alex de carvalho

Panel on Rebuild­ing the World with Free Every­thing, with:

• Doc Searls — Linux Journal
• Kather­ine Druck­man — Linux Journal
• William Hur­ley — evil genius project
• Chris Ander­son — Wired Magazine
• Dave Tay­lor — filmBUZZ

“Free” is the future of busi­ness. Steve Larsen says the world has more than 500,000 open source code bases now — all free. That’s a tall chal­lenge for a huge pile of build­ing mate­r­ial. Linux Jour­nal presents a panel of cre­ative hack­ers and busi­ness crafters to dis­cuss con­struct­ing the future.

Free as in free­dom and free as in beer. Free­dom gave us the inter­net. Free is the title of Chris Anderson’s book.

By giv­ing away con­tent for free, it means more eye­balls. One model for mag­a­zines is to lock up con­tent for a time period, say, 30 days; another model is to open up the con­tent imme­di­ately, rec­og­niz­ing that a cer­tain per­cent­age of peo­ple will like to sub­scribe to the long form mag­a­zine content.

Starbuck’s should give out free iPhone cases with their logo on it. This is a huge mar­ket­ing opportunity.

There are things that become com­mon knowl­edge as they evolve. For exam­ple, server mon­i­tor­ing has become a free ser­vice. Com­pa­nies in this area are giv­ing away the 90% to con­cen­trate on the 10% of stuff that requires con­sult­ing and is profitable.

Was there a con­nec­tion between “The Long Tail” and “Free”? Def­i­nitely. Free is enabled by infi­nite shelf space. The near-zero mar­ginal cost of an extra Ama­zon list­ing enables the “free”. The fas­ci­na­tion was in research­ing the his­tory of a very mis­un­der­stood word, which is becom­ing an eco­nomic model and defin­ing busi­ness for the next era.

The inter­net is our biggest mar­ket­place, but we’re just get­ting our sea legs now and under­stand­ing how it works. There is this enor­mous invis­i­ble energy and build­ing mate­ri­als that are mak­ing the sur­face we’re walk­ing around on. But this is how things work: you invent the medium frst and then fig­ure out how to mon­e­tize it later.

Wired Mag­a­zine pays among the high­est rates in the world: about $3 a word. So an exclu­sively online pub­li­ca­tion of Wired would still cost about 50% of a paper pub­li­ca­tion, because of the human costs.

It’s hard to think about what the pre­mium prod­uct should be and what peo­ple will pay for. But you can get around this by build­ing the prod­uct with the com­mu­nity … and they will give you the busi­ness model. Most peo­ple under­stand there is eco­nomic real­ity and that you need to make money: they will accept that the mon­e­ti­za­tion is there. If you build a com­mu­nity first, you build trust and peo­ple will be ready to pay money for services.

The patron­age model may not work well and is where the “starv­ing artist” comes from. It vio­lates eco­nomic prin­ci­ples. In fact, you want the oppo­site, which is for the mar­ket to fig­ure out how much some­thing is worth.

If you’re in a nose­dive, “free” is not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is the under­ly­ing paper, prod­uct or ser­vice. Whether it’s free or not is irrelevant.

Not every­thing has to be a profit cen­ter in your busi­ness; some things can be loss lead­ers in order to make money elsewhere.

Red­dit accounts for 20M uniques and 40M pages view per month … and costs noth­ing. This is user-generated con­tent that costs Wired noth­ing. So Wired has the mass audi­ence with the mag­a­zine, and the very spe­cific and gran­u­lar with Reddit.

In the com­ing years, as band­width increases, there will be a com­plete break­down of the movie dis­tri­b­u­tion model.

The mon­e­ti­za­tion of free is dif­fi­cult. For exam­ple, some­one needs to click on adwords in order to make some money. But this is just a prob­lem of con­tent. If you have nice con­tent that’s updated con­sis­tently, you should be get­ting good CPM rates. Google sinks or swims based on their abilty to match ads to content.

How to com­bat mis­con­cep­tion that just because the soft­ware is free, the ser­vices are not? The answer is to dis­ap­point peo­ple and to say no.

It is fac­tu­ally true that micro-payments have failed to date. One of the rea­sons is that the process of pay­ing is so high. If the trans­ac­tion were less dif­fi­cult, there would be more micropayments.

How can free apply to prod­ucts with a very high cost base? There is a com­pany that gives away elec­tric cars and sells you the elec­tric­ity. There are a lot of mon­e­ti­za­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties in ser­vices as well.

Open ques­tion: would the iTunes store make more money if Apple just gave away iPods for free?

Another model is to give away free deriv­a­tives of work. The prob­lem will be dis­tri­b­u­tion for the free stuff. How do you incen­tivize distributors?

