Hot stuff, yo? The solution to complex infographic ideas? These guys have chops that give Edward Tufte and The New York Times infographics squad a run for their money.

But what a letdown. Where’s the beef? The data? The way to bake in the intelligence of the network—people, aggregated and curated news, comments and real time tweets? Where is it?

If you’re going to work in Flash, at least work in Flex so you can include data below those pretty pictures. (And by the way, wouldn’t it be great to be able to bring underlying Flex databases together so that you could build in a mashup with, say, Facebook? Where’s Facebook Connect in all this?)

Ted Levitt, the late, great Harvard marketing theorist, turned this idea on its head. People don’t buy products, said Levitt. They buy solutions to problems; advertising is panacea to nothing. To sell, to succeed, companies must innovate—at very least, pursue incremental, non-disruptive innovation: e.g., the sixth blade on a new razor. Give customers more value than rival products, a better mousetrap, a better solution to their problems, and they’ll beat a line to your door. Advertising plays a role here too, but strategically speaking, it’s a different role, advancing the notion of customers as intelligent agents actively calculating and organizing their needs and values—albeit still as less-than-equal players in the determination of how demand is created and sustained.

Recently, I’ve been wondering about what Levitt would say if he had witnessed our revolution, the one wrought by the Internet. What happens when customers become the equal, or even the better, of advertising and marketers? What happens when advertising no longer plays the dominant, pursuers’ role in this relationship, and consumers hold the cards because their choice—e.g., their Google searches—is the leading edge of need and demand? Or to put this another way: When advertising becomes commoditized and consumer intent becomes self-organizing, how do companies organize self-organizing demand?

Post-advertising solutions

As AdSense and AdWords and PageRank show, it’s not as if you can count out the importance of advertising. Birds do it, bees do it, even Google does it, so it must be good: Advertising still serves a purpose in the atomized, anarchic world of search, even if that purpose is now merely to make algorithmically relevant matches between consumer need and products.

Even in this world of predictive matching, however, advertising, even advertising with well-written SEO, is losing its edge. This is particularly true of brand advertising’s expensive flattery (banners and brand campaigns). Not because brand ads don’t tell good stories or rivet brands to emotion (take a look at American Express’s My Life, My Card campaign), but rather because (as Chris Anderson says in his new book), customers basically orgasm when they get shit for free, and brands haven’t yet figured out how to compete in this environment. As long as price is a major consumer pain point—and that’s forever—you can bet your bottom dollar that advertising will continue to decline against Free. You can build the best mousetrap in the world, but if consumers find a mousetrap that delivers 90% of the value at zero percent of the cost—you’re sunk, dude.

Of course, most companies still haven’t accepted the idea that free products in free markets are good-enough consumer substitutes. They still think they are competing against advertised rivals instead of these reviled free purveyors/pirates. “The way to compete with Free,” says Anderson, “is to move past the abundance to find the adjacent scarcity.” I agree. But “adjacent scarcity”—e.g., the premium content consumers you supposedly going to offer for purchase to customers—isn’t easy to sell either. And it doesn’t leave you with much of a business model for the free stuff you’re giving away. So it’s back to square one: what’s advertised (and supposedly higher quality) versus what is free and frequently good-enough.

Another solution is to get consumers to do your advertising for you—what passes for much of what is called social media today. The theory goes that if advertising won’t work, influence will. You can zap a commercial, but you won’t zap your best friend’s blog or the tweets and (surreptitiously sponsored) Facebook status updates of someone you sortakinda trust. This kind of “social marketing” certainly seems to be gaining traction right now, at least among so-called social marketers. But saying you need social marketing strategy today is a little like saying you need dial tone strategy. The promotional stuff you load up on Facebook or Twitter isn’t social media, it’s social selling. Slathering “Follow us on Twitter” on your websites, emails, products is a kind of pure silliness that mistakes advertising for engagement. It falls absurdly short of the sophistication that self-organizing audiences require. And it reminds me of nothing less than the bubble pronouncements of Web 1.0, when every company trying to “get the web” slathered “Follow us at www.anycompany.com” on its products. It doesn’t work, except to create awareness that you’re advertising in a new medium. To which most consumer say: meh. (Counterexample: Coke.com. Its home page is nothing but a link to Facebook.)

