The Stripmalling Of Social Media: Media Sprawl And New Spatialism

Peter Kim jumps in on the stripmalling of social media, but seems to suggest it is an inevitable sort of growing up, as opposed to an incursion by giant media companies.

Peter Kim, Must be the money

Social media is finally coming to a critical inflection point and make no mistake – it’s all about the money.

When I started blogging five years ago – early, but by no means among the earliest – the prevailing inclination among bloggers was to share and connect on an individual basis. Bloggers shared their content and built each other up by linking to each other in posts, creating blogrolls containing links to friend lists, even commented on blogs of individuals who worked for industry competitors. Corporations had presence through individuals; Bob Lutz at GM and Randy Baseler at Boeing were like the Columbus and Magellan of corporate social media.

Between 2005 – 2008, consumer adoption of social media shot up at a rapid pace. According to Forrester Social Technographics data, US online adults active in social media increased rapidly from just under 50% to 75%. Naturally, brands began to follow consumers into the medium. Early adopters were not happy. Debates between “purists” and “corporatists” began to emerge. What they didn’t realize is what Mark Cuban had called out years earlier – the social internet is a long tail ghetto where no content creator wants to be stuck.

In 2008, I left Forrester to start Dachis Group, because early on Jeff, Kate, Ellen, and I saw the potential for companies to go far beyond what had been imagined possible using social media to date – the thinking eventually crystallized as social business design. We knew that there was money to be made in “social media marketing” and “Enterprise 2.0″ – and we weren’t alone.

I’ve been observing these trends emerge as social business evolves:

  • The nature of “social” has become much less social over the past three years. It’s now increasingly private and profit driven. The bloggers I followed in the early days write blog posts much less frequently today, if at all. However, they’re still writing and thinking about the industry – they’re just doing it behind the firewall and delivering value to paying customers. […] Enjoy them while they last.
  • Companies are cashing out, performing their final tricks off of Cuban’s hypothetical vert ramp. From following the brand monitoring space, we’ve seen Cymfony, Umbria, Techrigy, and Scout Labs sell off. You’re probably more familiar with TechCrunch’s recent sale to AOL or Six Apart sold to VideoEgg. From what I hear on some of the tech deals, the companies may not be shaking the glitter off their clothes as much as pawning off whatever usable parts they’ve got left after crashing and burning.
  • Free social media sites are moving to monetize. Ning moved early and very direct. As any MBA could see, penetration pricing strategy, duh. Free doesn’t last forever, but its spectre does sell books. Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new CEO and he has one mission – to make money. […]
  • Executives are migrating to small, socially-oriented businesses. This time around it’s not limited to traditional-to-dot-com; the similarity is from public to private. Talent is leaving Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and heading to Twitter, Zynga, and Facebook. 

Social business is businesses aspiring to apply what has been learned about social cognition on the open web, which is simply a new domain for business innovation, taking advantage of opportunities.

But what AOL and media firms are doing is something altogether different: they are scooping up social media mills — like TechCrunch — as a means of countering their faltering authority and relevance on line.

We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

Arrington and company are no dopes: they are selling out at a local maximum. The market for old school blogging networks is already past its high watermark. That form of not-particularly-social media, which looks perfectly mainstream to media giants at this point, is going to be challenged a next generation of really-social-media. Fixtures like Techmeme and upstarts like TweetMeme are mining the streams of tens of thousands, mining and curating.

TechCrunch had become less of a destination, and simply the number one source of tech posts in an increasingly fragmented world, once that seems to be ripe for the picking. I wonder when Techmeme gets acquired?

But conflating that with Twitter’s deciding that business is business is an over simplification.

Six Apart’s acquisition by an advertising company, however, comes as no surprise to anyone who had observed their fall from the forefront of blogging platforms.

Unlike Kim, I think these are a collection of relatively independent threads: yes, they are all aspects of the great transition going on, the social revolution, but I wouldn’t connect the dots between AOL buying TechCrunch, Dick Costolo becoming Twitter CEO, and The sidelining of Six Apart, and expect a picture of the future to emerge. These are just eddies in the wave.

