[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.

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

Mark Cuban has a very compelling piece up today that discusses some of the economics of the Long Tail. It is interesting mostly in that it is a very harsh, and potentially telling, view on just what success might take. There are quite a few interesting points, though I recommend you read the whole thing.

Mark’s first point is to provide more context around the Long Tail’s topography. He identifies new labels for two areas of the graph - The Vert Ramp and the Content Ceiling. Mark’s done a nice job explaining it but I just though the diagram needed some help so I created a new one:

Now, as I’ve shown it here, there are the Capital Needs on the Y-axis and Commercial Interests on the X-axis. Mark makes a good point that when you really are in it for the money - you need to be in it for the money. The last PEW study estimated that more than 10% of “bloggers” wanted to blog for the money. I’d imagine, however, that given the insight that blogging might net them more than pennies, quite a few more individuals would be interested in shaking the money tree. As Mark notes:

First content providers, whether podcasters, vloggers, bloggers, movie makers, writers, poets, whatever the content type make the decision of the creation of the content is about love or money. Is the goal of the finished product commercial, or purely personal ?

If the goal is commercial, whether to make money directly or indirectly from the content, then the battle to fight through the Content Ceiling begins.The bottom line is that people want to get paid for their work. Creators have a vision. They think there is something special about it, and they want to get rewarded for their effort. Its a simple goal in concept, but its incredibly difficult to achieve.

Is the Internet A Long Tail Ghetto ? - Blog Maverick

Mark introduces the notion of a Content Ceiling - reflecting the point where the tail starts to transition upwards. The Ceiling is actually the threshold where enough circumstances become positive that an actual business can ignite. For this reason, Mark refers to the many individuals toiling in the lower recesses of the Long Tail as the Ghetto. In the Long Tail Ghetto, there is an abundance of people pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into a proposition that barely nets them minimum wage.

For all the talk of the internet changing distribution, the reality is that in order to break through the Content Ceiling and to climb the Vert Ramp, 99.9 pct of content creators are going to do need OPM (Other Peoples Money). The internet alone is not going to get the job done. You can put your content everywhere and anywhere the net allows you to be hosted, but for most people the amount of revenues for that content you had before you started the hosting process will be the exact same as what you have after the hosting process.

Is the Internet A Long Tail Ghetto ? - Blog Maverick

This is an interesting point as well, though I am not sure how much I agree as of yet. On the one hand, I believe that the economics of the Long Tail are fundamentally flawed if not solely than that they still revolve around hits. We are still in the very early stages of learning what influence and attention are valued, but ultimately, I believe that the eyeball model will cede in many different places to one based on influence. To that end, moving from a small scale publisher with a small audience, you will need a lot of money - the kind of money that makes publishing and distribution broad and meaningful quickly. Mark’s point seems to be that the crux of that happens in unline (that place not online).

Naturally, my role at SocialRoots taints my views on this world. Whereas I believe there is a ghetto.. I think there’s also a market. When the conversation is made granular - note a different set of tools is required to handle boulders than gems, it may be that distribution and reach are things that can equally be distributed.

If a hit today is 100M (viewers, listeners, readers, downloads, etc), what will it be in 3 years? How many tails are there? As infinite as the tail itself?

technorati tags:mark+cuban, long+tail, socialroots, content+ceiling, vert+ramp, blogging, podcasting, social+media

For the last two weeks, Brian Solis and I have been discussing events and the role that blogging has had on them. We’ve done this largely as we actively engaged in the process at a variety of events in the Bay Area. More than a year ago, my life with syncPEOPLE was dedicated to the study of the role that social media can and would play in the event/conference business. It was a difficult process filled with fear and uncertainty. I’m happy to hear that there has been quite a sea change and the tide is moving in the right direction.

One of the major trends I have been observing is the migration to media. Almost every event organizer wants to hold onto the audience they have and to grow it in as many ways as possible. Remember this simple fact, sponsorship can’t grow without growth in attendance (up to the point of saturation, that is). It is this understanding of the world that has driven a lot of the experimentation in the conference industry. The truth, of course, is that there is not much room to not embrace new media and methods. Attendees have ever-changing needs and event organizers must adapt to new models.

In the last 2 weeks alone, I’ve been approached by no less than 4 events to assist in integrating social media into the attendee experience. I think it is a definite sign that more and more, everyone is looking back to the social dimension of events. It’s quite amazing how unsatisfying many events seem now when this is not properly planned and accounted for - after all, conferences are really about the contacts more so than the content.

This post was inspired by some discussion flowing today regarding the Nielson BuzzMetric client-only conference. The official word from the organizer was that the event was intended for its clients and that there were presentations of case studies from a variety of clients. Steve Rubel’s poses a broader question in response, “Should conferences ban blogging?” My simple answer: it depends.

