MiniMediaGuy

Yesterday I ended by mentioning the launch of Ourmedia, a site involving California journalist JD Lasica and featuring collaborators such as the libertarian-sounding documentary maker The Lexington League (which promises to show individuals planning and carrying out acts of civil disobedience).

While I wait to see what other creative types avail themselves of this new forum, I want to look at some of the technology and partnerships Ourmedia has announced to pull this community together.

Ourmedia says it will be based on an Open Source content-management system called Drupal. Similar to Linux, Drupal seems to have been launched by a Belgian computer scientist named Dries Buytaert who is in his mid-twenties. From what I gather, Buytaert threw the software out there about four years ago and a community of developers formed around the code.

Ourmedia’s particular brand of Drupal will be provided by a Vancouver (British Columbia) technology firm called Bryght. Again, as was the case with Linux, although the Drupal source code is free, its implementation appears to be sufficiently complex to justify the creation of specialty firms to make the magic work.

Other collaborators include the Creative Commons, which is popularizing new and less restrictive forms of intellectual property; Wikipedia, the astonishing Open Source encyclopedia and community (which I believe has recently spawned a real-time news posting offshoot, a sort of come-one, come-all wire service); and the Internet Archive, an effort to save and promulgate creative works in the public domain (the project was launched by netizen Brewster Kahle who, in addition to bringing people together in cyberspace, also holds regular salon dinners in his home overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gate).

A recent BusinessWeek article says Ourmedia is working with Yahoo, the Creative Commons and independent short-film distributor Atom Films to develop a video version of RSS, the technology that lets bloggers “broadcast” text to subscribers.

Surely, I am just nibbling at the edges of the new media coalitions that are forming. It’s like a United Nations of Technology. I’ll nibble away some more, but later.

Tom Abate

As someone who found his calling and living in newspapers, words like these make the gray hairs on my neck stand up:

“If we are to preserve journalism and its social-service functions, maybe we would be wise not to focus too much on traditional media. The death spiral might be irreversible. We should look for ways to keep the spirit and tradition of socially responsible journalism alive until it finds a home in some new media form whose nature we can only guess at today.”

So said newsman-turned-professor Philip Meyer in an essay in the Columbia Journalism Review. I found it while reading a blog post about how to inject new thinking into newsrooms. That post was written by Tim Porter, a journalist-turned-blogger who hired me for my first newspaper job.

On behalf of the dwindling ranks of those who still hold these positions of pay and prestige, I welcome Tim’s efforts (then and now!).

Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye out for the launch this weekend of Ourmedia, a project involving JD Lasica, another former news guy who seems focused on the second half of Meyer’s prescription.

The Ourmedia website says “our vision is to bring personal media to millions of users’ desktops through playlists, video jukeboxes, visual albums, and built-in media libraries … that can be freely shared.”

Lasica was an editor of We Media, the white paper that gave me the final push to create this blog, and also provided some of the how-to that helped me climb the learning curve.

Among those expected to join Ourmedia is a small TV documentary group called called The Lexington League. That operation strikes me as Michael Moore with a libertarian slant. In their own words, “The Lexington League is a weekly half hour reality newsmagazine featuring true stories of individuals fighting for freedom against unjust laws, power hungry politicians, and abusive governments.”

As Lasica wrote earlier this week: “A couple of years ago I might have reacted to subjective journalism like this by dismissing it as fundamentally flawed because of its imbalance, or because I didn’t agree with the reporter’s conclusions. Now I just marvel at the sophisticated ways in which people are joining the media conversation.”

Tom Abate

One of my earlier postings referenced a study of how artists were using the Internet to sell their works. It elicited a reply from independent music promoter Bob Baker, who pointed me to three sites that were trying to help musicians produce and sell works. They are:

• CB Baby!, a for-profit site in Portland, Oregon, that sells music online and links musicians with publicists or other resources;
• eFolkMusic.org, a not-for-profit site with a similar mission but more specific focus;
• Lulu, a North Carolina, for-profit site with the ambitious goal of providing “a better deal for authors, musicians, software developers, photographers and artists who want to publish and sell their work.”

