Reading-and-sharing: nurturing the ties that bind

Kate Niederhofer via Social Abacus

I’ve blogged before about Wegner’s notion of the transactive memory, a concept I love about how we get information into our heads (encode), arrange and add context (store), and eventually access when needed (retrieve) *as a group*. In my mind, this is underpinning of the success that Twitter is. It also helps explain this tendency we have to read-and-share as a means to coordinate our social network. That is, by sharing certain content with specific people, we more effectively encode, store, and retrieve information as a social network. Think of it like really effective curating. Simply by sharing links, we’re making sense out of our expanding networks. 

But something else happens when we read-and-share. We create virtual spaces. As the great sociologist Ray Oldenburg might say, we create “a third place.” Places, really. Salons. Sharing links creates places for us to meet and talk about our shared interests. Traditionally a “third place” is a place of refuge. It’s not your home, not your job. So these virtual salons we create let us escape— or augment our reality— while performing social network maintenance: clustering and categorizing our network.

Yes, I believe that by curating we are sharing more than links, although it’s not a space that we define, but a way to share time: to still the time we are in, and share it with others, who experience it themselves.

We are sharing experience: Time is the new space.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

The End Of An Age, Or The End Of The Beginning?

Jeremiah Owyang wants to declare the end of the golden age of tech blogging, or, even more portentously, he says

The tech blogosphere, as we know it, is over.

This could be interpreted in a number of ways, but at face value — and leaving aside for the moment the specifics of his argument — I agree. The ‘blogosphere’ — that mid ’00s concept of a community of bloggers writing for each others and cross-linking through trackbacks and threaded comments — that communitarian vision has been superseded by other ideas of what is, or should be, happening, online.

However, I don’t want to adopt the metaphor that is used by people that fear the future, and long for a halcyon past. I won’t go along with the ‘golden age’ rhetoric, which is generally employed by those arguing a fall from a better past into a less virtuous present. (The concept comes from ancient Greek mythology, with its Golden, Silver, Bronze, Iron ages, and then the present, debased age.)

I prefer Winston Churchill’s trope:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Winston Churchill by Yousef Karsh

Churchill was, of course, referring to a turning point in the struggle with Germany during World War II, while we are discussing the transition from a more primitive and less social phase in the web revolution, into something more complex and, ultimately, more rewarding.

The points that Jeremiah makes to support his argument are very tactical, not looking at the strategic changes going on technologically or societally. His ‘trends’ aren’t really trends, but narrow extrapolations from recent events masquerading as business advice. They are these, in brief:

Trend 1: Corporate acquisitions stymie innovation

Trend 2: Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover

Trend 3: The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social

Trend 4: As space matures, business models solidify – giving room for new disruptors

These observations are interesting as far as they go, but aside from the ‘faster, small, and social’ I don’t think these are major, in any sense.

I’d like to offer a few trends that may be implied by Jeremiah’s lists or by the comments of various bloggers that he cites, but aren’t really characterized very well in his post.

It’s obvious that Jeremiah is caught up in the issues confronting three groups of web denizens posting their contributions posting on technology platforms based on a now well-established model of web publishing, which we call blogging. This is unexamined in his piece, but the model of a website made up of chronologically ordered posts with comments in a thread on each piece, and a variety of navigation or advertising widgets in the margin may be getting tired, and may not gibe with other modern advances in online media dynamics. At any rate, Owyang’s concerns seem to be directed toward three constituencies:

  1. Independent authors or analysts, who may find it harder to operate in a changed media world, or to make a living from blogging, if indeed very many did so.
  2. Blog network companies — like Techcrunch, Mashable, and The Next Web — that are confronted with the invasion of major media companies, consolidation, and turnover.
  3. And last, the ‘audience’ — by which Owyang means everyone else. I will put to the side that social media was supposed to be about the end of the audience — Jay Rosen’s famous ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ — and simply state that Owyang and the others groups he appears to be concerned about have largely internalized a media-centric worldview, while mouthing mostly empty platitudes about the power of social media.

He doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the problems of major media companies, which continue to be deadly serious, nor does he refer to the notable advances that media companies like The Atlantic have accomplished. Nor does he spend much time talking about the technology companies — like Tumblr, Twitter, and Flipboard — that are involved in the tectonic changes going on today; changes that make the ebb and flow of small-potato business models surrounding tech blogging look like the scrambling of ants underneath the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Yes, we are veering into a new era of web media; and it’s about goddamned time.

Here’s a few of the most powerful trends, in summary:

  1. The rise of the web of flow, and the fall of the web of pages — Ubiquitous and highspeed connectivity and the emergence of a new breed of ‘genius’ mobile devices have led to a web in which information is perceived as and designed to be experienced in motion. The user experience has shifted from wandering around, searching for information, moving via URLs from page to page. Increasingly, information flows to us through the agency of solutions like Twitter, Tumblr, and Flipboard, mediated by social and algorithmic ‘engines of meaning’, as Bruce Sterling styled it. We are no longer experiencing the web as exploring a library, but more like a drinking from a fire hose.
  2. The social revolution and social tools — While a lot of the discussion about the rise of blogging talked about social media, the technology involved wasn’t particularly social. However, the emergence of network-based social tools — notably Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of other niche offerings — have led to a dramatic and unprecedented change in information transmission: increasingly, people are getting their news and insight via social networks, channeled through other, known individuals. The simplest proof of this state change is that Twitter is now the emergency broadcast system, the canary in the coal mine, the first place that the most important information appears. These tools form the bloodstream and the nervous system for the connected world we now inhabit. And the blogs and other media tools that were principally about publishing pages in the previous era, are now primarily oriented toward pushing links and summaries into the social nervous system.
  3. Social learning, innovation, and curation — As the population online grows, piling into world-spanning social networks, there are a number of systemic changes. As Stalin is supposed to have said, quantity has a quality of its own. As the online population and social density online goes up, there are phase transitions involved, and I believe that somewhere in the past year or two, we passed through a threshold. As Mark Pagel argues, our level of social connection has grown to the point where new ideas can travel much more quickly and economically: this includes all ideas, not just those involved in tech blogging, but tech blogging too. The best ideas — and their originators — will rise to the top more quickly, and as a result, Pagel maintains that we have a lessened need for innovators, and at the same time we are learning more quickly than before. I believe that this is the complementary trend allied to the increased perceived need for good curators: the value of discernment — which ideas are more useful — has gone up, while the value of creating new ideas has gone down. And, of course, you can substitute ‘write yet another post about iPhone apps or the Zygna IPO’ wherever I wrote ‘idea’ or ‘innovation’.

Obviously, Owyang and those leaving comments on his post weren’t necessarily treating these trends. The post was ostensibly about the changes in the world of tech blogging, after all. But I don’t see how you can meaningfully explore that niche without the larger context.

Brian Solis sees the larger context as necessary as well:

I recently wrote about my thoughts on the state and future of blogs, which is of course far grander than the world of tech blogging. And as you can see, blogging is alive and clicking.

Yes, micromedia, video, and social transactions/actions are breaking through our digital levees and causing our social streams to flood. And, yes, Flipboard, Zite, and the like (get it?), are forcing our consumption patterns into rapid-fire actions and reactions. You have a choice. You are either a content creator, curator or consumer. You can be all of course. But, think about this beyond the mental equivalent of 140 characters. What do you stand for and what do you want to become known for? The answer is different for each of us. But, content, context, and continuity are all I need to learn, make decisions and in turn inspire others.

I don’t buy the consumer angle — after all, every person is curating for at least one person, themselves — so I consider it a cardinality distinction: curating for one is not appreciably different than curating for two or ten. All curators — of whatever degree of discernment — started by curating for themselves. But Solis clearly gets the big picture, and I agree totally that what is bubbling up today will make the web a place where we continue to come to learn, make decisions, and connect with — and perhaps inspire? — others to do the same.

Tumblr, That Thingamablog, Keeps Exploding

Trumblr keeps growing astronomically, but meanwhile even the tech mavens don’t have a clear niche defined for Tumblr.