Social media 2.0

So, if advertising is commoditized and “social marketing” is commoditized, what’s left? How do you organize self-organizing demand?

Well, first let’s look again at why purely promotionally focused marketing in nano-niches over Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin items doesn’t work. Why shouldn’t you advertise the latest feature by Author A in the new issue on a Facebook page; promote that new concert via a MySpace page; advertise a 10% discount off “allready [sic] low prices” via Tweets. After all, these do their part to a media buy.

But compared to the real gains these companies could create by creating service to their customer base through conversation and engagement—or conversely, concentrating promotional power at the touchpoints of specific use-cases—these promotions look like wasted spend chasing cheap dollars from customer segments. There’s no margin worth chasing here, and the instant someone else makes a better offer (or this consumer is convinced that Torrents aren’t the end of the moral universe), they’ll be gone. (See the recent Stephen Fry brouhaha on this very subject.) Of course, the counter argument is that the power of cheap promotion is all in the long-tail—it’s a volume game. But if you’re going to be in the shmatte business instead of branded fashion, you’d better be prepared for low margins, heavy debt to support inventory, and nasty, fast-paced churn as your customers run. I’m not saying it’s never worth it, only if you’re building a brand, it’s a distracton from finding that “adjacent scarcity.” A tough game to play

A more interesting game—more rewarding to brands and more lucrative, with less churn and higher margins—is the one that builds conversational and engagement gambits based on already existing social relationships, digging into what John Seely Brown and John Hagel called the social life of information: the information that lives, breathes, and functions in and through social relationships, online and off.

From this point of view, all media are social—the big question is how you unlock their social power. Just as we say that the only communities worth building online are those that already exist between people—that our job in building community should be to unearth and facilitate the communities that already exist—we can also say that the only media that can break free of commoditization are those that exist within an inherently social construct. The trick is finding the social tentacles  already at work in the DNA of the brand.

Of course that’s easier said than done. Where’s your brand DNA? Cue the consultants, right?

Well, here’s a different answer, one thankfully less indebted to bright shiny object syndrome but still somewhat novel: Don’t think of social media as a construct placed on top of your media, instructing or seducing consumers to accept the ventriloquistic subterfuge of influence., of advertising. Don’t even think of it as sharing or collaborating or creating a conversation. (Although that’s certainly better.) Think of social media as the social construct of every piece of data your organization already owns or can own. Not as an object in a database but rather as part of an exchange—between customer and company. That involves understanding every single utterance your company (and your customers) make as a scarce social bits that must be organized into context(s) and arrayed with that understanding.

Condensed to a single thought: social media can’t exist without content strategy—and vice versa.

Without social context, content strategy is arid taxonomical merchandizing contained by (and girding) user architecture. But social media without content strategy is typically promotion-by-another-name. Together, audience creation and social connection make beautiful music. Together, content strategy and social media perform superhuman feats of revenue creation. Together, they create real service to the customer, unlocking the riddle of “organizing self-0rganizing demand” over the lifetime value of the customer, and not in response to a cheap promo.

And what’s cool is that they don’t do it through Flashy multimedia SEO-immune trickery by the Silverlight of the moon. (And please don’t tell me the solution is custom publishing, unless you’re willing to put your custom published content into the market against paid content.) They do it through the remix and mashup of the content already in the storehouse, the treasure trove of digital assets most companies build or aggregate every day—whatever objects they generate through data creation, including documents, text objects (captions, pullquotes, etc.—) photos, music, video, Tweets… no matter whether they are made by your authors and contributors or your users.

As Andrew Savikas says, Content is a Service Business, but how, exactly? How do you go from “we have a lot of tweets about business that intersect our brand” to ExecTweets, a Tweet aggregator about business; from “we have stuffed suggestion boxes about how to improve our stores” to MyStarbucksIdea; from “we have a ton of blogs about small business” to OPENForum. From registered Democrats to the Obama campaign’s amazing social strategy? Or (to borrow from my own examples above) from promotional chitchat about the latest performance at that big Las Vegas hotel to an entertainment community that brings aggregated news of who’s playing with user comments from FB, MS, etc. Or travel listings that bring aggregated news and blogs about hot destinations with users’ tweets, geodata, and photos—and rankings of hotels, travel agents, and airlines.