The social revolution has at least ten more years to run. The most recent acquisitions of AOL and the history of Six Apart will fall into the shadows of time faster that we can imagine, and the influence that Techcrunch had in the ’00s will be a footnote in Wikipedia.

We are confronted with a period of social media sprawl, where large media corporations are buying up all the intersections and off ramp properties out at the periphery of town where the highway goes by.

I wrote about this in May 2009:

New Spatialism:  Reclaiming Social Space In Web Media

Using an analogy from city planning and architecture, we need a rethinking of the basics: something like the New Urbanism movement, that tried to reclaim shared urban space in a way that matches human needs, and moved away from gigantic and dehumanizing cityscapes of the mid and late twentieth century, where garbage trucks seemed more at home than a teenage girl walking a dog.

So, we need a New Spatialism movement, to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media. Some web media may just remain what it is, like an industrial district at the edge of town. But at least some parts of web media should be reconceptualized, and reconstructed to get back to human scale. Just as New Urbanism is about organizing streets, sidewalks, and plazas to support the growth of social capital, New Spatialism would help us channel interactions on line to increase sociality, and thereby increase the growth of social capital.

New Spatialism is based on the idea that our primary motivations for being online are extra-market drivers: we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

Six Apart Acquired By VideoEgg: Old School Blogging Is Dead

Six Apart has had a strange history. Started by the starry-eyed Ben and Mena Trott, the early Six Apart (named after the number of days between the two founders’ birthdays) was like an earlier version of the WordPress story. The Movable Type publishing platform was the premier blogging platform of the mid ’00s, but the company divided its energies, building Typepad as a hosted blogging solution sort of based on Movable Type, but as an independent code base. The company also pissed off it most ardent users with an extremely inartful change in the licensing agreement, leading to the mass defection of the developer community to the then-fledgling Wordpress.

Not content with those diversion, the Six Apart team tried to grow through acquisitions, buying Loic LeMeur’s Ublog company and then LiveJournal, which was sold off years later.

Somewhere in there, they found time to squander their attention by building a fourth blogging platform, Vox, which was an attempt to fuse social networking with blogging, a sort of proto-Tumblr, but it never took off.

In recent years, Six Apart had grown into a services firm and advertising network, supporting larger publishers and dropping its efforts to grow its base of individual bloggers. This was partly a response to the dominance of Wordpress in old school blogging, and the rise of Tumblr, Posterous, and other innovative blogging solutions, but the elephant in the room has been the rise of social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, and the defection of the individual blogger to these social tools instead of blogging.

The acquisition of Six Apart by VideoEgg might represent a kind of end of the enthusiastic, communitarian era of blogging. Matt Sanchez, CEO of the combined company, which will be called Say Media, had this to say:

Mathew Ingram, Six Apart Deal With VideoEgg Marks the End of an Era

The VideoEgg CEO said that the new company would offer “content creators” of all kinds — individual bloggers, video creators, game developers and corporations — a single platform for their content and a way to build their brand through social media, but it’s clear that the point of the merger is to focus on corporations rather than the individual blogger, something Six Apart had been trying to do even before the deal was announced. SAY Media’s marketing presentation says “it’s not just about the amateurs anymore,” and that for brands, “engagement media is where your passionate customers are.”

It’s not social media, but engagement media, note: don’t want to scare off the big publishers with all that social malarkey. And, in case you are wondering, ‘it’s not just about the amateurs anymore.’

I have written a lot about media companies — who were once threatened by the rise of early social media — turning around and repurposing the tools of social media for their purposes. In several presentations and posts in recent years, I’ve made the case that we need to reconsider what the media companies are doing and out participation in it. They are creating ‘media sprawl’ — just like chain stores creating urban sprawl: 

New Spatialism: Reclaiming The Social Space In Web Media

Looking back on ten years of blogging, I think we have arrived at a turning point, where we have to reclaim the social space in web media.


Sprawl, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Ten years ago, when I started blogging, it wasn’t called blogging yet. I thought I was writing an ‘e-zine’ although it had all the characteristics of a blog: reverse chronological entries, categories, and so on.

