RianaPfefferkorn wants you to know that you are hot stuff. Industry is all aflutter over user-created content (which turns users into makers as well). We're ripping! We're mixing! We're burning! We're blogging! (Oh god, are we ever blogging.) "Indie" examples of successful sites made by as well as for their users include Fark and !SuicideGirls, but now every big site on the 'net has to have user blogs, etc. What is the value to these companies in having users drive content? What is the value to users? After introducing the topic, Riana hopes to start a discussion of whether our being hot stuff is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. Spawned a tangent: LocationTheft Notes from the talk: *User generated content is great for portals because it generates free content, supposed loyalty and ad revenue What's the benefit to users?* - Have others pay for your bandwidth (boingboing) - Indie sites like Fark and SuicideGirls leak over into MegaCorp sites - Locked up in community, users can't own it later -- build reputation and knowledge of subject -- not in our interest as user contributors - Motivations for blogging: fame, improve the world, etc. - Make an index of good policy vs. bad policy sites (AMIEVILORNOT.com) - Opening up APIs etc. is moving in right direction, but others are ruled by lawyers, who think of problems more than of opportunities - New wave of entrepreneurism is going in right direction, but older corporate models aren't embracing that idea, are too glaciated - Benefit to having one identity bring stuff together: GraceNote (form. CDDB) - people upload info about their CDs and then other apps can pull it from that, benefit of centralized information -- Meanwhile GraceNote makes money - User-contributed biz dev names company: Jigsaw -- users get free access if they're contributing, pay a fee if they aren't -- very old-school tradition, not a "new" way forward - Two streams: old-school online people vs. print dinosaurs trying to move onto the 'Net and fit a round peg into a square hole - Framing: Not "content" but "conversation". Problem for us as users: as long as it's viewed as content, They get free IP; instead, They should facilitate free conversations in a community - LiveJournal: Brad & Co. make money, millions of people having a big conversation - archive.org: I don't have time to read the entire thing, please give me the gems -- how to filter the Canon Of The Ages down to bumper stickers - For years, it's been in print and broadcast media: guest columnists, call-in shows, letters to the editor - Paying for quality of filtering that's done, so content is cleaned-up -- Jon Stewart filtering info makes for trusting viewership - "Gated communities" by design, tying up content - Enabling user-created content creates a greater need for editors; RSS aggregators only get longer, not shorter -- more information, needs to be whittled down (see bumper stickers above) - How do users correct for editorial bias (NYT vs. Daily Show vs. /.)? : "Start a blog." "Critical thinking." - Cost of personal publishing and group-forming is falling to zero; how do you get more people to bring themselves in? - Again, viewing "publishing content" is a different legal framework, implied authority; if you write a blog, you're having a conversation with users - What can Big Industry do? Help facilitate those things -- go more to Flickr-like privacy models, moving out of e-mail and into more public spaces - Use your brainpower to choose what conversational outlets you trust (Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs?) -- invest the brainpower - Blog recommendation engines & collaborative filtering engines to "stem the tide while providing interesting content": BlogBridge; Rojo - analyzes your subscriptions and recommends other blogs; Newsgator? - The "what's in it for me?" problem: there must be a clear value proposition for why they're participating in the conversation - People just want to be heard, to have a voice -- they don't care about losing control over their content, they just want to be able to express themselves and point to what they've done, and they'll seize any opportunity to do so; large site also helps preserve for posterity - Payment in reputation, opportunity to learn, other opportunities, not just monetary compensation for contributing - How many people in here intentionally seek out viewpoints different from their own? -- about 4 hands go up in a room of 15 - Are people being critical about they read? Is that aligned with or at cross-purposes with content companies who want to make money off of users generating content? Opposite argument: people love to see a good flamewar; maybe it's profitable to generate fights. - Already, there are reporters who just dig up controversy because it sells, it's a long, grand tradition; but is average Joe flamewar more delicious? - Can't a company trying to maximize profits foster both outlets? - Entertainment company vs. news company ("infotainment") - If goal is to be as sticky as possible, figure out which users are conflict-seeking and which are conflict-avoiding, and herd them into respective outlets - Scale: a big company has to address the needs of the masses, but niche publications can be extremely good at balanced, deep thinking about issues and they're still around - User-controlled scope in terms of searches: Yahoo's new slider (research or fun), recommendation engines that give you something way outside your usual purview but that you may really like -- common paradigm across different contexts of search - Pull together things that are really different, but with user's permission to cast further afield - Get stats on these features: there must have been some user call for them - Tell companies what kind of recommendations you want. Media Unbound: spend 10-15 minutes entering your preferences. Amazon: started out finding other music by same artist, has grown into a very impressive recommendation engine - PalmPilot back in the day: had to learn Graffiti, huge learning curve, but value to learning it; many systems, if you can't simply communicate the value to people, they won't participate - Someone has to do a better job of explaining the value exchange of giving up some privacy in the form of cookies, Safeway cards, etc. in order to get a discount on your groceries or to get good recommendations on new music - Benefit of cookies is currently opaque to most people, no explicit agreement or understanding of what they're agreeing to -- a mechanism is needed in order to achieve what we're talking about. You need something persistent and functional even for people who block their cookies -- we need to make explicit what and how gets passed between parties when you agree to a cookie - On the greyscale of how private soomething should be, stuff gets complex. With blogs, you know it's public already from the beginning. But when you add in e.g. using clickstreams to recommend links, you get really bad consequences: embarrassing clickstream demo incidents - Not a blanket statement to agree to give up all your personal information: there's context, need transparency regarding what you're agreeing to let be known and what you won't - Consumer Managed Information: CMI -- ownership and management of my own data - LiveJournal: access control lists are a value add in a world where whatever you say is public and available forever - Within companies, how to keep internal information internal, track what employees are doing but only within a work context - Contextual expectations: Organization monitors your email, but doesn't really get benefit from it; vs. say Spoke, where people communicate transparently and leave behind a trail of crumbs that can be built upon to assemble a (monetarily valuable) profile of you and a network of your relationships without you knowing about it - Where will your profile eventually end up? You can't tell. See divergence between N. American and European privacy law -- you trust the first-order of companies who have a profile of you (Safeway, home loan companies), but your info is so freely traded that other orders of people, less scrupulous people, can buy your data for a pittance, when you never agreed to letting *them* know. - Evolve a transparent CMI culture -- how to turn our desire into actionable incentive to bring this world about? (by doing black hat hacks in order to catalyze legislation) - Location theft: creating an alibi for yourself, others creating an alibi for themselves by using your identity. - Content companies had been focusing on personalization based on the bread crumbs you leave, narrowing your worldview, a biased filter based on profiling you. Contrast: Socialization - result of social media, letting people do the filtering for you instead of one core algorithm monitoring what you do. Let your friends read the NYT and tell you what you want to hear. - Difference b/w physical and virtual businesses: price discrimination based on cookies -- requires more sophisticated consumer to detect it vs. going to a store where they must "by law" post the actual regular price on the shelf (but then what happens when items get rung up at the register?) -- again, knowledge is power - Create a Greasemonkey script that makes a centralized DB, so every time someone goes to Amazon, the price they're seeing goes to the DB and others can check on prices - Evolution of conversation from industry glee at users making stuff to users trying to defend themselves when they expose themselves online: Will the death of user-generated content be the expense of protecting yourself in order to gain the same benefit? (RianaPfefferkorn spaces out a bit, rejoins after mention of how most of Bar Camp is pwned by Macintosh - branded! Riana's whole family, 2 generations, are Apple cultists) - With user-contributed content, you can make money (MySpace - millions of users), but how? - Craigslist: $75 in SF to post job listings, charging for rental listings in some locations, but most forums you can post to for free - Different levels of user sophistication offer opportunities for money-making -- consignment shops selling clothes on eBay for people who don't know about eBay, landlords not knowing to go to craigslist instead of to the Mercury News; not knowing how to use the computer, or refusing to learn, screws up your life! You get lost in the urban jungle and you don't know where to sell your used clothes! burtonator: Neanderthals coexisting with H. sapiens - Arbitrage, but instead of across physical markets, across time. Right now we can make money, but time will squeeze it out of the market. Latter generations in developed countries have computers permeating their awareness, whereas older generations can't adapt. - See Harvard Business review for CMI stuff - How important is it for user-contributed content to a site to be available through APIs, for easy reuse elsewhere? Amazon reviews analogue -- if you can only read it on Amazon, not available on RSS or some API, is that a nonstarter in this day and age? - Bulk access to your data is essential: any data you put into a system, you should be able to take back out -- fundamental digital right. Use of APIs to do that overhyped? Difficult from business perspective to build software around it unless you can predict cost. Hard to monetize. - "Hobbyist" APIs may have built-in biz model that nobody ever thinks about: Amazon Associates Program -- enables hobbyists to make money, highly incentivize them, lock up competition, all to sell books. Book author testimonial: you get 10% royalty on your book through normal channels, but selling his book through the AAP got him double his royalty amount. - Cory's idea for a tool: when you go to buy a book on Amazon, automatically add that author's AAP ID on there. - Are individuals going to make a lot of money off AAP? Probably not. But building an app on top of it that aggregates people and adds a new layer of functionality could earn plenty of money. Just realize what opportunities exist and exploit them! Everyone wins! - TypePad users with Amazon Associates codes can add the code onto links they blog to Amazon items - Tim Bray: Closed his AdSense account because thinks $15k a year isn't enough money to justify putting the ads on his blog. If you don't need the money, give it to [http://www.eff.org EFF]! - Is it wrong for an individual user to remix services that undermine the provider of the service? i.e. stripping a URL and putting in your own code. Amazon could just forbid such things in its ToS. - Create a system for sharing revenue with users: accounting would get so crazy, hard to scale - Users provide some value add, get some return for generating value for a central entity. Helping Amazon sell books and getting money in return. At the end of the day, what do I get out of my contribution? Money, esteem, reputation/fame, personal satisfaction. - What you're talking about has to excite extreme passion in you -- a really really bad or really really great game is worth reviewing. Is pain or pleasure the stronger motivator? Maybe the negative is a bigger motivator. On a daily basis irl, we talk about the stuff we use all the time -- why not in public? (ephemera vs. logged content) - It's easier to destroy than to create; don't point out problems if you can't propose a solution - Kevin Roberts, _Love Marks_: the brands we love and why we talk about them (http://www.lovemarks.com/) - Doing good enough doesn't get you talked about, but when you start to suck or shine, then people will talk about you. - When you do something really freakin' cool that was very hard to do, people don't notice, but if you screw up, they jump down your throat. - But maybe you're only really successful when you can integrate your technology so transparently into someone's experience that they don't even notice -- getting Google results in <200ms isn't remarkable to people. - Pandora guy: Watch how quickly rules and policies try to creep in -- Pandora tried promising responses to e-mails in an hour, saying that this sort of e-mail should go to this exec, etc. -- it sucked so they got rid of that and have started an amazing dialogue with their customers.