The secret sauce

In fact, it’s not so secret—and if you’ve been prescient enough to have some kind of end-to-end XML-based CMS behind your operation, you probably already have a start. Because all it takes it the metadata you and, one hopes, your users, attached to those assets.

Why metadata?

Because that’s the system—on either the authors’ or users’ sides—through which you’ve made yourself searchable. Increasingly, tags are no longer second-order data—they’re the brass lamp in Aladdin’s cave, without which nothing can be illumined. Rub the lamp, and you can turn all those programming stacks into the most scalable, continuously profitable revenue generating data you own. Leave it as pure content or a promotional bolt-on from advertising, and you’re not only failing to create the layer of customer service that drives user loyalty, you’re failing to create the rich and inherently social content experience that users expect today. And as the metadata get better and richer, as the capabilities of OWL and RDF and SPARQL and the rest of the anagrammatic programs of the semantic web (sometimes called web 3.0) become more mainstream—and newsier: like these International Press Telecommumications Council “newscodes” (now being ripped off by AP)—we’ll get to evercooler and more useful mashups of news data, with greater revenue earning potential than ever.

So is anyone doing this now? (Apart from the OpenCalais project already initiated, albeit phlegmatically, in a handful of websites.) OK, here’s a trick question: What is the most successful media company in the world using metatag data to whip-up self-organizing demand?

OK, I give: It’s Apple.

As Kontra (a self-described “veteran design and management surgeon”) wrote in a post a few weeks ago on counternotions, Apple has created an entire universe of metatag strategy and dynamic metatag management via the App Store. Kontra points out that there’s always been a trove of metatag data in iTunes, more relevant to pre-packaged, static content than dynamically updated content. But thanks to changes in iPhone OS3, the App Store now allows for content to be upgraded recurringly and connected to other apps—you can even alert customers that new data is available via push-based numbered badges hovering over your app icon.

You don’t have to be a genius to see where this can go, but in case you can’t, Apple tells you about potential business opportunities push notification and metadata open up in black and white right  on its website: “Create a subscription magazine app where you ask for payment on a monthly, yearly or periodic basis of your choice. Sell extra levels to extend the experience of your game. Build a general-purpose city travel guide app and let your customers pick the city guides they want to purchase.” Obviously a lot more too.

So what’s this got to do with media? After all, publishing hasn’t been central to Apple’s business model until now. Bob Cringely, the brilliant tech (and now mortgage) writer I read as soon as he posts, recently said that Apple is moving slowly and steadily toward becoming primarily a content provider with Apple TV as Jobs’s Trojan Horse. Preposterous though it sounds, Cringely may be right: I’m a (hacked) ATV lover, and I can see where and how Apple might use the aggregated metadata knowledge it acquires from my purchases to create new programming. Genius playlists, in my experience, already do this so well, they’re a total substitute for dj playlists and mixtapes. Could ATV do the same thing for networks and channels? Scary thought if you’re NBC.

But now start to apply Apple’s brilliantly counterintuitive strategy—using broad distributed networks as the foundation for a moated ecosystem—to drive revenue in other media. To steal Jarvis’s WWGD idea: WWAD (What Would Apple Do?): How would you build a metadata strategy for more traditional media companies (magazine companies, newspapers, book publishers, online programmers) using Apple’s model? For book publishing? For a candy company? A digital camera manufacturer? For vertical search with travel, real estate, or auto listings?

This post is long enough as is—mea culpa—but let me finish by pointing to one of the biggest companies to have applied Apple’s lessons to its own business to date, creating a wave of disruptive innovation that may actually succeed where so many others have failed. I’m talking, obviously, about Amazon’s amazin’ Kindle. The correspondence isn’t one to one. You can’t compare the depth or pricing genius behind the App Store with the more conventionally priced Amazon Kindle bookstore. And—to return to the argument I made above about finding “adjacent scarcity” in competition with free models—I’m not so sure how much I’d bet on a DRM-based publishing model when there are so many amazing substitutes out in the wild.

