05.13.07
Posted in crowd sourcing, digital sharecropping, fear/uncertainty/doubt at 11:21 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Last week on Valleywag Nick Douglas had a fabulous piece entitled ‘The Future’s Five Enemies‘. In it he outlines the biggest threats facing anyone working to make technology better. Those enemies listed are:
- Baby Boomers – No, its not because this rapidly aging generation is going to soak up billions in health care, cause decreases in labor pools, and render social security for later generations insolvent. With any generation growing age brings a fear of change. And since these are the folks who write the laws (see ‘the government’, below) hampering change is a form of fear management.
- The Government – remember how Digg is in hot water because its users posted a certain number to it? Thank the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We have a political body made up of almost entirely lawyers attempting to make technology policy. Of course they don’t try and come up with this on their own – that’s what lobbyists from well funded corporate players are for (see IP industry below).
- The Movie/Music/IP Industries – Something happened in the 20th century. Toward the end major intellectual property owners realized that the real money wasn’t in creating something great and selling lots of it. Instead, they realized profits could be extracted infinitum by owning a few great ‘brands’ (i.e. Mickey Mouse) and merchandising till the universe implodes. Congress has successfully been lobbied to extend copyright 11 times in the past 40 years. It’s things like this that make singing ‘Happy Birthday’ without paying royalties a crime.
- Cell Phone Providers – It’s hard to think of a better example of a ‘consumer-lock-in’ than the cell phone industry. While number portability laws help most people wanting to jump to a new innovative service face draconian ‘early contract termination’ fees. And can you explain to me why I should be charged 10 times (or more) for data traffic than voice? It’s going out over the same line, right? Until that’s fixed we’ll never have mass adoption of a mobile-friendly web set of applications (different, I should point out, than Twitter, which might be an interesting application platform built on SMS).
- Web 2.0 – While Nick laments web 2.0 what he is actually driving at is the ‘crowd sourcing’ (or digital sharecropping) of labor by this class of applications. It’s where people are empowered by technology – to make money for big corporate interests. Whether it is YouTube, or MySpace, or Flickr, etc. users provide the content, ad networks provide the revenue stream, and the central repository profits. The big (Google, News Corp, Yahoo) get bigger while those providing the labor do so for free.
How correct is this list? What are your biggest concerns for the future?
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05.03.07
Posted in business, community building, crowd sourcing, engaged crowds at 7:54 am by Matthew Reinbold
For quite some time (like the last two years) businesses have seen crowd sourced websites as something akin to the Golden Fleece: for nothing passionate users would populate your website with rich content in volumes far greater than anything your own team could do (and they’d work for nothing more than the opportunity to have their account name at the top of a ‘best of’ list).
While some have been warning about the woes these site would suffer if they would bite the hand that feeds them things have worked out pretty well – until now. Digg is a ’social news website’. Users submit news stories and then vote the pieces up or down. In theory this is supposed to create a ‘democratic’ approach to the news.
Things got out of hand this Monday and Tuesday. As Pete Cashmore of Mashable recaps:
The backstory: a story including the number got to the front page, but was quickly pulled by a moderator. That led to another user reposting the story with the number in the description – “Spread This Number. Again”. That story was also pulled, at which point the mob piled in.
Clearly, they’ve now lost the fight over the key: almost every single story on the homepage, and 100% of the popular stories in the technology section are links to sites that aim to propagate that number. This key, for those who don’t know, is a series of numbers which will unlock copy-protected High Definition movies. The MPAA hates this of course, and there’s no one Diggers hate more than the MPAA and RIAA. DRM has met its match against a single-minded army numbering more than one million strong.
Late on Tuesday the public face and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, threw up his hands in defeat on his blog:
after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
A reader of Om Malik summed the situation up perfectly:
I think the real story here is user-generated content biting back when it’s actively censored by the site generating revenue from it.
Does this mean that crowd sourced efforts are inevitably doomed to have the serfs charge the castle? Why hasn’t this already happened with other aggregated news spots, like SlashDot?
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04.19.07
Posted in Social Media, crowd sourcing, social networks at 9:52 am by Matthew Reinbold
I don’t want to belabor the tragedy of what happened at Virgina Tech; it was obviously a very damaged individual who methodically planned the worst shooting rampage in American history. It will be some time before the family, friends, and community surrounding Virginia Tech will be able to find closure from the senseless violence.
A by-product of those events, however, is the emergence of technology in the telling of this story. On one hand, as Liz Gannes reports, places like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal are essential tools for the students to getting word out to loved ones – “I’m ok” seemed to be a reoccurring statement. I found very interesting that despite the public nature of these forums those looking for a story – or profiteering from the grief – were quickly put in their place:
In many cases this happened through groups that are publicly accessible, in part so people who don’t attend Virginia Tech could see them. And on these same message boards on the highly organized and easily searchable site, reporters arrived looking for sources, and were derided — appropriately, in many cases — as vultures looking for a soft spot of a carcass.
Despite the fact that students were expressing themselves to the world, they didn’t want someone else to come in and retool those expressions for another venue. Despite the utter lack of privacy of the public forum of user-generated content, mourners expected to be left in peace. And the standard brusque “no comment” was expressed in a public forum, accessible to all.
