Things have been somewhat quiet here on the party front, what with Thanksgiving and aching livers to tend to. Don’t fret, though - the train has not yet left the station for this year.

On December 18th, we’ll be holding the Bastard Christmas Party. I’m organizing this event with Brian Solis and Anthony Grant. We hope you’ll be our guests. RSVP here. Here are some of the details:

When

Monday, December 18, 2006

7:00 PM

Where

Otis

25 Maiden Lane

San Francisco, California 94108

37.7882,
-122.404

Category

Social

Description

With December comes the holidays. While most enjoy spending time with
their familes, digesting their massive dinners and unwrapping gifts, a
select few of us shiver ourselves to sleep alone. Not any more.

The Bastard Christmas Party celebrates our lives away from our familes.
No crying babies, no annoying cousins, no long-lost aunts and uncles.
We like to think of it as Egg Nog for the Remainder. A tribute to all
of those who had the good sense to avoid the holiday shopping lines and
the crowded airports and highways. Sure, we’re bastards - but we’re
entitled.

Join us for the Christmas Party designed just for you, you selfish
bastard ;) There won’t be any gifts, and anyone seen wearing a Santa
Hat will be shot. What we will have is a mix of people even Santa can’t
forget. There will be drinking and plenty of “missletoe” for your
enjoyment.

To add a little twist to the mix, we’ll also be celebrating the birfday of our good friend and contributor, Brian Solis.

This jam is being brought to you by the fine folks at bub.blicio.us.
Our ears will be delightfully entertained by (dj) Mr. Grant and other
talented elves.

We’re in the process of working out things like schwag and sponsors so get in touch with me if you’re interested in either or both.

technorati tags:bub.blicio.us, bastard+christmas, greg+narain, brian+solis, anthony+grant, futureworkspr, christmas, bluewhalelabs

paidContent points to a Bear Stearns report titled “The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment” recently released that takes a hard, analytical look at the way media has transformed in the past and what that might imply for the future of the Long Tail in th media landscape.

Spencer Wang lays out several key points in the presentation. I’ll summarize them here, to the best of my own understanding:

1. Entertainment Supply Chain (seen below) is transforming based on various competitive forces (technology, economics, regulations).
2. Internet has truly blown the doors off of the Content Distribution mechanism, yielding more power to the Content Creators (though less than might be expected due to simultaneously decreasing costs of Content Creation).
3. An increase in choices will lead to an increase in demand, with one major caveat - hits get smaller. While there still will be hits, they will occur in a form different than before: smaller in scale (and potentially revenue). Today, we still think of our personal media properties in terms of Mainstream Metrics - hence the quest for “eyeballs”.
4. The ultimate penetration and reach of new, smaller niche audiences cannot be overlooked, but don’t expect it to happen overnight. TV took a significant amount of time to make these adjustments.We’re still in the infancy of the social media landscape - hills have yet to form.
5. Infinite Choice = Overwhelming Confusion. Amen. The problem with choice is someone has to make one. This has been evidenced in the perpetuation of phrases such as information overload, continuous partial attention, and others in that family that all allude to our decreasing attention spans and increasing river of data to consider.Information overload is a problem for not just servers but people.
6. Systems that serve to filter the river will ultimately prove invaluable to the wider population. These systems include Brands, Editorial Discretion, Ratings, User Recommendations, and Software.In reality, these seem all like citizens of a wider Reputation Economy.

I’ve added a number of my own comments to the end of each of these points. While there is a great deal more that can be said about this particular topic, I’ll return to these topics over time. Considering SocialRoots‘ ultimate goals, this topic is particularly of interest.

technorati tags:socialroots, long+tail, bear+stearns, paidcontent, spencer+wang, rafat+ali, greg+narain

Peter Caputa poses an interesting question: why isn’t the Techmeme sponsorship model perfect? Peter, much like myself, are both running frugal startups that provide room predominantly for results-based initiatives (be they marketing, advertising or PR) when it comes to allocating our small piles of resources.

As Pete notes:

But, it’s ridiculously out of the price range of the average blogger or startup to pay for. And I’ve heard it doesn’t necessarily result in a lot of new subscribers.