On the other hand, Kindle—or maybe an Apple tablet, we’ll soon see—will I believe one day change the whole way we think of the media product. No longer will we buy a “book”—one day we will buy a relationship to a title. Home reno: we’ll buy a title and a continuing stream of articles and community relationships. (Or you can flip this into a freemium strategy—we’ll get involved in nano-niche communities, and buy their books and teeshirts when they finally appear.) Nothing, not even fiction, will be untouched by the Kindle model: Instead of buying fixed narrative, we will be purchasing a touchpoint in a story, one likely to have living prequel(s) and sequel(s). Whether we fix a badge to the content unit to let you know there’s new material waiting to be pushed or whether you just download it per Kindle, the key to organizing the self-organizing community will lie in unlocking the value of the socially affective (and effective) metatags that can power revenue-generating media. Call it social media, call it content strategy, call it whatever you want. I think it’s the future, but it’s already well under way today.

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From Max Kalehoff:

One of the most innovative and addictive aspects of Tetris is the perpetual, intensifying stream of bricks the player must align without spaces. In fact, this very element foreshadowed howwe now consume most news content and personal status updates on the Web: in reverse chronological streams. Tetris’s layers of bricks fall with greater speed and complexity as you master the ability to arrange them in straight, crumbling rows. That is not unlike news feeds and status updates that funnel into your desktop and mobile interfaces, intensifying as your ability to sort and digest them increases. Indeed, there are classical elements of game mechanics in both examples.

It’s true. I was a Tetris addict the same way that I am now a Google addict. A former flame of mine used to complain about my Tetriholism,…until she started playing herself. Next I knew she’d bought a handheld Tetris gameplayer to keep at it.

The truth is Tetris—like Google—hits many of the same nerve centers. The increasing velocity. The sense that you are building something with each addition to your media profile. The simplicity of the color schemes. I’ve often wondered if there wasn’t some great flowering of digital culture before glasnost and perestroika. Not just Tetris, but Paragraph (a predecessor to Graffiti), and of course Triz, which is older (by a generation) but found a new wave of adherents thanks to digital technology.

Too bad Tetris is a locked and closed system…

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This That morning, in a very smart piece about the demise of newspapers, Razorfish’s Michael Barnwell wryly blogged on Scatter/Gather, the Razorfish CS blog, how “content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories”  and now  visionary computer scientist David Gelertner’s idea of “lifestreams” might be one creative solution.

Then Upendra Shardnand, Daylife’s CEO, wrote Storytelling Is Stuck In A Rut—What Publishers Can Do About It, a quick essay about how newspapers seem willing to talk about changing their IT, distribution, and revenue strategies but rarely question “the actual craft of writing and telling stories.” “On one side you have parties that produce what were once finished products, but are now just data for parties on the other side who take that fodder and reconstruct it,” Shardnand writes.  ”It’d be much easier for everyone if the authors took matters into their own hands, and wrote stories in a new language, with new tools, for the web.”

Story? What story? Whose story?

We all seem to be pointing to the same stifling lack of new tools out there to help editors and writers integrate, aggregate, reconstruct and re-narrativize story from relatively random microchunks of data in many formats in real time, but each of us wants to assign different job reqs to the folks who would do this.

Gelernter (whose comments are taken from an interview in Edge with NYU/ITP prof Clay Shirky and NY Times uber-tech writer John Markoff), doesn’t really care much who does this job: For him, it’s all about the construction—and definition—of “lifestreams,” a key element in his thinking about computer interfaces that ultimately become mirrors of the mind. Lifestreams as he defines them are ”[sequences] of all kinds of documents — all the electronic documents, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, email messages and every other digital information chunk in your life  …appearing on your screen as a receding parade of index cards.” For Gelertner, this is the newsroom of the future:

[Instead] of the managing editor, the city editor, or whatever, being a bigshot, there’s something more like a producer of the stream in real time. So the producer of the stream has lots of feeds. A reporter is posting a new story. Another reporter is posting a new story. AP is doing stuff. Photographs are coming in. Videos are coming in. But each person looks at one thing at one time. Okay, so I as the producer want to say, “Okay, put that on the stream now. And now put this on the stream. And now put two of these on the stream.”

In other words, a curator.

Barnwell says that this is good news for editors—and content strategists. He says that editors’ legacy role as curators—”assisted [of course] by an intelligent software agent to help in sifting the relevance of the news and discovering related stories”— will be one of the “bright prospects” for the continuation of journalistic organizations. As for content strategists, Barnwell says that their job is to  ”[maintain] the smooth functioning and insightfulness of the digital lifestream. In fact, content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories.”