We were like pioneers, fooling around out in the wilderness, cutting crude roads, building villages.

Relatively soon, however, this personal publishing by the fringe lunatics became big business and old media arrived. Now the leading ‘blogs’ are either run by old media giants, or bloggers who have become new media giants. Social media has been strip-malled. The funky soulfulness of the early days has been replaced by SEO, ad networks, and ersatz earnestness.

The reality is that so-called social media — even in its earlier, Birkenstock and granola days — wasn’t very social. We didn’t call it that until much later, anyway. We thought of it as personal publishing, and it adopted the basic dynamics of publishing. Most notably, there was a publisher or author and then there were readers. It seemed more egalitarian since anyone could be a publisher, but still there was a broadcast media dynamic despite the fact that anyone could argue or agree with someone else’s posts on their own blog. Then for a few years, we just called it blogging. Rhymes with slogging, because, in the final analysis, most people didn’t blog: too hard, too much work, not rewarding enough.

But the format is perfect for publishing companies, which is why the largest ‘blogs’ now are generally corporate media machinery. And as the blogosphere has become an increasingly corporate neighborhood, people are moving out.

I noticed a few years ago that comments seemed to be moving from blogs into faster paced social tools, like Facebook and then streaming apps like Twitter. (Twitter has become so popular that most of the competitors have closed shop). People are moving to where things are more social, where the author/audience divide is less sharp, and where the scale of interaction is human-sized. This is the new loft district: social networks.

Social networks are truly social, where web media isn’t, very.

Social networks are really about individuals and their personal relationships with others. So, if web media is to really become social — which it isn’t at present — we need to take what we have learned from other, more social tools, and take another run at social media.


New Urbanism, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Using an analogy from city planning and architecture, we need a rethinking of the basics: something like the New Urbanism movement, that tried to reclaim shared urban space in a way that matches human needs, and moved away from gigantic and dehumanizing cityscapes of the mid and late twentieth century, where garbage trucks seemed more at home than a teenage girl walking a dog.

So, we need a New Spatialism movement, to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media. Some web media may just remain what it is, like an industrial district at the edge of town. But at least some parts of web media should be reconceptualized, and reconstructed to get back to human scale. Just as New Urbanism is about organizing streets, sidewalks, and plazas to support the growth of social capital, New Spatialism would help us channel interactions on line to increase sociality, and thereby increase the growth of social capital.

New Spatialism is based on the idea that our primary motivations for being online are extra-market drivers: we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

Zemanta Integrated With Wordpress.com

Zemanta has announced a partnership with Wordpress.com, so that bloggers using that platform will have direct access to Zemanta’s technology.

I have been using Zemanta on my various blogs (stoweboyd.com, underpaidgenius.com) and it is a great support. In my case, Zemanta is a Firefox plug-in that does a lexical analysis of your post in the editor mode, and recommends related articles and photos based on the topics you discuss.

Here’s the plug-in’s recommendations for a recent post of mine:

By simply clicking on Zamanta’s recommendations, members of my reading community will see links to supporting information. It’s very easy for the author, and provides more context for the reader.

Zemanta has relationships with SixApart’s Movable Type, Blogger.com and Scribefire. I use it with Tumblr, although that is not a business relationship: it just works. Zemanta reaches far more than 30% of the blogging population now.

[I just wish I could use it other types of Tumblr posts: at the moment it is limited to ‘Text’ posts, like this one. I especially would like it to work with link posts, but there is no reason that Zemanta’s great dev team can’t figure it out.]

related articles

Typepad Goes After Tumblr

Six Apart has made an announcement of new capabilities for Typepad:

[via Announcing TypePad Micro]

As part of our ongoing rollout of the NEW TypePad we are pleased to
announce new social blogging features and the launch of TypePad Micro:
a completely free level of TypePad focused on easy sharing of text,
photos, and videos.

A new form of blogging is emerging — somewhere between the status
updates of Facebook and Twitter and the full-length posts of classic
blogs — focused on being easy, fun, and connected. Think of this middle
category as a bridge between blogs and social networks, tapping into
the connectedness of networks with the freedom, control, and
independence of blogs.