While there are a number of reasons that organizers should consider integrating blogging and other social media into their event experience, I can undertand that under certain circumstances they might seek some privacy - though I do beg they consider it very carefully. In this case, it was a private event and there is no requirement for transparency. Naturally, asking people not to do something is often more like demanding they do the opposite - potentially undoing any attempt to “contain” the content.

Ultimately, I think we need to be more constructive in our criticism (Scott Karp agrees). While we all are empowered with our new suite of media tools, entitlement is still something quite different.

The Social Media Club is getting things rolling quickly with their first workshop. Brian Solis published the press release today. I’ll definitely be in attendance.

PALO ALTO, CALIF. 10/17/06 – Social Media Club today announced its first workshop for high tech communications professionals. On October 23rd, From Social Media to Corporate Media (SM2CM), will offer an interactive workshop for high tech communications, PR, and advertising professionals to better understand Social Media. SM2CM will be held in SAPs conference center in Palo Alto from 1 to 6 p.m.This workshop is a unique hybrid of a traditional conference and an unconference. During the course of the afternoon on, attendees will hear short talks from leading Social Media practitioners and engage in conversations with other Silicon Valley professionals, leaving the workshop with an understanding of how their company can benefit from producing Corporate Media using Social Media tools.

PR 2.0

technorati tags:socialmediaclub, chris+heuer, kristie+wells, brian+solis

The Social Capital blog points to Paul Resnick’s interesting analysis of a paper titled “When is Reputation is Bad?“. Paul summarizes some of the key points as follows, referencing his example of a car mechanic:

1. Information about a player is revealed only when other players are willing to engage with that player, so that getting a sufficiently bad reputation is a black hole that you can’t escape from.
2. There are “friendly” actions; a high probability of friendly actions is what causes partners to we willing to play. (In the mechanics example, honesty is the friendly action.)
3. There are bad “signals” or outcomes that occur more frequently with unfriendly actions but occur sometimes even with friendly actions. It is these signals/outcomes that will be made publicly visible in a reputation system. (In the mechanics example, the bad outcome is recommending an engine replacement.)
4. There are “temptations”, unfriendly actions that reduce the probability of bad “signals” and increase the probability of all the good signals. (In the mechanics example, the temptation is reporting the signal “tuneup” even when the car needs an engine replacement.)
5. The proportion of player types who are committed to the friendly action regardless of its consequences is not too large. (These would be mechanics who would never say “tuneup” when you needed an “engine”, even if it meant closing their business tomorrow.

presnick: When Reputation Systems Are Worse Than Useless

This analysis seems incredibly appropriate in light of the discussion we’re seeing swirl around not only PayPerPost (1,2,3) but also the related sorties surrounding “blogging vs journalism” and “Edelman vs blogging“.

So let’s relate Paul’s points to our universe:

1. We’ve seen the problem with bad reputations becoming as persistent as toilet paper on your shoe in the blogosphere. Specifically, we know that it is extremely difficult (read near impossible) to recover once you have lost your trust
2. Friendly actions in the post-media universe often hangs under the banner of disclosure (you know, the italicized text usually surrounded by parenthesis)
3. Bad signals are quite easy to spot in the blogosphere, and online in general. PayPerPost provides us two cues: first the text provided by the advertiser is a natural cue and second, the quite manual beacon that call’s home (note: it would take about 10 minutes to whip up a greasemonkey script to highlight the “bullshit” if you were so inclined). However, we should not overlook the best tool of all - blogger’s own innate desire to call bullshit on just about anything.
4. Tempations come in the form of link love, technorati rank, and x-list status. Ultimately, we’re more than likely too obsessed already with our standing in the universal scoreboard that we feel less and less incentivized to put the game in play. We don’t want to run the risk of getting caught with our hand in the cookie jar, right?
5. The proportionality of good vs. evil is what has the big minds in the space all worried. Today, the proportion of good players outnumbers bad players (haha, that’s probably not even true relatively speaking).

Which leaves us, yet again, in the same position I’ve been considering. The equation seems as if it will balance itself over time. The notion of balance still seems overrated, if not far-fetched. Perhaps the real worry is that we’re already past the point of equilibrium.

technorati tags:blogging, payperpost, reputation, monetization

CNN Money, by way of Business 2.0, has a lengthy look at the “Blogging for Dollars” movement. While the piece does quite a bit of research, it won’t be of much help to those of us not at the top of the blogging game - not that it’s not worth a read.The one thing that seems most salient, regardless of the size of your readership, is the nature of the relationship you have with them as compared to the traditional media outlets. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s meaningless - you’ve got something many, many large corporations with all sorts of money can’t muster all that easily on their own.

