In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, "Content Aggregation is King?," the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again:

"Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create."

The deal between the a consortium of newspapers and Yahoo to outsource listings functions to Yahoo in return for a cut of revenue was predicated on the idea that there is a way to do some basic arbitrage on this situation, but even that doesn't work over the longer term. News media simply can't justify the cost of their content creation staffs, even if they get rid of the printing presses and costs of classifieds businesses. And they have yet to really deal with this (probably because they are still much larger than the aggregator sites even now).

Maybe, as the news media starts seriously shrinking the content pool, the aggregators will start to strike deals like Yahoo did, but more expansive and lucrative. Done right, such deals could raise all boats. For example, rather than aggregating traffic on one domain, Yahoo (or Google, etc.) could drive traffic to news media sites that federated their news with aggregated content from all over the Internet. A network of these sites, served by a single ad engine, could broaden the ad inventory far beyond what Yahoo would ever be able to support on its own and save some amount of a business model for content creators.

It may take a risk by someone on the scale of the 2001 AOL-Google deal, which similarly tied a content network to advertising engine. Marissa Meyer talked about it as "a very big bet, a revenue guarantee" to AOL:

"It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn't do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even... and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times."

Posted by ben at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

Posted by ben at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

In an article about the politics and economics of consumer choice in cable entertainment ("Bland Menu if Cable Goes à la Carte") in the New York Times, the author talks about how it's actually a good thing that the costs of producing niche programming are borne by all cable subscribers, as otherwise such programming would be very expensive and possibly not attract enough buyers to exist at all (even the most popular channel, ESPN, would rise from $3/month to $12/month). This makes sense, and could be a useful way of thinking about two other media businesses that are in some trouble: the Web and newspapers, both of which are in that bad à la Carte downward spiral.

In the case of the Web, despite the large amount of investment and growth in Web users, the economics still do not support niche content in any serious way. Small publishers have not made a living off of their content, depending on VCs or large distribution networks for investment to stay afloat, or publishing despite the lack of money. And even the most popular blogs on the Internet make a tiny amount of money compared to any other publishing medium like books, magazines, TV, etc. For example, Boing Boing is estimated to bring in $50,000/month in advertising revenue, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single full-page ad in a local magazine like New York generates the same amount of revenue. Traditional media companies like AOL and Yahoo! have tried to aggregate many small publishers and sell ads across all of them, but despite getting a lot of traffic for this content, the rates for ads remain low (and at flat growth rates). The money remains in search text ads. Jaron Lanier pointed out in an Op-ed that this model doesn't work for content authors.

In the case of newspapers, their audience is falling steadily and won't sustain the costs of keeping the staffs of reporters and editors working (let alone the costs of publishing in print). They have had some success working with internet networks like Yahoo!, but this is likely not sustainable nor will it replace enough revenue to keep things going at current spending levels (magazines haven't had the same problem, but that's another topic).

So given that the cable model supports a number (not a huge number, but a number) of niche content players, and given that the Internet functions well as a big lab for new ideas but not for building content businesses, maybe what's needed is a sort of content consortium, or at least association of creators, with thresholds for membership and the ability to bargain collectively for better compensation. This would be different from a union, more like the Author's Guild or Screen Actors Guild, where plenty of work is done outside their auspices, but productions that generate a lot of revenue must conform to standards of pay. The cable model shows that if companies seeking to exploit content have to buy in to a collective pool of content, content costs are lower while allowing even niche content to thrive. This model doesn't need the cable networks to work for the author's benefit.

In a rough environment for content creators, where the economics are against them (but no one wants them to stop creating), the authors and makers should hang together more than they are. Some kind of association would re-balance a business that is out of kilter, draining the money out of a very valuable part of the culture we live in.

Posted by ben at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

[see updates, below]

My brother, Michael A. Clemens, is an expert on issues of economic development and was recently asked to do a book review for the pre-eminent journal of thinking on international politics, Foreign Policy. I am not able to appreciate his work fully, but I know he's very smart and worked very hard to get to the point where his ideas can get the influence they deserve, and I am very proud of him and happy to share his name! In his honor, I want to rip off one of his frameworks and use it for my own purposes; pretty bad behavior, but that's family for you.

He divides thinkers on economic development for poorer countries into two camps: "planners" (who want to create grand visions for the future and fund large projects) and "searchers" (who want a more incremental and experimental approach to finding what works). If I butcher his arguments completely, I could say that he concludes that neither camp adequately and seriously takes on the complexities of actually improving the economic situation of developing countries at all, however. Development is hard to do, and there are no short-cuts.

Far away from the moral value of his work and in my petty world of Internet bullshit, there is an analogous divide, between "storytellers" and "searchers." The storytellers are usually the big thinker types and designers, who believe in their ability to imagine a solution, build excitement, tell the story of how it will make things better, and make it happen. The searchers don't believe in stories anymore, they trust hard facts and cold reality, eschewing fanciful stories for careful scientific principles and evolutionary methods.