TypePad Micro is built for this growing form of blogging, making it
easy for people to curate compelling content from the web — be it text,
photos, or videos — and share it in real-time with people on their blog
and to Facebook and Twitter. We very much see this form of blogging as
a complement to, not a competitor of, these services. Many bloggers
have friends and followers on these great networks but often want to
post more than 140 characters, or share photos and videos, with their
own narrative and their own design.

TypePad Micro comes with a beautiful new theme, Chroma, custom built for this streamlined form of blogging and a new feature: Reblog,
which makes it easy for your blog’s readers to re-post items from your
blog on a blog of their own (think of it as the blogging equivalent of
the “retweet”).

This micro release of Micro is an effort to go after Tumblr, to catch up to it’s phenomenal growth. And in part, it does so.

The inclusion of the ‘reblog’ social gesture (or function, if you are a functional thinker) is perhaps the single most important aspect of this release. The ‘reblog’ and the ‘like’ gestures are two minimal touches that make Tumblr what it is. Mostly the impact of these social gestures are invisible to people who don’t have their own Tumblr accounts, because behind the open public face of tumbler is second open public sphere, but only seen by Tumblr users. I refer to this as ‘behind the veil’, since it also public, but occluded.

In this social plane of Tumblr, I receive a torrent of posts from those Tumblr blogs I am following, and I can see the social gestures related to the posts I have created. Whenever someone reblogs a post of mine, or ‘likes’ it, that appears as a message in the stream.

As a result of this social stream behind the Tumblr veil is a rich world, where a Tumblr user may spend a great deal of time, reading, examining pictures, seeing reblog notitfications, and so on. Here’s my stream for my /Ambivalence Tumblr blog, leaving out the posts from those I am following:

  

This is the principal user experience of Tumblr, bathing in the stream of images, text, links, and social gestures flowing from those you follow.

To have it work, you need the ‘reblog’ and ‘like’ social touches (or the Micro ‘favorite’ I guess), as well as a stream view behind the veil. Typepad implemented the stream view sometime ago, and has now closed the loop.

It seems, though, at present only the new Chroma template supports reblogging, which seems odd. Why can’t I just add reblog to my existing Typepad blogs? My sense is that Six Apart are maintaining a conceptual distinction between micro blogging — which Chroma is designed for — and macro or long format blogging. I think this is a meaningless distinction, and that the important thing is the stream behind the veil, for any sort of blog. It represents a new and richer social dimension to the blogging experience.

Here’s a Chroma blog that I created:

 

It took only a minute to change an existing blog to the Chroma template, and it offered the very cool feature of offering me three color schemes based on the tones in the photo I uploaded as the banner image.  You can see the ‘Reblog It’ button at the bottom of the first post.

Note that this post was created in what I consider the most common fashion for ‘tumbling’. I went to my /Ambivalence blog selected a picture I posted there, and I used a Typepad bookmarklet to select that image to post in the /Edgewards blog on Typepad. This is how most Tumblr blog posts are made, aside from reblogging existing Tumblr posts.

I used Typepad’s bookmarklet:

 
And that works pretty much the same as the previous bookmarklet.

Perhaps this is the only place where Typepad Micro doesn’t operate like a tumblr blog: the posts aren’t typed. In Tumblr, image posts are different from video, audio, quotes, links, and text. Typepad posts, even in Micro’s Chroma template are all the same. In Tumblr, if you descend down into the guts of the template language (a subject too technical and detailed for this post), each of these post types can be managed differently, with different fonts, styling, and layout. Although I have not tried to dive down into Chroma’s template, it doesn’t seem like the system is typed. I predict that Typepad will have to be extended to meet the sophistication available to designers in Tumblr.

Six Apart has added some of the small touches that make Tumblr a rich experience externally, like the ability to create a gallery in photos in a single post, by uploading a series of photos or URLs:

 

Conclusions

At first inspection, Typepad Micro might add up to something very similar to the internal social experience of Tumblr. The combination of a streaming experience for logged in users and the ‘reblog’ and ‘favorite’ gestures could lead to an experience nearly as rich as Tumblr. However, there are some serious caveats:


  1. Posts aren’t typed — this will provide a lower lever of design sophistication, even if people can get at the Chroma template’s innards, which I have yet to explore.