Jennifer Van Grove, Tumblr Tops 13 Million U.S. Uniques in July

Tumblr, the simple sharing service and blog alternative, continues to attract a record number of visitors each month.

According to comScore, Tumblr scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in July — up 218% from the same time last year.

The blog-meets-social-network service has seen its most explosive growth in the past few months, according to comScore’s data, upping its unique visitor count by more than 5 million from April to July.

Here’s one try at defining Tumblr.

Tumblr could be lumped in with other ‘social media’, but only in the most general meaning, as a term that covers social networks, blogging, check in apps, photo sharing, social commerce, etc.

Blogging, a la Blogger and Wordpress, is actually not very social, basically a personal publishing model, with comments as a sort of afterthought. Blogging is also considered as text-centric, while Tumblr is very rich on other media types.

The big shift from blogging tools to Tumblr and Twitter is the advent of the stream, the context in which posts are experienced. This breaks away from RSS readers and other organizing devices, used to aggregate the content of blogs into a context.

Tumblr has a chameleon quality, since non-tumblr users who visit a tumblr blog see it as a more or less plain-vanilla blog: they don’t see the social network behind the scenes. And they can use RSS and other old school approaches to aggregate with non-Tumblr blogs as well. To get behind the scenes and really experience Tumblr, you have to create an account and start following people.

Here’s a analogy: imagine participating in Twitter without an account. You could go to various Twitter users’ pages, and read what they were saying, but you could never reply, repost, or get @mentioned. That’s what Tumblr is like for non-users. It’s only when you sign in that you see your own stream of incoming tweets, or in the case of Tumblr, incoming posts from those that you follow.

If Twitter is a social microstreaming network, then Tumblr is a social streaming network. There is no inherent limit to the length of Tumblr posts, as there is in Twitter, so I drop the micro. But the experience is dominated by the stream form factor, not the size of posts.

Side note: I am fascinated by the surging hype around Google+, and how rare it is to have that service compared to Tumblr. But Twitter and Tumblr are the two social streaming tools that are most advanced, in my mind. The Google+ fan boys are endlessly comparing it to Twitter, but hardly a murmur about Tumblr.

Netflix Introduces New Plans and Announces Price Changes

Leaving aside the new plans (which are window dressing), Netflix has announced that they are breaking the streaming and DVD services apart:

[…] we are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into separate plans to better reflect the costs of each and to give our members a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan or the option to subscribe to both. With this change, we will no longer offer a plan that includes both unlimited streaming and DVDs by mail.

So for instance, our current $9.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 1 out at-a-time (no streaming), for $7.99 a month.

The price for getting both of these plans will be $15.98 a month ($7.99 + $7.99). For new members, these changes are effective immediately; for existing members, the new pricing will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.

Basically a doubling of price, which will simply accelerate the transition to streaming only, which is probably fine with Netflix.

It doesn’t look like Netflix is just trying to make more money here. They are offering unlimited streaming for $7.99/mo for the first time, and a plan with unlimited DVDs (one at a time) for $7.99. So they are making considerably more money in the lower tiers of the new plan. So the threshold for getting started is higher, but when you get out to the 5 DVDs at a time and unlimited streaming it’s only $2/mo more.

In my case, I opted to downgrade: a 1 DVD at a time plan and an unlimited streaming plan. So I will pay around $15/mo, instead of the $36/mo I might have paid for unlimited streaming and 5 DVDs out at a time, but which was $34.99/mo until this month.

Since the plans changed, I realized that I had let my DVD queue go empty several times in the past months, so I just don’t need as many DVDs as I originally did. Just one at a time for the occasional movie that is not stream-configured yet.

So I think Netflix will lose some money from people like me defecting from discs, and gain some from people signing up for unlimited streaming with a disk or two at a time.

But both the DVD-only and streaming only businesses can make money at the lower tiers, which must have been a loss leader for one or both services, before.