In engineering, the culture is heavily weighted toward the searchers. In design and marketing, the culture is weighted toward the storytellers. For example, today visual artists were described to me as interfering with good design decisions in Web sites, "failed artists" who shouldn't been taken as seriously as "an architect, say." This is clearly a searcher perspective, heaping scorn on the emotional side in favor of 'more serious' approaches. Conversely, the storytellers will deride the 'incrementalism' and 'lack of ambition' of the searchers, wishing for the 'next game changing idea' to emerge out of some yeasty marathon whiteboard brainstorm.

Recently this article about the weaknesses of "democratized design" looks disapprovingly at the new "hack culture" of participatory innovation, saying that genuinely new things ("like the iPod" --ugh) can't be produced "by committee"; the clear implication is that a single person's great idea (storyteller) will beat a mob of tinkerers (searchers). I'm not sure about that either; seems too grandiose.

You can even find parallels to this in ancient philosophy, where Plato exalted the unseen ideal (storyteller) and Aristotle wanted to ban plays and poems because they distorted clear thinking (searcher). Being a designer, I constantly find myself on the wrong side of whatever group I'm in. Being able to draw a picture of something does not count nearly as much as code, but I am addicted to the power of stories. I have attempted to bridge this gap by becoming a designer who builds, but most people I know still sort themselves firmly into one of the two groups.

In fact, the abstract nature of Web products allows people to work purely in one camp or the other, without a hard need (other than the success or failure of their projects) to cross the divide in their thinking. This is apparent all the time in the whining of designers and their fantasies of becoming dictators to engineers bound to execute whatever they say, and the resentment engineers have toward the promiscuous, irresponsible, and arbitrary ideas of airhead designers. This game is stacked against a synthesis right now, and we're all worse off.

Ultimately, I come down on the side of the storytellers, but try to make a practice of humility about my ideas, checking them relentlessly against reality. The best practice is like life-drawing from a model: make a bold line and decide how you want to show a subject, but constantly look back and forth from your sketch to the person in front of you, making sure your drawing still has a likeness.

Update: This article on egotistical architects bemoans the masturbatory elitism of top architects, and feints briefly with democratic design ideas before coming down on the side of the elitists:

[Democratic design advocate Bruce] Nussbaum is dreaming if he thinks democracy and design are seriously compatible. Truth is, they're not even love muffins.

This is partly because specialism - as in honed, polished expertise - is the core of what we call civilization. Designing your own may bring spiritual satisfaction, and homegrown design may be less ill-advised than homegrown, say, brain surgery. But be it blog, bog or village, it still has that unmistakable backyard look.

"Design democracy" is a feelgood idea, and that's about the only quality it offers. As the Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy told last year's Aspen Ideas Festival: "If I was competing with the US, I would love to have the students … spending their time on this kind of crap. To be a great designer is very hard. It's not about your friends [liking] something you did."

It's hard because humans are hierarchical primates. Only the few can be great at design or anything else. To be a great architect - a Brunelleschi, say - may require a self-belief so vast as to be limitless, but it also requires more than a Botoxed self-portrait as proof.

Meh, seems like they are trying to have it both ways. I think it's all about tension, not one extreme or the other. You could create a simplified two-card Oblique Strategies deck, with one card reading "let the usage and ideas of ordinary people be your guide" and the other reading "trust only your instincts and ruthlessly pursue what you think is best," and switch strategies randomly!

Update 2: An Economist blogger flagged Michael's review, and highlighted an idea that was implied in the review my brother wrote, that the only development strategy that made sense was allowing freer emigration to functioning economies (rather than trying to pursue 'planner' or 'searcher' strategies in countries that are so screwed up that no strategy is implementable. This made me wonder what the analogue to my world might be, and I think it's something along the lines of opening up companies and products so that their data and ideas are more portable and free. If products are 100% interoperable and your data is your data (not trapped or siloed) but completely portable, we could have a faster, easier evolution of better networked products and services. As it is, people satisfice; sticking with some things just because it's hard to move data around and nothing works easily with anything else.

Posted by ben at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

In a meeting last week, I said I wanted to try to involve some other designers in a project, but just got a blank look and the question "what can design do?" — designers can't really help with the actual making of the product, they meant. Ugh. It's true: Silicon Valley-type engineers and other very smart people have put designers to shame by creating products and services that no one imagined but that many can't live without, and for which design is just not critical.

Rather than working within people's needs and expectations (the traditional approach of practical-minded designers), the work of engineers has changed people's habits, thinking, and behavior. Designers are relegated to optimizing a use-case, working out the complexities, or putting a nice shiny coat of varnish on top (and rounding the corners). This approach, and the "undesigned" look of Google, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. has led people to talk about design more as marketing (and to be avoided) than as part of the product. The real work is in the engineering, and invention happens there first.

I've tried the fancy idea of using "design thinking" as a way of making product decisions, to be more strategic (and less production-oriented). It works for IDEO, but not so well for me — it feels more like business development than inventing. Heroically, Bruce Nussbaum has tried to save us all by equating design and innovation, as the secret sauce that will enable the West to compete with China, etc., but I don't think it's gonna stick.