  2. Reblog is not built in to every blog, so even if I am an active Typepad Micro user, I can’t reblog every post of every Typepad blog. It requires the blog’s owner to change to a Micro template, like Chroma. This is a major problem, and will slow the adoption of Micro. At the very least Six Apart should add a reblog capability to the bookmarklet, so that users can reblog all Typepad blog posts. This might even be extended to support reblogging of other blogging platforms’ posts, like Tumblr, Moveable Type, and Wordpress, for example. Ultimately, interoperable reblogging and favoriting are going to be demanded by users. It is a social good for interoperability of this sort to exist. In fact, I am going to kick off a project in Microsyntax.org calling for conventions to be considered that will support this.

  3. The limitation of a single template supporting Micro is dumb. I already had an issue with the limited number of templates in Typepad, and the fact that they were all so similar. This is due to the fractured model of templates that exists below the hood in Typepad. Better to shift to an open model of templates, with one large text file containing the entire template, instead of a structured model. Again, this is a bit too technical for this forum, but I wanted to include it in my list.


[Update: I learned that Six Apart has in fact set things up so that every blog can have reblog enabled. I have turned this on for /Message, too.]

Six Apart has a long way to go to provide an experience as rich and social as that offered by the much younger Tumblr. But I have to say, they have given me hope that I won’t have to port my /Message blog to Tumblr in order to ultimately have the same depth of experience surrounding my tech blogging as I do on /Ambivalence, where I tumble everything else. Note I don’t say that I blog on /Ambivalence, because the experience is so different, so much more compelling and deep, that it is really something completely different.

I dream of logging into Typepad to have a cascade of other tech writers’ thoughts and commentaries stream past, being able to reblog and comment on these posts in a one step fashion. To be in the stream is just a better experience than wandering around, or reading from RSS tools. Six Apart might be on the way to get me there. I hope so.

I plan — as you might expect — to convert this blog over to Chroma, or something like it, just as soon as I explore the implications in a bit more depth.

Moved to Wordpress

I am going to be dramatically revamping my Typepad set-up for /Message over the next week or so. Pardon my dust as I am futzing around.

The motivating cause is my desire to get Sphere working on the blog, which has proven to be a real headache. The nice people at Wordpress — solicited by Tony Conrad of Sphere — discussed moving me over to Workpress, but that soon started to look like a real major headache: partly because I have three blogs at Typepad, now, but just because I don’t want any breakage. Then the nice people at Six Apart offered to help me, but it rapidly became clear that I know just as much about Typepad’s vagaries as many of the Six Apart staff, if not more.

So, expect a template that looks something like this one, but with only one sidebar, on the right, new logo, no banner ad along the top, and a reduction in clutter of various sorts.

More to follow.

Screwed Again: Typepad Widgets

The folks at SixApart have announced Typepad widgets, which they define this way:

A widget is a piece of content or functionality provided by a third party that you can place in the siderail of your TypePad blog. Technically, it’s a snippet of HTML and/or JavaScript that you can manage like any other sidebar content module on your blog.

Great! I have been using the current “Notes” form of Typelist in Typepad to allow me to embed my own widgets at /Message, like my eventful calendar, and various reformatted RSS feeds. But I have had some lumps doing that.

But then… the small print:

However, Widgets are not supported on blogs that use Advanced Templates, nor are they supported on Mixed Media layouts.

Yikes. But we all know that to do anything serious with your blog template you just have to push it to Advanced. For example, you cannot delete the metatags for various RSS feeds unless you promote the blog templates to Advanced, which means — even if you use a Feedburner feed — autodiscovery of RSS feeds at your blog will go to the prdefined feeds, not the feedburnerized one.

I am using Typepad because I don’t want the full-up hassles of MT or Wordpress — hosting, fooling a database, etc. — but there has to be something better that this never-never land of Advanced templates at Typepad, doesn’t there?