And by breaking out the team managing the DVDs, Netflix might be preparing to spin it out:

Jessie Becker via Netflix blog

Last November when we launched our $7.99 unlimited streaming plan, DVDs by mail was treated as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan. At the time, we didn’t anticipate offering DVD only plans. Since then we have realized that there is still a very large continuing demand for DVDs both from our existing members as well as non-members. Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs. Creating an unlimited DVDs by mail plan (no streaming) at our lowest price ever, $7.99, does make sense and will ensure a long life for our DVDs by mail offering. Reflecting our confidence that DVDs by mail is a long-term business for us, we are also establishing a separate and distinct management team solely focused on DVDs by mail, led by Andy Rendich, our Chief Service and Operations Officer and an 11 year veteran of Netflix.

And the future CEO of DVDFlix?

The News Article Is Breaking Up

Jonathan Glick, The News Article Is Breaking Up

Long-form writing will survive and will do so by abandoning news nuggets. What emerges will offer a liberating business model for writers. Within the next ten years, long-form writers will accept that their readers have seen the facts of the story live as it happened, probably elsewhere. The longer content that succeeds in that environment will be pieces that provide the most value as backgrounders, news analyses, and commentary.

The good news for writers is that this dovetails with their financial and intellectual interests. Via a variety of social-mobile platforms, they will pass along facts and pictures as soon as they obtain them — or verify them, depending on the writer’s journalistic standards. Writers who are especially good at doing this real-time reporting will develop audiences who are attentive to their mobile alerts. News nuggets are highly viral, so successful reporters will very quickly be introduced to huge numbers of readers.

Through this loss-leading channel, writers will then be able to notify their readers about longer-form articles they have created. Unlike news nuggets, which cannot be protected and whose facts are instantly everywhere, personal pieces reject commoditization. Their value will hinge on the author’s subjective perspective, experience, or knowledge. They may be longer than news articles today, uniquely styled, visually interesting, or delivered via video or audio. These pieces will written to be saved to read later — for that time when the reader takes a moment to relax, learn, and enjoy resting by the side of the stream. Social and mobile platforms make payment much easier, so it will be practical to charge a small fee. Fifty cents for thoughtful analysis is inexpensive, and yet it is the cost of an entire newspaper today.

There is nothing sacred about the article for the transmission of news. It is a logical way of packaging information for a daily print run of a newspaper and a useful format around which to sell display advertising. It has survived into the Internet age for reasons of tradition and the absence of better formats. We have come to accept it as a fundamental atom of news communication, but it’s not. Given faster, easier alternatives, the article no longer makes sense to mobile users for consuming news.

News will go one way, into the stream as scannable updates, and analysis will go the other, toward a new long-form business model for writers. I believe it will be a happy divorce.

Glick is another person who sees the changing nature of reportage in the world of liquid media. His conjectures about the shifting financial model for writers are interesting, but he misses the larger philosophical implications inherent in the liquid media world he describes.

Now, Glick suggests that writers might opt to create and release fragments — facts, quotes, dates, observations — on the fly, rather than waiting to collate them all into a traditional article. And we may need tools to find all these bits, and pull them into some form that can be experienced like an article.

The deeper tectonic shift is that we are moving away from the notion of a permanent, unchanging, written object — the article — published in a specific issue of a specific publication, as the source of our understanding of events. And while the traditional article can be cited elsewhere, its existence and identity has always been tied to the publication. Nowadays, the ‘article’ may be just some collation of bits, contextualized by the reader, not by a single author.

The same old school publishing model was carried forward into the first generation of online media, and still remains in the current model of web publishing. This blog, for example, relies on Tumblr to produce a unique URL to represent my post, which is the modern, pint-sized representation of that fixed identity. My blog domain is stoweboyd.com, and posts generated here have that unique domain at their head.

But in liquid media, my words do not have a single fixed identity: their identity is uncertain, in the Heisenberg sense. They have characteristics of being a particle, fixed in space, and at the same time, a wave, propagating outward from the point of publishing, once the first URL is dropped into the world stream. A lot of what I publish is explicitly other people’s words, like Glick’s at the top of this piece.