Ok, I'm starting to finally get it: this may be a time when the myriad possibilties of creating new-to-the-planet things means engineering. But I am not ready to give up all the fun to those folks! I would rather undergo some wrenching adjustments to what it means to "design" and be relevant again. I want to be able to say that 'design creates new things to make people happy,' not 'design makes it look pretty or more usable.'

Like an architect would, I am going to have to know a lot more of what an engineer does, and be able to work directly with a good part of the code if I really want to play in the deep end of the pool. I am going to start designing in code, maybe bullshit, arty code, but code nonetheless. This is a little rough and later in life than I would have liked, but what the fuck, bring it on!

technorati tags:design, designers, engineers, web

Posted by ben at 3:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

This screengrab is the list of tags for a Flickr photo I ran across randomly. It feels more like micro (or nano?) blogging than tagging, in fact it's anti-social!

I love casual personal revelations. It feels like there is a great deal of rich meaning in fragments of thoughts and ideas set down semiprivately (in a search box, or a tagging input) that is lost in the ultra-self-conscious blog post. Also, making a disorganized list of thoughts is more personal than a diary entry. It feels like there are several epiphanies somewhere in gathering my private thought fragments and using social media and networks to connect them to other people's fragments.

technorati tags:tags, terms, private, thoughts

Posted by ben at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

At my job (and in Silicon Valley in general I think), Agile development is supposed to be the best way to do things. Specifically, the Scrum method encourages an evolutionary approach, where an entire team works together in short cycles and creates a product iteratively (first a barely-functional demo, then a rough prototype, then a more finished version, etc.), without an overall plan.

Scrum works very well for implementation, since it empowers a team to do its own planning, breaks a large project down into brief chunks and reduces the amount of churn and decision-making that can cause delays and rework. It is an approach with an evolutionary philosophy: no one can know at the outset what the right solution is, so let's just start working and refine as we go.

Coming from the perspective of design, there are some built-in tensions to this approach, however. Design as a discipline has as an article of faith that people can sit down and create a drawing or visualization of an idea that will make things better, and that this idea can help push the expansion of what's currently possible to engineer (this is not to say that only designers can do design, just defining the activity, everyone does design all the time).

Scrum allows no time for the messy task of conceptualization (other than beforehand), and divides up all the aspects of a project into small, unintegrated tasks, making it hard to see the 'big picture.' The team-focused environment encourages strong collaboration, but does not ensure that the value of a product is realized by itself (and the proponents of the method don't claim it does, either). In fact, the method ensures that engineers, designers, and product people spend less time thinking about whether the product is the right product overall.

What's needed is less of a focus on methodology, and more of a focus on ideas and people's talents. Scrum is a fine method to do work, but doesn't actually solve the problem of making good products. Rather than talking about intelligent design vs. evolution and assuming that one way of doing things explains the entire world, we should be valuing time spent on hard thinking and idea generation just as much as we value the time spent implementing things. There are certainly limits to emphasizing creativity, but there is a sameness to Web products these days I think. We need more really new ideas.

Update

People are fundamentally spiritual beings, with big needs for meaning and a sense of themselves in relation to the world (whether they believe in God or not). Scientific thinking is always needed and important. But what we most need now is that messy old-time religion: creative thinking, design thinking, the faith that we can know the right thing to do, to make the world better.

Posted by ben at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

There's nothing quite like taking care of my daughter to blast away selfishness, bitch-slap my inner child, napalm my therapist, etc. And I'm doing just great. Right about the time I'm congratulating myself on how far I've come is great timing for another reminder, though.

Just the other day, we had a blow out. I had fed her (well, she's pretty good at feeding herself, I was just there to make sure she didn't decide to throw the bowl) and I was eating my own food, which she wanted some of. I refused to give her any, and she put her head right down on the cold floor and wailed and cried. She kept it up, no matter how I try to distract her, and trying to hold her just made it worse. Even after a half-hour of this I couldn't comfort her, and only my wife was able to hold her and calm her down. Over my wife's shoulder she looked at me with the burning eyes of someone safe from the enemy.

We make up of course, she's fine (she's always great). But damn it all if I wasn't left with hurt feelings. In some ridiculous way I want taking care of her to be personally fulfilling. What a crock of shit! It's one of those times when I have to look at my psyche and just shake my head, sadly. (I'm not alone though. Every month we get Parents magazine for some reason -- we didn't order it and never renew it -- and in every issue there is an article about how to get the most fulfillment out of raising a child.) The latest version of my personal mantra is to take care of her:

1. ...without being a rigid asshole
2. ...while staying open and intimate with her
3. ...without being wishy-washy, negotiating with her, or becoming pedantic
4. ...while staying in sync with my wife's style and expectations of her

and above all:

5. ...with the ability to let go of any desires for personal gratification I might want for what I do for her.

Technorati Tags: baby, parent, psyche

Posted by ben at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ()