Just Imagine a world without amateurs or free sharing

Co-founder of Flickr, Hunch etc. Caterina Fake is no stranger to the culture of sharing. One could easily argue that her and husband Stewart Butterfield were really on the front-lines of pioneering and cultivating that very activity on the internet. Enter Jaron Lanier, who among other things coined the term ‘Virtual Reality’ in the early-80s and recently wrote a book called ‘You Are Not A Gadget’ where he boldly claims sharing and collectivism have turned the internet into what he calls the ‘World Wide Mush‘ in a Wall Street Journal excerpt.

Lanier seems to imply that people who give their efforts, music etc. away for free or without credit are either killing innovation or on a crusade to force everyone to do the same. It’s hard to tell if Lanier is taking this position intentionally to ruffle the web’s feathers, is grumpy, or is it that he is so skewed by his own lens and experiences that he can’t see the value of other pursuits or motivations? To put it bluntly, he pissed Caterina off, and rightly so in my mind. I’d paraphrase Caterina’s response but she’s far too gifted with words to do that, so in the spirit of ‘sharing’ here is the gist of Caterina’s rebuttal.

…(Lanier) appears to believe that quality is a zero sum game. A bunch of amateur musicians singing in someone’s living room take nothing away from Lady Gaga. There’s a lot of tilting at windmills in this excerpt. I’ve never heard anyone assert, as he appears to think everyone in the digital arena is constantly asserting, that “collectives make the best stuff” — quite the opposite. Everyone agrees that 99% of everything is crap, and no one is claiming Wikipedia’s entries are better written than those of Charles Lamb or Edmund Gosse in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (my favorite). But really, who cares? By sharing my (admittedly crappy) snapshots on Flickr, I’m not claiming to be Margaret Bourke-White. And my sister *likes* to look at photos of my dog. Who am I hurting? Should I charge a penny to look at my photo? Do I need a photo credit? No. If someone other than my sister admires my cute dog, they are welcome to do so for free.

Additionally Lanier does not understand that people do things for reasons other than bolstering their egos and making money. You shouldn’t need a motivation or justification to correct spelling or factual errors on Wikipedia — a certain desire for orderliness, good grammar, or truth should be sufficient. Those who enjoy correcting spelling and grammatical errors online — I do — are they thereby “robbed of dignity” as Lanier would have it? Of course not.

I could go on. I haven’t touched on his claims that we’re destroying innovation, or his implication that people who license their work with Creative Commons licenses or give their music away for free insist that everyone do the same. The open source software movement that could be mentioned, the free culture movement, or, frankly, any of the other many great things that are taking nothing away from auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard, and even Jaron Lanier. They’re safe from the incursions of amateurs like you and me. Of course the word “Amateur” comes from the French word “to love”. Good enough reason for me to participate. And you?

Yeah, but who wants to listen to amateurs anyway, right? 😉

Untethered, the next frontier

“Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013… Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.”

via MediaPost.

The real killer of newspapers, magazines won’t be the Internet

Ever since the rise of the commercial internet, the physical distribution of media has been under fire. The demise of magazines and the death of newspapers in particular has become a spectator sport and the debate is typically framed as ‘Internet vs. Newspapers’ or ‘Internet vs. Magazines’. While it is conceivable that over the next 10-20 years the internet will continue to chip away market share and eventually render those industries obsolete, perhaps there is another elephant in the room facing newspapers and magazines that poses a far greater extinction risk than the internet ever will.

A couple of weeks ago I watched the documentary film called “Collapse” (available via Rogers On Demand). It’s a riveting, thought-provoking character-study of a man named Michael Ruppert who believes the world is currently crossing through a critical threshold known as ‘peak oil‘.

“Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.”

I’m not going to get into the meat of the peak oil issue here, it’s just far too big for this post. However, since watching Collapse I have sunk my teeth deeper into the tentacles of the peak oil movement, read lots of articles and consumed a lot of video on the subject, and am now reading a book by Jeff Rubin, a former global energy expert for CIBC World Markets called “Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller“.