More chilling is the multi-media CD (DVD?) of materials that the shooter sent to NBC. In the month preceding the event he had put together an elaborate video and text package. Rather than unanswered questions or the mute ramblings of a note goodbye the victim’s families are left with a leering, vocal testament to the madness that took them.
The package is said to have contained a DVD or CD which held a PDF document with embedded QuickTime videos, digital photos, and 1800 words of run-on psycho text. The contents of the disc are said to have amounted to a total of 27 video clips and 43 still photos, each of which was separately captioned.
NBC has had to walk a fine line. On one hand the killer didn’t send the material to the FBI or a spurned lover – he sent it to a major news outlet for the express purpose of having it exposed. Playing clips only seems to be granting him his final wishes and torturing those left behind. On the other hand, there are comments like Dave Winer’s:
NBC has a dozen Quicktime videos of the Virginia Tech killer. They’re sifting through them and deciding what to release and what not to release. This is wrong. It’s 2007, and it’s a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what’s on those videos. Given enough time the focus will go on their process, much better to just let it all out now, with no editorial judgement.
So what is appropriate here? If we have the technology to effortlessly distribute is it always appropriate to do so? Are there some boundaries that should be observed? Or is that naive in this day and age?
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04.16.07
Posted in crowd sourcing at 7:41 am by Matthew Reinbold
Politic 2.0 is a Utah based company trying to use modern social networking tools to bridge the gap between politicians and their constituents. Last Wednesday they held their first virtual town hall with Representative Chris Cannon and a number of area bloggers. I was lucky enough to participate.
The tool’s centerpiece was a Digg like ranking system (based on the open source Pligg project). People in the room or those remotely watching the streaming video feed could submit question to the system. Those questions could then be voted up or down. The highest voted questions were then asked of the Congressman by a moderator.
The first event was not without problems. Those in the room were encouraged to blog about the event as it was happening. Between that, voting on issues, participating in the threaded discussions and listening to the speaker it was just too many cognitive shifts. Since asked questions had to be found, read, and then summarized by the moderator the pacing was also considerably slower than a room full of reporters. The lag between question submission, voting, moderator presentation, the Congressman’s answer, and the restart of the process also made asking follow up questions impractical.
So there are some problems to iron out. However, that shouldn’t diminish what the event was able to do – anyone, from anywhere could simultaneously participate in a dialog with an elected official. If Politic2.0 can address some of the quirks of the system they could truly be on their way to better connecting the people with those who represent them. I look forward to their next event.
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02.13.07
Posted in crowd sourcing, digital sharecropping, terminology at 9:33 am by Matthew Reinbold
Mathew Ingram, writing on the Social Media Today site, brings us the story of KFTY, a television station out of Santa Rosa, California. It’s owners, Clear Channel, fired all the reporters on staff in the name of giving citizen journalism a try. The result has been the dark side of crowdsourcing, or what is referred to as digital sharecropping.
Ironically, the station that is encouraging its viewers to create their own news media may be enabling its own irrelevance.
The Poynter Institutes site has more, and Dan Kennedy at MediaNation points out that citizen journalism is often a euphemism for getting content for nothing, to boost a content producers bottom line. But Dan makes a good point: since the technology is cheap and plentiful, what exactly does a citizen journalist gain by giving their content to a TV station for free, when they can just upload it to YouTube? In the long run, TV stations like KFTY may be sowing the seeds of their own irrelevance.
Sadly, I don’t expect this to be the last example of corporate interests trying to get by with only user contributions. Is there a good example out there of traditional media working alongside and being enriched by user contributions?
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02.12.07
Posted in business, crowd sourcing, video at 4:35 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Mitch Ratcliffe is a ZDNet reporter blogger. On a recent web post he talks about the brewing storm between Google/YouTube and the television networks. While that portion of the article has the usual copyright conversationalists in full glower mode the gems are buried toward the bottom. There, Mitch (quite correctly, I think) points out why YouTube is so important and won’t be replicated by a studio:
The local flavor, added by individuals who lovingly or hatefully recast media, is essential to the success of this form of media. It is the fact someone sits down and excerpts the significant parts of each episode of Lost, for example, that makes mainstream-derived media more popular on YouTube. Those edited contributions are the filter that allow people to decide whether to watch the whole show.
A studio portal would, by emphasizing the whole programs, put a damper on personal expression, making the place sterile and, well, much like television is already.
In other words, social media sites add value above and beyond the content that they’re covering. Unless the studios can recreate their businesses to harness the passionate contributions of their audiences any efforts by them will pale in comparison.
Update: Changed Mitch’s relationship to ZDNet as per comments below.
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02.05.07
Posted in community building, crowd sourcing at 5:00 am by Matthew Reinbold
In the last several weeks there have been multiple contests that hope to harness the power of crowds to better code. The first is B5 Media’s WordPress Custom Field Contest. From the contest announcement:
There is an often-overlooked aspect of WordPress that adds functionality that is more geared to a Content Management System than a blogging platform. And that’s why, perhaps, the world’s #1 blogging software finds that many users don’t really use Custom Fields.
I think that’s a travesty.
Meanwhile, over at CambiranHouse (a company built on crowd sourcing), they’re having their February contest to find the best idea to build. Sixteen ideas are competing for $10,000 prize money, much of which is meant to encourage development of the winning project.
Contests are a great way of generating interest around a product. Are they also a good way of rallying contributions too?
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