course, this means people with established brands can only do this as people will not pay unless they know what to expect. However despite their current lead in this game due to their century-old mastheads, the newspaper industry is refusing to solely go down this route. And the reason for this, is because they still rely on advertising for the majority of their revenue mix - and advertising is driven by traffic.

Newspaper executives want the economic value provided by search engines and aggregators in discovery and traffic - but they whine consistently because these innovative new businesses in the information age have found a way to monetise this function in the value chain.

The solution is simple: cut public access, and put all content behind a paid wall. And only participate in exclusive aggregators. The search engines and free aggregators no longer have your content to add to their mix - and yes, you Mr newspaper executive no longer get as much traffic. But that's what you get for being a whining little kid.

I am sick and tired of hearing industrial age executives refuse to compromise with information age business models.

The ‘always-beta’ culture is affecting more than just journalism

Published on June 8, 2009 in enterprise, Media and Trends, with 0 Comments. Tags: , , , .

always in betaMichael Arrington, one if the world's most successful bloggers, writes about the latest battle he's had against the mainstream media. He quotes the progressive journalism thinker Jeff Jarvis who identifies the conflict as a difference between "process" and "product" journalism. This is a brilliant step forward in understanding the evolution of the news media (highly recommend you read both posts), and to validate it, I will share how this very fact is true in other domains (specifically, web2.0 in the enterprise).

How I sold the idea of a wiki at PwC
In 2006, I pitched to senior management at my firm - the world's largest knowledge firm - that we were failing at how we did knowledge. More specifically, I argued that the systems in place was creating opportunity cost, because the way we viewed "knowledge" was wrong - and the systems we had only supported one type. As a solution, I proposed we implement Web2.0 tools as a way of changing this.

What I want to share more of however, is the actual problem I identified. It was a problem that senior management knew existed but in different words. What I did was give the intellectual justification that created the "ah-ha" moment.

Soft knowledge versus hard knowledge
Central to my thesis was that knowledge had a continuum, and that we have traditionally said knowledge was a product only. The physical output of knowledge in the industrial society has been some published form like a book or a magazine. This output therefore defined the perspective of this product - multiple reviews of the content, close scrutiny of what was being said, and careful consideration of what made the final cut. It was expensive to create a book, and so quite reasonably, we've aimed at making it perfect.

However most knowledge within a firm doesn't exist in a published form. When we talk about sharing knowledge within organisations, we are actually actually referring to having people talk to each other. Human conversation is the most established type of human knowledge transfer, and until the alphabet was adopted by various cultures, was the only way knowledge could be transmitted. This is called "soft knowledge", and it's not better or worse than "hard" knowledge, but just a different state on the continuum.

tree roots

Soft knowledge rapidly evolves. It never has a fixed state. Sometimes, it never ever makes it up the line to become "hard" knowledge, or solidified - but this doesn't make it useless. In fact, when it comes to doing our work, this tacit knowledge doesn't need a fixed state - it's a fluid piece of knowledge that will never justify it being published in a hard-bound book. Like a dynamic conversation between a group of people, the ideas are rapidly evolving so fast that trying to lock it down actually ruins the process. Soft knowledge is not so much a product but a process - like rapidly firing electrons remixing towards the goal of a more solid state.

The 'always-beta' culture
Technology is enabling us to evolve our ability to communicate. Its gone beyond a one-to-one and one-to-many model that we've traditionally been accustomed to, but now allowing a many-to-many model. This new form of communication is allowing knowledge to get better captured in this 'soft' state. Categories are no longer useful, even though as a society hierarchies and linearity is how we are accustomed to the world. We need to now become more adapt at analysing knowledge through a network.

When it comes to information (including the news), the value comes not from its accuracy but its availability. If I have an emergency situation on a client, I want all the available options for me to assist in my decision making. As a professional, I can then assess what route to take. Although pre-certification of knowledge has value in accuracy, sometimes full accuracy results in a bigger opportunity cost: inaction.

crushing waves

There will always be a place for news as a product. But what we need right now is to understand blogs do news differently, and potentially for news itself, might be a better model. And whether you like it or not, it's worked before- after all, we've been doing conversation now for close to a 100,000 years. If we never did it, we'd never end up to where we are now.