[…]

Subscriber and reader acquisition is a big market. They should apply their filters to content providers willing to pay for the privilege. And that might be a scalable business model.

pc4media: Techmeme’s Sponsored Posts Program is Almost Genius

When I first heard of the arrangement at Techmeme, I must admit that the entrepreneurial cog automatically kicked in and I wondered why I shouldn’t just buy a month’s sponsorship and then “sublet” posts on my blog so that they could make it into the sponsored box on Techmeme.  My second thought, naturally, was that Gabe would already have some control exerted that prevented me from doing this - something akin to removing the tag on my mattress.

Pete’s solution is somewhat different in that it urges the creation of a literal marketplace with paid benchmarks for performance.  As Pete suggests, he’d be willing to pay for RSS subscribers and a smaller amount for site visitors.   I certainly see the value and the opportunity in this approach.  Indeed most corporations and groups that we work with are interested in the size of their audience and how to quickly, if not exponentially, grow that.

My question, of course, is whether or not Techmeme is that place.  I think it very well might have the potential to be, as Pete suggests, with the variety of “channels” it offers.  It also draws the technorati (as in the elite tech users) crowd which increases the likelihood that a subscription might precipitate.  Still, however, I think the universe is in its infancy - at least around this particular watering hole.

In contrast, I might more anticipate Google to broach this problem - maybe even Yahoo! or Microsoft.  Seemingly, the CPA model is understood, supported and innovated in at all of these companies.  They also have the ear of the small to medium-sized advertisers which is really the most critical component in the mixture.

Good call Pete.

technorati tags:techmeme, sponsorship, blogging, rss

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has an interesting post about some emerging trends in our behavior, largely surrounding our newfound love and dependency on technology and all things gadgetry:

I begin my economics of abundance speech with Carver Mead’s mind-bending question: “What happens when things get (nearly) free?” His answer is that you waste them, be they transistors or megabytes of bandwidth capacity. You use them profligately, extravagantly, irresponsibly. You shift out of conservation mode and get into exploitation mode.

The Long Tail: The Rise of Freeconomics

This reminds of me of the trailer at the movie theater where there’s the annoying cell phone guy that is on the phone in all the inappropriate places and cackles at the end, “Don’t worry, I’ve got like a million minutes.” I certainly do see that this newfound obsession with abundance does impact the way we live our lives.

Chris’ main distinction, which I think deserves a secondary nod, is that the price has to approach free or virtually free. I think there’s an interesting phenomena that does happen at the end of that spectrum, or perhaps it’s more of an inflection point, that the value of an object becomes abstracted. The most common case where we make this evaluation is with the “free give-away”. Many the entrepreneur has fought with pricing for their product or service - constantly balancing the value proposition of free versus that of paid. Recently, we’ve seen many fall into the Freemium model for pricing. Why? It’s easy to choose. By segmenting our feature set into convenient columns, we force the customer to evaluate the value - using the language and imagery we choose. Of course, it’s our challenge to find the right mix to create the proper slope - but it’s easier than retracting a free offer, isn’t it?

In many of our minds, free translates to disposable: Buy this shredder, get a free toaster. We are forced to reconcile either our need for the second, the quality of the second, or both. Of course, the second one is trivial in nature.

In other minds, it’s an extension of the original offer, not free at all: Buy this PDA and we’ll give you a free SD card. Can I really use the PDA without the card? No - it was already part of my purchasing research. We’re more likely to wonder why it wasn’t included originally, not value the token.

Lastly, there’s the notion that free implies some form of bait: Try our product for free or return it in 30 days for free! Everyone’s been burned on this one, right? The process for the return is so difficult or tedious that you actually end up eating the loss. It’s established a general distrust in our collective minds that “some things are too good to be true”. We’d rather pay and know the extent of our liability than relinquish it to that unseen abyss.

But the science of free, it’s still evolving. As Chris points out:

With apologies to Levitt and Dubner, I’ll cheekily call the emerging realization that abundance is driving our world “freeconomics”. Understanding when to shift out of scarcity mode and start giving away what you once held dear is a core competency for our age.

The Long Tail: The Rise of Freeconomics

They same common sense is not all that common; perhaps the same can be said for abundance.

technorati tags:freeconomics, chris+anderson, longtail, abundance

I’m sitting on what must be the most uncomfortable, pitiful excuse for a chair known to man at JFK in the JetBlue terminal. I’ve been up all night - we got a later than usual start to Thanksgiving this year (think 10pm) and I got dropped off straight to the airport without much time to prepare in between.