Panel on Build­ing Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools, with:

• CC Chap­man — The Advance Guard
• Dave Delaney — Grif­fin Technology
• Saul Colt — FreshBooks
• Loic Le Meur — Seesmic
• Chris Bro­gan — New Mar­ket­ing Labs

Get­ting atten­tion for your brand (per­sonal or com­pany) is eas­ier than ever thanks to the ole’ inter­web but doing it with “zing” is still key to build­ing a fol­low­ing. Learn and ask ques­tion from the peo­ple who have built brands and careers by doing it with “zing”

Build­ing a brand is eas­ier than ever before thanks to the inter­net. It’s like broad­cast TV, except every­one has their own show if they want it. The way you com­mu­ni­cate online will tell peo­ple more about you than your resume ever will.

Ques­tion: How should peo­ple man­age and bal­ance per­sonal vs pro­fes­sional life as you brand your­self on Face­book and other plat­forms?

Answer: This ques­tion is most often asked by GenY as they post their col­lege pic­tures online and tran­si­tion to job hunt­ing. Gen­er­ally, you should be “you” online and remain authen­tic and true to yourself.

Ques­tion: What’s the story of how you all started? Did you start from zero?

Answer:

• “Mostly every­body starts out from zero. I started blog­ging … because I wanted to start blog­ging. Just be your­self and do it. If you’re build­ing a brand, you have to fig­ure out what’s right for the brand. For exam­ple, Twit­ter is not right for some brands. It’s a ‘weird, scary feel­ing’ when peo­ple start lis­ten­ing to you … but it’s nice and proves you’re doing some­thing right. Keep doing it.” –CC Chapman
• “When some­one crit­i­cized me, I actu­ally thanked them, say­ing I had learned a lot from the crit­i­cism. We later became friends” –Loic Le Meur
• “You can never ever have the last word on the Inter­net.” –Saul Colt
• “Some brands are just not ready to talk to the con­sumer. They’re just not … and they will fail if they try.” — CC Chapman
• “Be help­ful. Don’t talk about your­self, rather, be help­ful to oth­ers.” –Chris Brogan

Ques­tion: How involved do you get into your clients’ social media strat­egy? Will you tweet on their behalf?

Answer: “Clients need to learn how to do this for them­selves, although they need hand hold­ing and train­ing in the begin­ning. They need to under­stand what a troll is and how to deal with them. But ulti­mately, a client needs to drive their own car.” –CC Chapman

Ques­tion: Where should I focus my energies?

Answer:
“Spend a lit­tle bit of time every­where and fig­ure out what works best for you, and then spend your time there.” –Saul Colt
“If you use Ping.fm, you can broad­cast to many ser­vices at once.” –Loic Le Meur
“If you do the mul­ti­ple one to many thing with Ping.fm, you’re not gen­er­at­ing con­ver­sa­tion.” –Chris Bro­gan

Ques­tion: A lot of star­tups focus on stealth mode. Should they do this? And should star­tups have a dou­ble “O”, like Google?

Answer: “Don’t fear com­pe­ti­tion, share as much as you can, and track the feed­back and online con­ver­sa­tion.” –Loic Le Meur

Ques­tion: (unintelligible)

Answer: “Social media is a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. But we never approached Twit­ter as a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. We see it as a rela­tion­ship chan­nel. Frankly, talk­ing about online invoic­ing is bor­ing, so we talk about other stuff, like movies.” –Saul Colt

Ques­tion: How about build­ing brands in local com­mu­ni­ties, rather than on a national or inter­na­tional level?

Answer:

• “One of the things you can do is to orga­nize local events, like Pod­Camps and Bar­Camps and Geek Break­fasts, to bring peo­ple together and build a com­mu­nity. ” –Dave Delaney
• “Use Twit­ter to have small con­ver­sa­tions and to reach out locally. Twit­ter is like a box of Legos: you build some­thing one piece at a time.” –Chris Brogan
• “If you start speak­ing with peo­ple, they will buy at *your* store … just because they’ve spo­ken with you” –CC Chapman

Ques­tion: What about “re-branding” in an open and trans­par­ent soci­ety, for exam­ple, when a prod­uct sucks?

Answer:

• “Please remem­ber that your legal team is your legal coun­sel: they are not your company’s oper­at­ing offi­cials.” –Chris Brogan
• “Never crit­i­cize your com­peti­tors. Never do it as an indi­vid­ual either.” –Loic Le Meur

Ques­tion: Most of our clients’ bud­gets are dry­ing up, so they are turn­ing to new media. We have two types of clients: those with ideas that suck, and those with no ideas at all. What oppor­tu­ni­ties are there 

Answer: “Seek out Beth Kanter”

Ques­tion: (missed it)

Answer: “Read Shel Holz’s book ‘Tac­ti­cal Trans­parency’” –Chris Bro­gan

Ques­tion: Busi­ness don’t expose who the indi­vid­u­als who are blog­ging or twit­ter­ing on their behalf. What’s the best practice?