The nature of streaming media has changed everything. Instead of posting our words on a wall where people come to read them, we scribble them and throw them into the stream, where they wash wherever the stream takes them. And, along the way, others repost parts, clip paragraphs and images from the original and the millions of copies made, until finally the existence of the original piece is best considered as its trajectory, its decomposition into whatever bits others found interesting, if any. Dozens or hundreds of new URLs are created, some pointing back to my original post, here on stoweboyd.com, but others point to copies, snippets, misquotes, or outright plagiarism.

Systems like Tumblr do a limited job of keeping track of the distribution and decomposition of our posts, but it is an inherently impossible task. There are too many ways for people to cut and paste, too many ways to repurpose our words and images, and anyway, the main channel of the world stream is not Tumblr, but Twitter. Twitter is where the stream is fastest, widest, and deepest. It is there that we look for the newest and most important flotsam, perhaps noticing the source, but often not, because the original source may have been lost along the way. Yes, we may have a URL back to a source, but that may lead to someone quoting another intermediate source with added commentary, and that can lead back to another, and so on.

From the viewpoint of the person in the stream, the ‘news’ that is floating by is experienced compositionally. The stream is like a palimpsest, where newer material have been overlaid over older, and you may be able to see through, or maybe not.

The decomposition of media content as it is decontextualized in the stream means that we each have to rebuild context anew as we pore through links, reposts, and others’ commentary on the bits.

In a liquid world, news is a mosaic, pieced together, and where every tile in the mosaic is itself liquid, made of streaming bits. So the wave is made of particles, but each particle is a wave when you zoom into it. News, and our experience of it, is therefore increasingly fractal. You can choose any scale, it seems, and find the same meandering stream at the core of things.

So Glick is right, as far as it goes, but more is changing than the nature of articles. Our experience of ‘news’ is changing, and behind that, us: we are being changed.

You make your tools and they shape you, Kenneth Bouldin said. And if we flow everything of importance into a raging stream, then we must learn how to swim.

This is our story

This is our story

Hello,

Every day, I have things to share with friends, family and the world. A new idea, an interesting find, a quick message, and plenty of other things that don’t fit on my blog.

And it seems I’m not the only one.

A musician friend with a big fanbase called a while back to ask how to share his latest music video and some info on a nice background. Something clean and quickly shared. Not a blog that needs to be updated, nor a full website.

He just wanted to share a link on Facebook and Twitter, fast.

It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask. But I realized there was no answer. No one had built it yet.

That’s why we invented checkthis.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Put up your content.
  2. Change how it looks.

And that’s it. No set-up, password, back-end, save button, sidebar, blogroll…
Just publish and share your beautiful link in seconds.

Checkthis is instant web publishing without the clutter.
Simple. Fast. Open to all.

Meet checkthis (including a short video)
http://checkthis.com/about

It would be great to hear what you think, so please keep in touch. And don’t hesitate to tweet me any questions or suggestions.

Have fun with it in the meantime ­and, if you like, please tell the world.

Much love,
Frédéric della Faille

I am looking forward to fooling with checkthis, Mr. della Faille.

Checkthis is a deconstruction of blogging, taking out sequence and the ‘single shared template’ metaphors, and getting down to just pages. Micropages, not microblogs.

Pages that are cast adrift in the new world of liquid media. When all content is being encountered in the liquid flow of streaming apps, why the overhead of a blog chronology? Everything needs a URL, but every one can be atomic, instead of part of some larger whole.

Media — and identity — is being atomized by the flow. This is our story.

Are "Work 2.0" apps like InklingMarkets, Podio, oDesk disruptive to hierarchical business workflow? - Quora

Apparently, someone from TechWeek is planning a panel on ‘the future of work’, and want some guidance.

Here’s my response:

We need liquid media to deal with an increasingly slippery, uncertain world, and to — paradoxically — help ground us by keeping our heads above the churning surface exactly where the flow is at its fastest.Let’s start by agreeing that the 2.0 meme has been played out.