Well, I’m not so sure this is as good for editors as Barnwell—in my experience, editors are good at curating the stories in their own magazines or newspapers, but they are rarely focused on aggregating context, especially from the web. That’s the writer’s job. And as for presenting that context to readers, for a long time—even now—many, many publications won’t link outside themselves. They still think a linking reader is a lost reader! (Way to show confidence in your product, editors!)

Not who but how

So is this what content strategists should be doing?

When I wrote yesterday about “taxonomical narratives” this is part of what I was thinking. Someone has to kick off, organize, strategize, and render author-side metatagging and data hierarchies for readers and match that to readers’ expectations and needs on a continual basis. Relevancy and related-story technologies from Daylife to Inform to Zemanta to Publish2 will all be useful.

But as Upendra says, it’s not enough. We still need someone to understand storytelling at the level of the bit—and please not by turning it into megabyte multimedia, constructing yet another metanarrative, this time built by editors instead of authors. (It also should be additively accesible to users in the form of user-side meta-tagging, ranking and commenting, but let’s leave the ugc side of this alone for a minute, ok?)

It doesn’t finally matter what you call this person. It probably depends on the company and agency. Like Barnwell, I suspect CS is more involved in systemic maintenance and strategy (d’oh) than storytelling itself, especially in journalistic situations. In agencies, it seems to me CS and creative need to be part of a collaborative effort.

The real question though is not who should do this, but what the economic incentives are for it. You can train editors or content strategists to think through these issues, but before any of that happens, you need new tools. As Shardanand says, the problem is “The tools haven’t changed. Whether it’s Microsoft Word or Wordpress, it’s all still word processing. The workflow in newsrooms hasn’t changed. Authors, rarely being software developers themselves, can’t develop the tools they would want. Usually some third-party CMS company makes it for them…Publishers haven’t committed significant R&D to the development of new tools. If they, did they’d have a competitive advantage, much like Apple developing its own chips or Amazon tinkering with its shopping experiences.”

Indeed, while publishers are committing tens of millions of dollars to installation of terrific end to end XML-based, network capable CMS systems such as Eidos’s amazing Methode, they aren’t much willing to innovate at the front end of a story. In other words, as Shardanand says, the story is still just words and pictures, with these bits over here isolated from those bits over there, both in terms of internal story structure and external links. (And yes, the Times is doing a great job with reporting stories with interactive components, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

So when will it take to make story change? Much as some CS people believe they have the ability to make it change, I very much doubt it. At agencies, content is typically held in the creatives’ silo; at magazines and newspapers, it’s the province of either editors or producers—over there on the “online side.” (Stage direction: usually followed by someone pointing across the floor to the other side of the newsroom.  ”Uh, those guys over there–can you see ‘em?” Oh yes we see.)

So what comes before a new job req and a rockin’ CMS? Probably this: Behavioral innovation at the brand level—the brand promise that these companies, either newspapers or media organizations or agencies (on behalf of brands or on their own) deliver—driven down to the level of customer service.

It’s easy to say aggregate. As Barnwell points out, you can aggregate with machines, rebundle by metatag. Smart aggregation is more though. As Umair Haque suggests in his in-depth, very toughly argued dek on the economics of new media—one of the few things I’d say is truly a must read in digital media analysis—it requires leveraging deep information about content including customers’ information, expectations, and preferences about content, then reflitering, altering, remixing microchunks into something new and different. A story. A new story. That’s brand in customer terms, not brand as grand narrative story, brand marketing. That’s is the difference that makes a difference for Google pagerank.

As Shirky and Markoff’s question to Gelertner implies—and as Haque, Shirky, Jarvis and a growing chorus of others  now say—this isn’t a matter of R&D anymore, but a struggle for the future existence of media. No innovation at the level of story is likely, as Haque says, to lead to abrupt hyperdeflation of news products by smart aggregators who don’t care about anything more than the revelation of new ideas and repackaging, remixing, and rebundling reportage to support their piratical ways. I hope we figure it out before that.