One of the largest media sales in Canadian history is currently taking place as Canwest’s extensive network of daily newspapers looks for a buyer(s). Many analysts expect those assets to fetch north of a billion dollars on the open market. While Canwest’s newspaper titles are paired with digital editions, much of that price tag will be based on the present-day cash-flow of their daily newsprint operations.

From the production of the paper, to the printing process, to the distribution chain, both magazines and especially daily newspapers are extremely carbon-intensive operations which rely greatly on the availability of cheap oil energy. In June 2008 the price of oil skyrocketed to an all-time high of $147 per barrel. However, a few short weeks later the world economy plunged into economic collapse and the price of oil plummeted back down to $30 as global oil demand sunk with the economy. Because we didn’t experience any prolonged exposure to $140/b oil, we really didn’t get an accurate indicator of what the effects of high-cost oil would be to the most carbon-intensive businesses. Now that we are in some form of economic recovery, once again the price of oil is on an upward climb, currently hovering at approx. $80/b.

This inevitably leads to the question of what happens to these oil-intensive businesses when the days of cheap liquid energy are over? Is the daily newspaper in any market a viable business at a sustained oil price of $140/b? What about $200/b? What about $250/b? Depending on who you ask, those days are approaching much faster than you think.

Now the “peak oil” theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. “The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this. “Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further…. Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France told a conference: “If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one.” – via Guardian.co.uk

Despite the alarming quotes, I’m not running for the hills, and furthermore I’m actually quite bullish on the near-term economic outlook. But as I learn more about our energy issues, I am more convinced than ever that the rising cost of liquid energy poses a far greater mid-term risk to legacy media businesses than the migration of their audience to another medium.

Look before you leap, but don’t look for too long

Research is important. Planning is important. But at what point do you just ‘go for it’? And is it conceivable that too much research, plotting and planning puts you at a disadvantage, disconnecting you from the razor’s edge of innovation, creativity and thinking differently?

Don’t worry if you don’t know “absolutely everything” before starting out

Before they launched their car com­panies, Henry Ford and Karl Benz didn’t decide to first spend a decade trying to win the approval of prominent horse breeders or railway magnates. Same goes for the Wright Brothers.

When Google– the most successful advertising business in the history of the world– star­ted their company, their founders knew practically nothing about the inside workings of Madison Avenue. Sergey Brin and Larry Page most likely had zero inside knowledge about famous advertising titans like Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Lee Clowes, John Hegarty or Claude Hopkins. They were just a couple of twenty-something Stanford PhD students, who were far more interested in Internet search engines than they ever were in Nielsen Ratings, Proctor & Gamble or The Clio Awards. Which helps explain why, when the nor­mal, mainstream, industry-obsessed kids of around the same age were just landing their first East Coast internships or junior executive positions at advertising blue-chips like McCann’s, Lintas, DDB or Saatchi’s, Sergey and Larry were already well on their way to becoming billionaires.

I love this story about Bill Gates: Some years ago, when the company he foun­ded, Mic­ro­soft was at the height of its powers, he was giving a lec­ture to some college stu­dents. When the the Ques­tion & Ans­wers came along, a keen undergra­duate asked the ques­tion, “What advice would you give to a young per­son like me who wants to make a lot of money some day?”

Gates’ ans­wer was as won­der­ful as it was short: “For Good­ness’ sake, don’t do what I did. That money’s already been made by me.”

via gapingvoid.com

Is ‘leadership’ old skool?

