Hopper Analytical - Long-Tail

Online Participation Headed Towards Democratic Utopia or Civic Demise?

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:59:06 -0400

On Thursday, the MIT Center for Future Civic Media as part of the MIT Communications Forum and Civic Media Series hosted a talk between Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein, moderated by Henry Jenkins and entitled "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly." The premise, of which I was skeptical, was to get Cass and Yochai to duke it out over whether internet participation was headed anywhere good. I was dubious of MIT staging a scholarly drama, but Benkler, Sunstein, and Jenkins have written three of the (arguably) most important recent works on the participatory internet, and for that fact alone, attendance was mandatory.

Many great arguments were articulated, all of which can be heard here. To nutshell it, Sunstein stayed true to his books stating that pervasive individual self-selection on the internet is leading to insulation and a lack of diversity. He paraded out the tired old The Daily Me argument and the so-called echo chamber effect. He suggests that democracy itself is at risk, as it requires diverse input, the exchange of unshared knowledge, and serendipitous encounters to function effectively.

Benkler refused to outright disagree with Sunstein, but instead focused on the positive effect of empowering individuals to participate online. He argued that individuals who perceive they can influence society's agenda become more engaged in civic discourse and behave more responsibly in this context. I took this to mean that individuals who feel they can make a difference are more likely to be engaged (vs. detached), develop meaningful arguments (vs. complain), and try to make a productive difference (vs. passivity).

While I agree with Sunstein's desire for diversity and serendipity and with Benkler's excitement over individual feelings of empowerment, I was disappointed that neither questioned the tired and quaint notion of the web being nothing more than a series of echo chambers. I wonder if either looks outside their inboxes to see what's really going on. Here is where Jenkins should have jumped in and schooled them on growing participation across diverse online communities, the wildly serendipitous (if not downright chaotic) information exchange found on Twitter, and individual interest (and subsequent sharing) expanding outward across every category of long tail media and knowledge. I would go farther to argue that emerging social norms in online interactions encourage diverse information dissemenation and punish the types of insular behavior that Sunstein and Benkler seem to accept as universal.

Undoubtedly, there are specific examples where echo chambers do exist, and link analysis shows narrow patterns of interaction in, for example, select political blogs, but I would argue that the internet is just a wee bit more than link spam littering the bottom of inflammatory blog posts.

I live-twittered the event. Here are some selected Tweets
(These are not direct quotes but rather real-time paraphrasing what I took each speaker to mean. Greatness is theirs. Mistakes are mine):

Benkler: What happens instead of a few elite that can set the agenda, we now have 3 million who believe they can affect their society
Yochai suggests that traditional mass media is more polarizing (fox news, radio talk shows) than the web's perceived echo chamber effect
Sunstein: How much serendipity we embrace depends on what we're regularly exposed to
Show of hands: 3/4 of the Bartos Theater audience have edited Wikipedia
We need a new model for understanding human behavior that builds in imperfection to allow for the possibility of true collaboration
Benkler: If you feel you have the ability to influence the cultural agenda, your concerns migrate from complaints to considered positional arguments
Sunstein, in response to what web tools should come to be: Stimulate curiosity. Once curiosity is triggered, it is very hard to resist
Triggering participatory activity requires, in part, for individuals to feel their efforts are needed and wanted
1st order diversity = range within our group (different people); 2nd order diversity = range across groups (different groups)
Sunstein: 4 probs in deliberation: amplify individual bias, polarization, early words initiate cascade, shared knowledge crowds out unshared

When the Customer Sets the Price

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:55:17 -0400

As you have no doubt heard, Radiohead skipped the middleman with their latest release, offering the album online for download. This resulted in an estimated $10 Million in profits from 1.5 million downloads over the past week, more than the first week sales of their last three albums combined. Not too shabby, particularly when users could set their own price for the download, including being able to set the price of nothing. Radiohead's VRM-like experiment did trigger a flood of promotion, but at the end of the day, fans still volunteered to cough-up an average of $8 per album. Gets one thinking, don't it?

We will undoubtedly see more stunts like this to promote online sales, along with an increasing willingness to go cheaper and wider by offering digital downloads for free. But I want to know, will we see more customer-driven price setting? It feels a little like a public radio pledge drive, essentially asking the customer at transaction time - what is this worth to you? Applying this sort of purchasing model to product transactions is one approach that the VRM project is exploring - where the customer takes a more proactive stance in setting the relationship terms with vendors. Doc Searls introduces this idea in the context of public broadcasting at the tail-end of a Berkman.tv video on the future of public media. Don't miss the first part of the video either, as Jake Shaprio takes on predicting the future.