Most of my family hasn’t been fully dialed in that I am no longer living in New York - it’s a big clan. They’re also not aware of many other significant changes that have happened in my life over the past few months, but that’s a whole different story.

Life is a lot like packing. Most of us spend all of our lives collecting all sorts of things that we really feel we need - the things we can’t live without. We never give much thought to what really matters except in times of extreme panic or tragedy. It’s often the hardest thing to simply appreciate what you have right in front of you - sometimes it takes 2500 miles to even know you had it at all. In the end, we don’t need all that stuff - just a handful.
Being back briefly this time, it makes me realize just how small that handful really can be. For me, it was getting picked up by my brother on Monday night, playing with my nephew and taking him to the bus on Tuesday, watching Blue Man on Tuesday night, and singing and dancing like nobody’s business on Wednesday night with the best collection of friends I could ever have asked for. Sure not everyone could make it, but then again, neither can I. Thursday was ringing sales at the mom’s ice cream shop and lounging around with my cousins - something that we only recently began doing but that really is nice.

The trip ended, much as it began. A quick ride with my brother (younger this time) to the airport and some reflection on things past and things to come. I try not to compare life in New York and life in San Francisco - they’re so utterly different any comparison is unjust.

I’m heading home in an hour. Home - I like the way that sounds, wherever it may be.

Excuse the very late notice for this - the budget for Podcamp West ended up having more room than we anticipated and we wanted to do something fun to kick off the festivities.

Yesterday, Vic Podcaster, Brian Solis, and I baked the plan to have a small pre-party on Friday, November 17.  We’re going to The Mint, just a block or two away from the camp venue to have several pitchers of beer as well as some finger food.  Things will get started at 6:30pm and continue on until at least 8:30pm.

In case you don’t remember, this is the same spot that Vloggercon ended at.

Please RSVP here so we can tell how to prepare best to serve you ;)
http://upcoming.org/event/127408

For the past couple of months, Vic Podcaster has been working tirelessly to bring together the West Coast’s version of PodCamp, aptly called Podcamp West. Vic and I originally hatched the plan over chinese food in Boston’s South Station after the original camp had concluded.

San Francisco has seen its share of podcasting and videoblogging events, to say the least, however, there’s something quite different about Podcamp West. With a camp, the unconference model provides us with a way to move the hallway track to the main stage. It begs to argue that an unconference on podcasting is a unification of the rants and raves of thousands of podcasters everywhere. At the same time, Podcamp West is not just about videoblogging but everything related to the art and trade of podcasting.
If you are in SF, you definitely want to stop by on Saturday and Sunday for a good time and interesting conversation.

Where: San Francisco
When: 18-19 November, 2006
Timing: 12 PM - 6 PM
Days: Saturday and Sunday
Venue: Swedish American Hall
Map: Click here
Address: 2174 Market St. San Francisco, CA

[sponsored post] I’m giving the new ReviewMe service a try. Some might be wondering why bother doing this - it’s not really that much money when all is said and done, however, I think the experiment is worth a shot.

Today during brunch, we had an extended conversation about this specific topic. One fellow felt that any form of paid post was a betrayal of the publication’s authenticity. This is in stark contrast, seemingly, to the walled garden of the traditional world of publishing. The point being made was that the people who are writing are expressing their opinions but it’s not biased in any way - bias is a measure of commercial interest.

My point was three-fold. First, authenticity and commercialism need to be separated. I firmly believe that any individual has the ability to remain authentic and truthful, despite their financial interests. I know that this is not a simple task, however, and perhaps the work I have done for years as a consultant where I am asked to often tell my clients things that they don’t want to hear despite my fee.

Second, the “long tail” makes it possible for you to vote with your attention. If you don’t like the writing or feel that you can’t trust it anymore, leave. There are more than enough options cropping up in a variety of verticals meaning increased options and variability of opinion. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the old landscape where we had just a handful of publications that we could turn to for information.