Umair Haque’s blog post ‘The Builders’ Manifesto‘ is an outstanding read. He surmises that ‘leadership’ is to some degree a by-product of a dying industrial era. Leaders of today know how to govern and navigate what are essentially 20th century organizational structures and economics. As we transition from industrial to information age, Umair sees a future that needs a rethink from the ground-up and thus requires a different skillset than your typical leader. Ironically, one of the better leaders / US Presidents of our time Bill Clinton penned the moniker ‘Building a bridge to the 21st century’. Yet, even Clinton himself is a mere cog in the wheel of that old leadership paradigm and wasn’t so much building a bridge but rather attempting to lead people across a fictitious one. Much in the same way that Haque contrasts Mahatma Gandhi (the builder) vs Barack Obama (the leader).

Today’s builders are igniting the distant grandchild of yesterday’s industrial revolution: an institutional revolution for a post-industrial world. They are forging the new building blocks – from ethical investment, to deep journalism, to socially useful finance, to universally accessible communication – that a rusting economy, society, and polity so urgently demand.

The 21st century doesn’t need more leaders – nor more leadership. Only Builders can kickstart the chain reaction of a better, more authentic kind of prosperity.

I’m not suggesting leadership is easy, but this reminds me of something Thomas Edison said about opportunity; “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Which is the tougher job, editing a book or authoring a new one? Perhaps this explains why the list of wannabe leaders is awfully long and wide, but builders? Not so much.

Baby boomers are getting into new technology, on their terms

Facebook’s growth continues to explode, now topping 350M users and still going strong. If there is a ‘secret sauce’ that has propelled Facebook into becoming the most widely used social network in the world, one of the key ingredients of that sauce would undeniably be demographics. As Facebook has grown, it has gotten older. Twitter is a brilliant real-time publishing tool, LinkedIn is equally brilliant for business networking. However, no other social network in the world has managed to weave together all three primary social pillars as well as Facebook has. Those pillars are Family, Friends and Business.

“A study in August by marketing agency iStrategyLabs suggested the number of new Facebook users aged 55 and older grew by almost 514 per cent in the previous six months, compared to 4.8 per cent growth among 18-to 24-year-olds and 24.2 per cent for those 17 and younger.”
– (source: AM1150)

On the research trail for a new venture, one of the things I’ve been mindful of are the wants, needs, usage patterns and behaviours of baby boomers. What motivates boomers to adopt new technology? What turns them away? I recently stumbled across a study that offers some great insights into the baby boomer cohort and how they perceive new technology. Inside the tech world, we gravitate to the shiny new beta-toy on the block and the digerati tweenies/Echos are a sought-after cohort because of their willingness to be on the front-lines of the adoption curve. But talk to investors, VC or otherwise, and they are clearly looking for the next Facebook. While attempting to be the next Facebook is a fool’s errand, aspiring to be as widely used as Facebook isn’t. But before you can shoot for that moon, it would be wise to ensure that your concept is age-agnostic and that means it has to be something a baby boomer could embrace.

“…boomers are in fact active adopters of new technology – but with a unique style driven by two aspects of their character. The first is that this generation lives at the midpoint of life’s cycles: often with children at home, yet also responsible for aging parents. From this center-court vantage point, they see the technology wants and needs of their children and also of their own parents. They’re likely to experience, in daily life, both the brash enthusiasm of youthful early adopters and the deliberate caution of older adults. The second unique aspect is their historical perspective. Baby boomers grew up with technology: they were in their teens to early 30s when the first IBM PCs and Apples appeared, and were the innovators and early adopters of that era (one dinner participant still has the manual for Windows 1.0). Yet they also recall a time when all telephones had wires and were rented monthly from Ma Bell – a time when there were a handful of television stations, and if you turned on the set in the middle of the night, you saw a test pattern. They created their social lives before the advent of ubiquitous communication, when physical distance meant true separation, and if your parents moved to a new state you’d likely lose touch with old pals.

The consistent theme in this diverse group is that boomers want to bring their own values to technology. Boomer ideals were forged in an era when human rights and individual freedoms were central concerns, and boomers apply that perspective to technology as well. They fear that their children, perhaps unwittingly, allow technology to shape their lives rather than using technology to help create the lives they want. Boomers want technology to fit the lives they have made and the values they hold dear.