Lulu sounds like an eBay-like venue for creative types to network and create virtual storefronts. It is run by Bob Young, who was one of the first entrepreneurs to commercialize Linux when he formed Red Hat software. A Salon article reveals a bit about Young and his adventures in commercial Linux-land. A North Carolina business paper, the Triangle Tech Journal, recorded the event in 2002 when Young bought a failing dot.com called OpenMind (which had intended to blow open text books) and begin its transformation into Lulu.

Young has published his own views of what Linux and Red Hat were about in the University of Michigan’s Journal of Electronic Publishing. There is a brief bio on the Lulu website. Here’s another segment I clipped from the site: “Lulu is a tool for creators. It’s also a business, to be sure. Lulu’s commission on the sale of content through its site is 20%.”

An interesting guy with an interesting model. There must be more outfits like Lulu and these other publishing aggregators. I will look around and report back. Any and all help appreciated.

Tom Abate

The Merrill Lynch equities research team recently had more depressing news for newspaper publishers, “projecting an average ad revenue increase of 4.2 percent to 5 percent in each of the first three quarters” of 2005.” An article in Media Daily News quotes the Merrill Lynch analysts as saying that newspapers with online presences are “experiencing strong double-digit gains” in that portion of their business. But “while the success is worth noting the dollar amounts are still small,” the analysts said.

Advertising in non-traditional online media, particularly search engines, continues to be the Big Story. An April 2004 slide presentation from Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, though somewhat dated, lays out the prevailing assumptions. Slide 63 shows the dominance of keyword search ads among the mix of online offerings, garnering 31 percent of Internet ad dollars, to 22 percent for second-placed banner advertising.

A more recent report from comScore Networks suggests some interesting results about how search ads are used by consumers shopping for computer and electronic products (which Meeker put at upwards of one-third of all online purchases). The report, encapsulated by the Center for Media Research, found that “25 percent of searchers ultimately purchased a consumer electronics or computer product and that an estimated 92 percent of these purchases occurred offline.” (Emphasis added.)

If correct, that finding suggests it may be tough for Web publishers to increase their revenues by collecting transaction fees for completing purchases. If consumers actively shopping for gadgets exhibit a latent buying pattern, it’s tough to believe they’ll click and pay on impulse for other goods.

Tom Abate

I’ve just spent a week in the hellish realm that is modern customer service. Several electronic gadgets pooped out at the same time, including my wireless router. That annoyance was cured Sunday when a service manager at my CompUSA let me swap out a defective unit even though the company’s normal return period had expired. Blessings upon the empowered clerk who untethered me from an ill-situated cable modem!

My release makes me think about the customer service challenges that will face Internet media businesses — especially those with a prosumer focus. The rationale of these businesses will be to aggregate thousands and millions of small transactions into big revenue streams. This does not always go swimmingly. A cursory search revealed an article on VeriSign’s problem in assigning domain names.

Iin starting this blog, I had problems and questions which I dispatched to Blogger help. Their non-answers came back too late to be of use. This is not a complaint, because the software is remarkably robust and costs me nothing. But it makes me wonder how people would react to glitches if they were paying even modest fees for services or goods.

In the brick-and-mortar economy customer service suffers because it is seen first and foremost as a cost center, says John T. Self, a professor at California Polytechnic University at Pomona, speaking of the hotel and restaurant world. “When consistent service takes place, whether excellent or horrible, it takes a relatively long time to take effect and produce results. This time delay makes it difficult to measure. Since most companies are still much more short term oriented than long term, service often takes a back seat. Pity.”

The Internet is hyper-competitive. Transactions are smaller and alternatives a click away. Conventional wisdom touts customer service in high-tech. “Rising businesses aiming to excel in the real time arena have as their goal ubiquitous, non-stop and transparent service,” said tech icon Regis McKenna at one point. Okay, so why are call centers migrating offshore ?

I don’t know how to deliver excellent customer service to large numbers at low cost. At least not yet. But I suspect Internet media firms will invent those systems, or perish.

Meanwhile, I did find an ISO standard for handling customer complaints that must offer useful guidance.