Third, extremism will make things more and more difficult and force underhanded actions.  I think there is a growing awareness and need to fund our efforts as media creators.  If our audience scorns us (in the form of criticism, defection or refusal) for seeking a livelihood that we desire, we have one of two optionis - quit or take the action secretly.  A solution somewhere in the middle seems like the only sustainable option.

So this is my review of ReviewMe.  There’s nothing much to see there at this poiint in time.  You’re ability to earn is tied to a variety of metrics that are somewhat telling and give the advertiser some context about their investment.  I think that the issues raised above really are the critical issues surrounding ReviewMe and its potential for success.

I’ve been listening to the Gillmor Gang in spurts this morning and stumbled upon a part of the conversation that was quite salient as regards the future of SocialRoots. In Part III of the Harpo Gang (can I contest this multi-part thing formally here). I think it’s Mike Vizzard (but I could be mistaken) that brings up the topic of IT publications changing media topology.

As explained, recently a conference for IT publishers, the acknowledged and increasingly accepted content mix of the future was something like this:

• One-third staff content
• One-third user content
• One-third vendor content

This is a really interesting admission, for a couple of reasons. Vendor contributed content has traditionally been frowned upon or quickly thrown into the Advertorial Bin for most traditional publications. User-contributed content has often been relegated to Letters to the Editor and other pre/post-roll commentary (geographically associated with the “Corrections”). Increasing the diversity of content creators can, potentially, increase the breadth of the writing itself. Additionally, the expansion seems to include other forms of media like audio and video that serve to enhance the experience of that information.

Aside from the change in the landscape, another area that seems worth considering is who the new leaders in this generation of publications will be. It stands to reason that entities like CNet and ZDNet are well prepared as they have established channels to collect this information from all three sources. Social media entities like pure-play blogs, like TechCrunch, already reap a tremendous amount of knowledge from the interactive nature of blogging and commentary. Of course, that still leaves the traditional publications (mainstream media, if you will). Perhaps Gannett is out front with their crowdsourcing efforts, but it seems to reason that all the “regular folks” out there still need to be aware that the conversation is now bi-directional. It is, isn’t it?

One point that was raised during the podcast was that vendors would actually, and most likely, pay for this content to be created with the hopes of getting their name, and potentially message, in front of the audience they most desire.  This point inspired this post.

SocialRoots (which I am happy to say is back on the tracks and steaming forward) has been developing the marketplace that will make this sort of activity frictionless by bringing the vendors and the creators together.  As an entrepreneur, it’s always nice to hear affirmation of your beliefs.  It also looks good on slides during investor presentations ;)

Jeff Howe has some breaking news about Gannett’s plans for the future. It seems that they are taking the next step in social media integration - this time outsourcing story research to the masses. As Jeff reports:

Of all the pilot projects the company has conducted over the last few months, the most promising would seem to be the crowdsourcing of in-depth investigations into government malfeasance. Crowdsourcing involves taking functions traditionally performed by employees and using the internet to outsource them to an undefined, generally large group of people. The compensation is usually far less than what an employee might make for performing the same service. Well-known examples include Wikipedia and iStockphoto.

“We’ve already had some really amazing results with the crowdsourcing element of this,” said Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s VP for new media content. “Most of us got into this business because we were passionate about watchdog journalism and public service, and we’ve just watched those erode. We’ve learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged.”

Source: Wired.com, “Gannett to Crowdsource News”

I have to commend Gannett for experimenting with this medium. While they’ve made a firm committment to this direction, it is still largely experimental in nature. As one executive notes: “We’re serious about this… Do we have it licked? No. But we’re ahead of the curve. By maybe half a step.”

Ahead of the curve indeed. I’m curious how much of an advantage this truly provides. Ultimately, the medium we’re attempting to wrangle provides quite a bit more transparency into the processes involved. While Gannett might have the largest body of experience - that experience is not necessarily exclusive nor proprietary. I am sure that there is some advantage, but perhaps there’s more to learn from the establish players who are actively tackling these problems.

Naturally, I think that the largest problem still is on the input side rather than the output. The key challenges revolve around managing a workforce and providing the storytelling experience the traditional media consumer’s palette is adjusted to. Like it or not, we bloggers, as journalists, still have a lot left to learn.

The question is who will learn the right lessons first?

technorati tags:crowdsourcing, media, social+media, social+news, gannett