Answer:
“Your com­pet­i­tive advan­tage is your per­son­al­ity” –Saul Colt
“The slip­pery slope is con­nect­ing with the per­son and not the brand. What hap­pens when that per­son leaves? For exam­ple, when Scoble left Microsoft — what have they done since then?” –CC Chap­man
“Dell is han­dling it well, with @RichardatDell, @LionelatDell, etc.” –Chris Brogan

SX09-286, cake, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, social media, brand, loic le meur, cc chap­man, chris bro­gan, julie had­don, saul colt, rep­u­ta­tion

Steven John­son of outside.in talks about “The Ecosys­tem of News” and “old growth media”. This live blog post is mostly para­phrased:

It is now con­ven­tional wis­dom that the news­pa­per as we have come to know it for last cen­tury is over, or will be in a mat­ter of years. The ques­tion is whether we’re going to spend our time griev­ing over the loss, or whether we’re going to use this moment as an oppor­tu­nity to invent some­thing even bet­ter. We’re inevitably mov­ing from the “paper of record” model to a some­thing more dis­trib­uted, a news ecosys­tem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t con­sciously define the shape of that sys­tem. So let’s fig­ure out what val­ues we want to pre­serve from the older news­pa­per par­a­digm, and what val­ues we want to improve upon — and then let’s go build it!

To under­stand the future of news, you need to look at the past. If you wanted to find out news about the Mac in the 80’s and 90’s, you read Mac­World; only break­ing news would make it to the New York Times. In the early 90’s, the chan­nels started to widen, and a few years later, the web arrived. New Apple sites started pop­ping up and later Apple brought out its own offi­cial web­sites. Nowa­days, there is a huge diver­sity of infor­ma­tion about Apple … and the lag to get new infor­ma­tion is sec­onds. The level of sophis­ti­ca­tion of blog posts also far exceed what any news­pa­per would even attempt.

The metaphors we’ve used for the changes in media tell us a lot about the changes going on. Ecosys­tem is a good metaphor: it’s com­plex and dif­fer­ent from an assem­bly line. Yesterday’s ecosys­tem is a bar­ren desert and today’s is a thriv­ing jun­gle. This is a good indi­ca­tor of the future of the news information.

Peo­ple are pan­ick­ing about two things:  1) news orga­ni­za­tions are going to dis­ap­pear and 2) impor­tant bits of infor­ma­tion, ie., “news”, will dis­ap­pear as well. Peo­ple decry the alleged demise of war report­ing and of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism: blog­gers are not likely to get out of their paja­mas to report on these things. The web doesn’t have an intrin­sic abil­ity to cover news bet­ter; it just cov­ers news faster.

But now think about the ecosys­tem of polit­i­cal news dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion: polit­i­cal blogs like Dai­lyKos to YouTube, Twit­ter, Face­book and the can­di­dates’ own web­sites, all the news was well cov­ered … and in fact, thrived online. There are more per­spec­tive, depth, and sur­face now.

Really, we now real­ize we were liv­ing in a desert dis­guised as a rainforest!

When you pick up the New York Times, there are only a few sto­ries you are inter­ested in. But when you walk in your neigh­bor­hood, there are dozens of sto­ries you would like to know bet­ter … and that will never be cov­ered in the NYT. This is the long tail and the Times will never even attempt this. And this is what the best can do. In fact, the Times itself is now launch­ing local Brook­lyn blogs.

We have grown from read­ing Mac­World to expect­ing to see an instant keynote of Steve Jobs. We take it for granted that we can do things like geo­t­ag­ging news … but the old growth media did not bring this to us.

It is pos­si­ble that inves­tiga­tive report­ing will not thrive. On the other hand, the new ecosys­tem may free up tra­di­tional media to do what they do best: war report­ing and muckracking.

There is an objec­tion to the ecosys­tem of news model: it is com­plex and there is more noise than ever before. Can we expect the gen­eral pub­lic to nav­i­gate the new ecosys­tem with the same skill and dis­cre­tion (and dig­i­tal lit­er­acy) as we can?

The funny thing about the news­pa­per today is that their online audi­ence is grow­ing faster than their print cir­cu­la­tion is shrink­ing. Mea­sured by pure audi­ence inter­est, news­pa­pers have never been more relevant.

The implied model of every news orga­ni­za­tion is “all the news that’s fit to link”.

The ecosys­tem of news model pre­dicts we will have a layer of “NEWS”:

• Pro­fes­sional journalists
• Pro­fes­sional bloggers
• Non-profit jour­nal­ists
• Ama­teur bloggers
• Direct events
• Pub­lic data — API’s (every local gov­ern­ment will have an API to its own data)

and a layer of “COMMENTARY”:

• Pun­dits / Columnists
• Blog­gers
• Schol­ars

and a layer of “CURATION” (ie., of decid­ing what’s good or not):

• Social Media
• Pro­fes­sional Editors
• Aggre­ga­tors
• Group fil­ters

and a layer of “DISTRIBUTION”:

• Tra­di­tional media
• Aggre­ga­tors
• Viral word of mouth

The tragedy now is that the finan­cial melt­down and some over lever­ag­ing by news orga­ni­za­tions is cram­ming what should have been a decade-long tran­si­tion into the space of just a few years. This is a tragedy for two rea­sons. First, it inflicts a lot of stress and dam­age on news pro­fes­sion­als who are doing excel­lent work. Also, it dis­tracts us from build­ing the new model by attempt­ing to shore up the failed model of the old growth media.

SX09-2131, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, news, media