The boomers thus occupy a unique niche. If their children are the technology pioneers, the first to explore new territory, boomers are the settlers, arriving a bit later to set up schools and libraries, churches and hospitals, to sink deep roots and build permanent structures. With one foot in the future and the other in the past, they are inventing a world for the 50-year-old of the future. The choices they make, the devices, software and services they embrace, will directly inform what is available as the next generation grows older.”

Full study entitled ‘Boomers and Technology: An Extended Conversation’ can be downloaded here: (source: PDF Report)

Entrepreneurs can change the world

dailypixel has been a happy GotVmail.com customer for years. So when I heard a few months back that the company had bought a generic domain name and a re-branding announcement was on the way, needless to say I was intrigued. Sure enough in mid-April we received a letter from the founder/CEO announcing their new name, Grasshopper.com. It was a brilliant move to say the least. However, having a kickass brand name / location is half the battle, it’s what you do with it (ie, your messaging) that makes it a home run. After watching this viral video, I’d say the Grasshopper team deserves some serious high-fives!

Is T-Mobile’s viral campaign a shining example of social media? Or is it a rip-off? Or both?

Is T-Mobile’s viral campaign a shining example of social media? Or is it a rip-off? Or both? I think these are fair questions in the wake of T-Mobile’s recently released commercial which features a crowd of 13,500 people singing the Beatles ‘Hey Jude’ in unison with celebrity vocalist Pink leading the way.

On the one hand, it really is an impressive commercial spot in terms of scale. They used over 2000 microphones and 40+ cameras to capture the event in a public venue. T-Mobile successfully used social media tools like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to bring awareness to the event, which is a genuine social media victory given the large turnout. The end result is a polished commercial concept that is successfully going viral on the internet and getting much attention from the frontlines of the social media crowd. But is this really what social media is all about? Is this what we should be pointing to when companies want examples of social media / viral marketing done right? I’m not so sure. If there is any social media brilliance in the T-Mobile ‘Hey Jude’ campaign it is in their use of social media to organize the large public gathering. But that is pretty much where the ‘social media’ aspect of this ends, and where the rip-off begins. This ‘sing-along’ concept was pioneered 30+ years ago by Coca-Cola. Do you remember that 1971 commercial? If you are 30+ years of age, I bet you do.

What makes the Coca-Cola spot so much more impressive than T-Mobile’s latest campaign is in the originality of the concept. Coca-Cola didn’t borrow a song from a world-famous band, nor did they hire a highly-paid celebrity to drive engagement and traction. Coca-Cola produced their own song ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ which was so original, catchy and effective that after the commerical aired it was re-produced into a stand-alone full-length single that reached #7 on the charts in the United States, #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #5 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. The best illustration of how vital the components of ‘originality and creativity’ are when measuring marketing success is evidenced by this live video…

That’s 10,000 people at an American Idol audition in Atlanta (2007) singing Coca-Cola’s song over 35 years after the commercial aired for the first time, and even more impressive is that the primary demographic attending that event were likely not even born when the original commercial was made. How much is that worth to Coca-Cola? Priceless. In my view, the best examples of any form of marketing, especially social media marketing, needs to have an element of originality to it. If you simply copy, borrow or outright steal concepts, you will never hit the same mark as the original, and more importantly, you will potentially lose the biggest benefit of social media marketing – timelessness.

Due to the saturation of brand messages in the marketplace, advertisers today should be trying to push the boundaries of aesthetics and originality more than they ever have. That is precisely what made something like the Eepy Bird – Diet Coke + Mentos viral videos such an incredible albeit accidental boon for Diet Coke and Mentos, or the Subservient Chicken campaign for Burger King. They were completely original concepts that will endure for decades. I’m quite certain if and when a large public gathering in the future spontaneously starts singing ‘Hey Jude’, it will have little to do with T-Mobile, and everything to do with a band called The Beatles.