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What’s that you say? Who needs content professionals in a distributed environment? It’s time to say bye-bye to editors? The era of the amateur is nigh?

Not so fast, say content strategists. First, who you callin an editor. Second, who the hell do you think is minding all that content? And third: we’ve got a distinctive competence that not only makes your content—which is, let’s face it, the face of your firm—shine: we’re the difference between competitive success or failure in the Googleplex. Every company, say the content strategists, has a content strategy, but only the ones that know it can turn on the Googlejuice. Whether they like it or not, pay for it or not, CS is a distinctive competence all its own and a source of competitive advantage no company can do without.

Good pitch. Logic? Er, not so much

That’s a good pitch, but I’m not sure how well it holds up. Is the argument that content strategy is a functional competence every agency, airline, bank, media company has to have (like accountants)? Or is it that CS is a necessary ingredient of a company’s distinctive competence, positioning, competitive advantage?

People in the tiny CS community have been all over on this. You could see the hairs stand up on a lot of CS necks when Campbell-Ewald’s brill Chris Moritz softballed a tweet about the difference between content strategy big or small a week or two ago. Some worried Moritz was being a splitist, trying to separate those who do little CS—the meat and potatoes of content inventories, taxonomies, editorial calendars, style books, integrated into UI—from the bigger strategic issues of messaging and competitive differentiation. (Moritz says he was just pointing out that it’d be a tragedy if CS fell into the same trap as IA where you’re defined by the deliverables.)

Most CSers seemed to reject the whole idea of big and little, strategic and tactical: If you have a CS job, count your blessings, big, little or anywhere in between. Some don’t want to make the big/little split because CS itself is nowhere yet recognized as a functional necessity, especially in a recession. Eat Media’s Ian Alexander asked whether CS would ever be anything more than a rounding error in a client budget. IA/UX: OK but if a CS tree falls in the forest, no one will hear it (much less pay for it.) Another CS brain, Jeff Macintyre, takes a resolutely big tent approach, pointing out that CS has one meaning in an agency context (where it’s about the deliverables: content audits, gap analysis, taxonomy and tagging, and style guides) and another in the rest of contentworld, whether marketing- or editorially-based. Why split, he says. The whole point of this evolving discipline is its fludity.

Size doesn’t matter. Really.

Well that’s what they say. You may know different:)

But to me it seems obvious that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: both CS big and little are bubbling out of the same tap: It’s all about XML (or its many siblings such as DITA, SGML, etc.) surrounding content in the distributed search network of Googleland.

As far as I can see, this is the real differentiator between CS and most other content work: Unlike traditional editorial work, content strategy isn’t steeped in grand narratives so much as in bits, in data. “CS big” isn’t custom publishing (although there are definitely narrative and brand strategies one wants to be aware of). And “CS little” isn’t just those deliverables: content without context, from the container to the brand, is all essential if you want to sell in the Googlesphere.

WARNING: Technical language ahead

Another way of saying this: content strategy pushes authorial voice and traditional marketing monologues to the side in favor of taxonomical narratives that assist users in connecting their own dots, driving their own containers. (Don’t forget that the Latin root of content is contentere from “to be contained.”)

Let me repeat those two very odd sounding words together: “taxonimical narratives.” This is, I think, the big innovation of CS, and why firms that are pursuing it are on the right track and firms that are ignoring it are likely to lose their edge.

The way I see it, CS isn’t about big vs little, or strategy vs tactics so much as it’s about the sinking power of traditional brand narrative and the rise of data driven content. CS is about mastering the tiny—the power of data, contained and defined in those XML containers to bubble up via SEO and SEM—in the realm of the massive. As destination websites and traditional brand marketing give way to the artful arrangement and deployment of billions of nuggets of containerized info that can be reused, recycled, retweeted, reblogged, and otherwise recirculated in the vast data anarchy of the Googleplex, content strategy is the only measured response marketers and media companies have to get their stuff out there.

That’s why traditional brand marketing is getting eaten up by search. And why CS little without CS big could just as easily be done by information architects. And (paradoxically) why CS big without CS little is usually just another name for digital custom publishing or other traditionally brand narratives.

So if you want to know why CS matters and why it matters now, it’s because without it, you don’t have a shot at playing the Google game. And that’s where real competitive advantage—and media innovation—is today, whether your company is as big as The New York Times or as tiny as a blog.