The Long Tail of Consumer Demand

Thu, 3 May 2007 22:23:52 -0400

Thanks to the Project VRM team, I now understand the concept of a personal RFP (Request For Proposal). The idea is simple: have the individual consumer dictate what they want and at what price. Let the vendors who can match this need come to them rather than the other way around. Product marketers currently have an annoying habit of telling us what we need and then inundating us with a sea of unsolicited communications around products we may not want. Removing this vendor behavior would reduce an unwanted advertising burden on the consumer (annoyance) as well as on the marketer (cost). This should decrease total unit costs, and by extension the cost to the consumer.

A Project VRM participant (I believe it was Chris Carfi as referenced here) suggested that Google’s AdWords already is a great a vendor matching tool for highly-personalized consumer requests – albeit around the broader realm of information rather than more specifically of products (I’m paraphrasing). I think he was implying that an AdWord ad is a real-time response to an individual's "three word RFP" (e.g. keyword search).

Leading up to this insightful comment, I had been noodling on who might be the perfect VRM vendor. If we found a good fit to sponsor a VRM initiative, the solution definition and adoption would be a cinch. The secret is to find a vendor with a unique customer acquisition problem that can be best addressed by the VRM model – an organization that would benefit only if consumers were driving the relationship and a traditional vendor-consumer model just wasn’t working. This is essentially the crossing-the-chasm strategy for high tech products – focus on a vertical that is uniquely positioned to benefit from the format and structure of your solution. In essence, who is the perfect vendor candidate for what VRM could provide?

Traditional large product companies would probably be a bad fit for VRM. Their competencies are centered on creating narrow demand, not addressing widespread niche demand. Chris’s comment about AdWords got me thinking that when looking at a personal RFP, you are essentially looking at the Long Tail of demand – a big chunk of typical, common requests followed by an endless sea of nuanced consumer need. But large, traditional companies are experts only at The Short Head of product options. The combined forces of scarce shelf space and the economies of scale explains why these companies meet demand the way they do and are wholly unprepared to respond to individualized consumer demand. For example, scarcity of parking and the economies of mass production explain why you won’t find a convertible, hybrid-powered rental car with an MP3 player. For many existing mass-market products, these laws push less consumer choice into the short head of product options. In other words, they will not respond to the majority of personal RFPs. But then, who will?

I propose that those best suited to responding to niche, personalized RFPs will likely be those already in the long tail business, such as product aggregators like Amazon, retail aggregators like eBay and the thousands of specialized merchants currently relying on search and filter technology to drive personalized demand to their unique solutions.

Managing the Public Media Relationship

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:46:47 -0400

How can a public radio listener take greater control of their relationship with public media?

This was (more or less) the question posed to a public media-savvy group last week at Harvard’s Berkman Center. Led by Doc Searls, our ad hoc team explored how to equip the public media audience with a VRM tool to better drive their relationship with existing broadcasters, distributors, and shows.

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is the reciprocal to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). VRM explores the idea that individuals could create more value if they had better control over their vendor relationships rather than the other way around (my definition). The rise of participatory culture and its subsequent impact on vendors suggests an environment where this is not only possible, but highly desirable for everyone. Perhaps the long-term outcome of VRM will be to facilitate the dissolution of traditional consumer and vendor roles. Identity will be managed by the individual, but value production will happen across a spectrum of participants in a variety of capacities. In this environment, it will be difficult to define the meaningful boundaries of an organization, and what exactly constitutes an employee, vendor, consumer or producer.

A whole new generation of creative consumer has the potential to rediscover public broadcasting and co-opt it for its potential

But why public media?
Well, it feels like a good testing ground for something like VRM. If you are exploring the boundaries between organizations and the public, what better environment than one that is mission-driven to engage and serve the public?

There also seems to be a compelling overlap between what’s going on in participatory culture and what already exists surrounding public broadcasting. A whole new generation of creative consumer has the potential to rediscover public broadcasting and co-opt it for its potential as a non-commercial, open network designed explicitly to serve the public. I would ask, how can we encourage this?