At the same time, advertisers–shunning old-line media in favor of the Web–are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers–which naturally has made advertisers take notice. In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), “The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop.”

Business 2.0: Blogging for Dollars - September 1, 2006

technorati tags:blogging, monetization

I’ve got to say that I am increasingly worried (see Make of Your Blog As You Will) about the attitude many are taking with regards to “blogging”. I put it in quotes because, quite frankly, it’s just as much art as it is science, er, technology.

Robert Scoble has been involved in some sort of revolving door
argument with Dare Obsanjo of Microsoft. The dispute centers around the
claim that MSN Spaces is the #1 blogging platform based on the fact
that it has 72 million blogs. OK. Let them say whatever they want, it
has nothing to do with me and I’m not sure what it has to do with
Robert either, actually.

What does, however, have something to do with me is Robert’s attempt to debunk
this claim by going through the most recently updated “blogs”.
Something made me cringe when he notes “FIRST TWO POST BLOG! But one is
about how much the poster loves her cats.” Then later, in the comments, he makes another “clarification”.

I defined a blogger as someone who posts at least twice a month with at least 500 words a month

Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger » “Where’s the blog?” in Windows Live Spaces?

Anyone heard of photo bloggers, video bloggers, or podcasters (audio bloggers)? Most of these “posts” don’t have any words - it’s not the media they choose to create with. By Robert’s defintion, cornershots.com isn’t a blog either.

When did Scoble become the authoritative source on what blogging is and isn’t? Oh I remember, it was when he wrote his book. Speaking of Naked Conversations, there’s this gem from Shel Israel:

The other thought is that maybe you should reflect on just quitting your blog. You don’t like the blogosphere. You certainly don’t seem to like those of us who are dedicating lives and energy to its promotion, and–don’t be offended by this Nick–we really won’t miss you a whole lot if you just sit down and shut up.

Naked Conversations: An Open Letter to Nick Carr

Excuse me? Is someone telling someone else to quit blogging because they don’t like what they are saying? Get over it. Blogging is not your darling, it’s ours.

Stowe sums it up well: “So, my take is we are back to counting dark blogs and the variousflavors of sinner blogs that don’t follow Scoble’s Five Commandments.Yes, leave out the real mechanical splogs, but everything else counts.”

technorati tags:blogging, robert+scoble, shel+israel, msn+spaces

Just a quick shout out to my main bud, Jimmie and Cornershots.com for his recent publication in Popular Photography. Jimmie talks about a technique he has been experimenting with called High Dynamic Range. For you photo nerds out there, it is basically a method that involves overlaying one source image taken with different exposures.

It’s really a joy to see things working out so well for him and his continued success.

Over the last 6 months or so I have been quite engrossed speaking with alll sorts of people who decidedly don’t consider themselves bloggers. I often follow-up their immediate gut-reaction with a question, “What’s a blogger?” It seems that there’s an image problem with blogging, and not from the credibility side.

The problem, actually, is with the profile of blogging activity and the mindset of the blogger. For many looking in from the “outside” - drawn to the fences by mainstream and trade coverage of the wonders and merits of this thing called blogging, they’re completely baffled “how to do it”. There’s no easy answer, but presumably lots of “wrong” ones. Should there not be an on-ramp? Don’t we need time to let groups and organizations find their voice. We’re all born with one as individuals - that’s harder to coordinate inside an organization.

I came across this post on the 6apart site the other day:

Busy CEOs don’t always have time to do all the homework and writing for a blog all by themselves. If you acknowledge the team that helps write a blog post, just like you’d acknowledge people who help do research for a presentation or a business meeting, it’s completely okay to have people contribute to a blog that’s “by” a CEO.

Six Apart - Movable Type News - Another Sacred Cow Debunked: You Don’t Have to Write All Your Posts

It got me to thinking how much we, the people inside, tend to segment ourselves from them, the people outside. It happens everywhere and in everything, so it’s no surprise. But perhaps we’re setting ourselves up for a resounding thump - trying to carry a handful of water across a desert.

What would the next generation of blogging look like without our encouragement and guidance? What will it look like with it?

Update: Ironically enough, I had this tab open and didn’t read it.  This seems to drive at what I’m wondering about:

The powerful have a greater stake in the perpetuation of an innocent fraud than do the powerless. Long after the powerless have suspended their suspension of disbelief, the powerful will continue to hold tightly to the fraud, repeating it endlessly amongst themselves in an echo chamber that provides a false ring of truth.

Nick Carr, “The Great Unread”

technorati tags:blogging, business, mentality