(I learned another thing from my quick perusal of the ISO site. The name “International Organization for Standardization” was derived from the Greek isos, meaning “equal,” so as not to offend national sensibilities outside the English-speaking nations — an interesting parable for any business that thinks global.)

Tom Abate

I’m jazzed about the successful landing of the Huygens probe on Titan. San Francisco Chronicle science writer David Perlman, covering the event from Darmstadt, Germany, described the early scenes beamed back from the probe:

“The black and white images, taken during the descent at 95 miles above the surface, then 10 miles above, and a final one at the surface itself, revealed solid, rough-sided hills with deeply shadowed drainage channels, most likely carved by liquid hydrocarbons flowing down from above; clusters of rough boulders, and what appeared to be a shoreline, possibly fronting a dark lake or perhaps a hydrocarbon sea.”

The European Space Agency website downplays expectations that we’ll discover life on Titan: “Titan is not a pleasant place for life. It is far too cold for liquid water to exist, and all known forms of life need liquid water. Titan’s surface is -180°C. According to one exotic theory, long ago, the impact of a meteorite, for example, might have provided enough heat to liquify water for perhaps a few hundred or thousand years. However, it is unlikely that Titan is a site for life today.”

Meanwhile, here on earth, I noticed this item worth a chuckle.

Male flies offer females gifts of food in exchange for sex — but sometimes substitute fakes for edible treats. This bait-and-switch tactic may offer tricky males an evolutionary advantage, study author Natasha LeBas of the University of St Andrews in Scotland told New Scientist magazine. Males who hunt for food expose themselves to danger, while those who offer spoof mating gifts take fewer risks in the act of passing on their genes.

Spoof gifts worked so long as the ruse was elaborate, UC Davis entomologist Steven Heydon told Animal Planet: “By the time the female finishes unwrapping her gift and discovers that it is empty, the male has mated with her.”

An article on the Animal Planet website noted that, when it comes to gifts, size matters: “The researchers also found a link between the size and quality of a gift and the duration of copulation. Impressively large, real food gifts presented before mating led to the longest copulation periods. Smaller, real gifts were next in line, followed by the big fake token presents and then small, worthless gifts.”

Tom Abate

Instinct and observation convince me that, when it comes to media products, the genius of the web lies not in delivery, such as movies-on-demand, but rather in assembly — enabling the rapid formation and dissolution of creative teams. Another change implicit in the web is the transformation of the passive consumer into the participant prosumer, to borrow a term from futurist Alvin Toffler.

Toffler popularized the prosumer in his 1991 book, Third Wave. When society moves past the second wave of manufacturing — the first wave being subsistence — the economy is transformed. Wave two was about specialization to increase supply and distribution. In wave three specialization breaks down, and people blend the roles of producing and consuming. Writing more than a decade ago, Toffler used sales of building supplies and power tools to do-it-yourselfers as an example of prosumerism. Home Depot and similar outlets have prospered by tapping that trend. We already see prosumer activity when people download music and create their own play lists that disregard the structure of albums or CDs. Will do-it-yourself media give rise to creative depots?

Toffler advanced the idea of prosumerism before the spread of the web, and now that it exists to actualize his theories, other thinkers have focused on the new organizational realities of a networked world. One such guidebook is the Cluetrain Manifesto, which boils down to the thesis that commerce has now become a series of conversations, in which many voices can join to provide the mother’s milk of markets, information. (That’s my first blush synopsis, subject to revision. At this point I’m merely finding interesting ideas, new to me at least, and making notes out loud to learn more).

The Manifesto was created by several Internet visionaries including Doc Searls, from the Linux movement, who runs an off-cited blog. When I visited there, the topic that happened to be under discussion had a prosumerian ring: When Demand Supplies Itself, Part N.

Another of the Cluetrain authors is David Weinberger, who also wrote Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. He explains the title and thesis. Web publishing has ripped apart books and rearranged the pages in a virtual realm. In similar fashion, this reorganization will affect and rearrange human institutions. Again, having not yet read the book, my distillation can hardly do justice to his ideas. Meanwhile, enjoy a laugh by visiting David’s bio, which offers three entry points, depending on whether you’re a right-brain, left-brain or no-brain person.

Tom Abate