...triggering more questions on engaging with public media in a participatory environment:

If we were to reinvent public radio in an end-to-end environment like the internet, what would it look like? How would it compare to what exists, and what important differences might emerge? What can we do to fill those gaps?
What does the long tail of public media look like? What are the democratized production tools, potential aggregators, and filters that drive demand down the tail?
As a creative consumer, what is it that I want to do with public media? What are my Lego building blocks, and what would motivate me to play?

In trying to answer these questions, one particularly promising idea that emerged was a model for a new type of public radio station - one that is not centered on broadcast. Such a station could have many of the traits of a participatory, web-based environment while leveraging the existing broadcast audience and media. In this way, we would have a transitional strategy of sorts – understood and embraced by traditional participants (both the audience and infrastructure), but able to transcend boundaries by reinventing itself from scratch, online, and with the public itself to steer its direction. These unique characteristics would drive important differences on how to fund, program, create, and manage its media. Without too much wild-eyed thinking, you could imagine an encouraging and experimental mix of user and collaboratively-programmed media, integrated online conversation, multiple device support, and a breadth of media types, alternative funding methods, etc.

Rethinking public media from a new, more participatory direction reveals an opportunity to redefine people-oriented broadcasting. And what’s more people-oriented than public media?

The History of User Participation

Sun, 9 Jul 2006 13:56:12 -0400

About a year ago, the subjects of user-driven value creation and distributed amateur participation had only the beginnings of popular interest. To be fair, these ideas had already been explored aggressively by academics like Eric Von Hippel and had popped up in blog posts by pundits like Chris Anderson, but most of the popular thinking was only notes in the margins of larger and more familiar success stories. These initial successes, such as open source software development, paved the way for more modern ideas by triggering important realizations in the eyes of those that saw their ground breaking potential.

The curious success of Open Source Software Development got a lot of people wondering how they too could build software for free. A million Wikipedia entries helped us realize that fantastic content assets could be built by strangers scattered across the globe. Flickr and YouTube reminded us that content wasn’t only text. The rise of social networks like Friendster and Myspace showed that value can be in the connections as well as the content. The value in phenomena like tagging and Google’s search algorithm taught us that intelligent solutions can emerge from aggregate participation. User-driven product reviews on sites like Amazon nudged us to see that seas of people may be willing to expend valuable effort for reasons other than cold, hard cash. Posing as the poster child for The Long Tail, Amazon also created collective head-scratching around the potential of a million individually-driven niche markets and the idea of selling less of more.

Of course the list continues. Since I began writing on this topic about a year ago, several high visibility events have heralded in the age of the participant. But more on that in another post…

The Pro-Am Revolution

Wed, 8 Mar 2006 21:48:13 -0500

Links to popular writings on The Pro-Am Revolution are long overdue. Here's a good lead-in post on The Long Tail and the real meat of the pro-am diet can be found in Demo UK's Downloadable book (PDF).

The Pro-Ams (Professional Amateurs) are "innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards." Pro-ams threaten to overthrow the entrenched professionals and corporations who once held undisputed control of our economy. Due to many factors, such as the plummeting costs of creative production and easy access to knowledge and distribution through the Internet, the popularity of pro-am activities and its subsequent recognition has grown significantly. There are many successful examples providing inspiration for burgeoning amateurs world-wide, such as the adoption of open source software and amateur astronomical contributions to eBay storefronts, blogging, and myriad innovative web solutions emerging from the social network of the web.

More Links:
BBC Article
Institute for the Future

The Network's Psychological Impact on Creative Contributors

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:18:47 -0500

In a highly-networked environment that naturally favors the emergence of experts and the elite, where does that leave the rest of us? Well, probably where we were before the networked Web - right smack in every day obscurity. Sure, the occasional Internet phenomenon favors the quirky contribution, but real attention goes to the super-talented or well-established. The difference now is with exposure. Aspiring individuals are now consistently aware of the best-of-the best in every domain. What might be the psychological impact to the individual contributor? Is a lack of recognition a negative factor in the development of the individual?

You might be the best at something in your circle of friends or local community, but you probably don't compare on a national or global scale. Can the creative contributor hope to do more than be a glorified gossip artist, passing around links to other people's best work? How will this affect people's willingness to contribute in a highly-networked environment knowing they are virtually guaranteed to sit in the shadow of others, unless their passion is obscure?