I suggest we refer to these modern collaboration tools as work media: social tools designed for the enterprise but based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication from social networks of the open web.  Work media tools share a number of characteristics, most centrally the streaming metaphor of Twitter and Facebook, with short updates from a variety of followed sources cascade into each user’s dashboard, from which each can derive a networked gestalt of the world. Work media is altering the DNA of business.

The transition to liquid media — where content is contextualized within streaming apps like Twitter, Flipboard, and News.me, instead of on web pages — is not a fad. It is the next cycle of a fundamental transition into social media, and one that is moving past the superficial, earlier adoption and into a deeply socialized experience of information flow, based on social networks, not just alternative, low-cost publishing solutions.

And yes, this is a movement away from business processes as the primary metaphor of business operations in hierarchically organized companies, over to social network-based work and social network-organized companies. This is much more than a shift in scale, and very pragmatically, it is a shift to a way of work that is very well fitted to the time we are living in.

The adoption of work media in business will be profoundly transformative, and not just because of the shiny toys — like tablets, and truly smart phones — that are arriving at exactly the same time.

There are strong cognitive reasons that people naturally are adopting a stream/networked model of work communities. There are numerous studies (Meade, and many more recently) that demonstrate that people are happier and more productive, for example, when they share their immediate tasks and receive acknowledgment of progress made. In such settings, we perceive time moving faster, and the effort involved in work seems less. (See my writing on ‘social cognition’ for more on this.)

To the extent that we are capable of getting to a flow state in our work, it seems clear that the best tools are those structured according to the patterns of human interaction present when teams ‘flow’: helping us to keep relevant information in close context, to coordinate with team members, and for all to know what needs to be accomplished by who, for example. This requires tools in which we, those doing the work, are the principal sources of information, the principal sources of meaning: not the information we are exchanging, or even the company on whose behalf we are exchanging it.

Today, companies need solutions that foster trust in an increasingly free agent world, and especially the ‘swift trust’ that is necessary for short-term teams to come together quickly, accomplish a shared task, and then move on.

We need liquid media to deal with an increasingly slippery, uncertain world, and to — paradoxically — help ground us by keeping our heads above the churning surface exactly where the flow is at its fastest.

Ten years from now, we will have a strange sensation when we think about how work was accomplished ‘in the old days.’ We will look back on the work environment of the ’00s and earlier, and wonder: how did we ever get anything done when our tools got in the way and divided us from ourselves?

Hollywood in turmoil as DVD sales drop and downloads steal the show -- Dan Sabbagh

The sale of DVDs has been falling since 2007, but the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) reported that physical sales collapsed 19% to $2.2bn (£1.3bn) in the first quarter, while high-street rental also plunged by 36% to $440m, in a period when Blockbuster was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Online downloads and streaming through services such as Netflix, by contrast, grew quickly, although not enough to avert a 10% decline in the total home entertainment market to $4.2bn.

Ephemeralization of movies will lead to huge swaths of the entertainment marketplace collapsing, like Blockbuster. Redbox and its competitors have a way to go, but they are strictly transitional, too.

Just as big will be the death of DVD/Blu Ray players, as streaming becomes the principal distribution, and then TVs, as more and more of streamed movies and entertainment is watched on mobile devices and PCs.

Sell everything, like Sony, Panasonic, and all the others. They are walking dead.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine

Chris Anderson -

As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work.

I buy a good deal of Anderson’s pitch, but he misses the biggest aspect of the next wave: the movement is not just away from HTML to apps, its from a web of pages to a web of flow.

The dominant motif of all strategically important web apps from this point forward for at least a decade will be that they stream information to users from those that they chose to follow. This will turn the historical web into an archive of pages that we return to less and less as better apps and richer social experience fragments pages into constituents and hurls them into the vortex of sociality. URLs will cease to be navigational tools, principally, and instead will represent addresses through which fragments are pulled, and streamed.

It’s not that the web is dead, it’s being reanimated through pervasive social streaming.

And then, the step after that is when social constructs are built into the operating platforms, like iPad, Android, Mac OS, and whatever other platforms matter in the next few years. That will obliterate the browser, except as a fallback for viewing archives.