Either way, size seems to matter less, frequency (of bit circulation) more. Just do it.

1.   Saturation:  The first chart they show you in a b-school is a 2×2 of size v. saturation. Big unsaturated markets are where opportunity lives. Small unsaturated markets are where nichemakers rise. But big and small saturated markets are a waste of time—without marketing or disruptive innovation. Portfolio had neither. In magazines, “editorial” IS brand marketing, but when the editorial lacks positioning, it’s the same thing as torching money. And as for disruptive innovation—what’s the opposite of disruptive innovation? Conformism, imitation, similarity, an editorial idea unrelated to digital life, to a working business model, or to meaningful differentiation. Why bother? Readers didn’t. Advertisers didn’t.

2. Fragmentation: Trying to cap a fragmented media market with generalist coverage is either very bold or very foolish. You pick.

3. Print. D’oh. I still think it can be done, but not without a compelling digital strategy that would rethink the role of narrative journalism.  There was zero effort to do that here.

4. Money. What’s the ROI on a 600-day-launch prep, $4/word stories, $150,000+ contracts, $200,000+ editors, and no digital strategy? Can $100 millon launches really break even in this economy? Unlikely.

5. Mission: Conde would have you believe Portfolio invented the genre of business mag with style. Vogue Business? Not quite. So was there a market here? Consider: Only 10% of the WSJ’s readers are women. That’s why Lipman’s hiring made good sense: she launched the WSJ’s Weekend Journal. But the proof is in the pudding, and Lipman showed she didn’t get it, in just the same way Weekend Journal didn’t really change the pickup with women or younger readers until Murdoch. Even Tina Gaudoin hasn’t figured it out yet, and she knows style in her sleep.

6. Editorial: Long-form business journalism? Hello? See above. Despite 600 days of prep, Portfolio never had a well-thought through editorial positioning to differentiate in saturated markets. Yvette Kantrow writes in The Deal that Portfolio wanted to be the business magazine for people who don’t like business, but that doesn’t seem right to me: I think Lipman just had a shallow idea of business journalism that was distinguished solely by the idea that longer pieces could explain the complexities of business better than business magazines with known business writers. But it turns out that Lipman hired the same people, writing more or less the same kinds  of pieces with the same kinds of spin. Sure she won a few awards for this, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You could have put almost any competent business editor in Lipman’s job and won a few awards if that person had CN’s resources  (see number 4 above). I defy anyone to tell me what Portfolio stood for except a committment to spending money on long-form journalism.

7.    Credibility: From day 1, Lipman gave readers all the wrong signals. She put all her marbles on long form journalism when everyone was talking about digital journalism, then chose many of the same old prize-winners from Michael Lewis to Tom Wolfe. Her covers showed a complete lack of comprehension about her audience and the economy. Remember the golden skycrapers, the gears, the hairy apes, the spy—one cliché after another—followed by Dov Charney, Sarah Palin, and the fallen bull? What’s that you say?  She shouldn’t have been expected to cover the Zombieconomy when she was hired to celebrate it? Rubbish. She could have covered everything from recession economics and its style to derivative disasters  to Obama and his style—right from the start.  (That fallen bull was apparently stuck on the cover after Lipman feared she’d be seen as a Barry cheerleader, a copycat, or both.) She could have signalled outrage. Instead she signaled that she was personally offended by the fallout and incapable of explaining it. And flying to Davos first class didn’t help. (Gawker really excelled on its coverage of this point.)
8.    Digital strategy: Did I say strategy? (Disclosure: I interviewed with both the business and edit side before Portfolio was launched; it’s one of the few times I was happy not to get the job.) Yes, Ari Brandt and Chris Jones attracted talented bloggers—Jeff Bercovici and Felix Salmon were doing great work. But to what end? Despite a well-designed site, there was never any thought to how Portfolio would deal with its competitive set in the digital space, whether the competition was NYT DealBook, WSJ, TechCrunch, Seeking Alpha, Dealbreaker, Bloomberg, or even Slate’s The Big Money, which has no resources but is constantly working to distinguish its tone and positioning.

Portfolio had all the resources money could buy but no competitive strategy, no editorial strategy, no content strategy, no technology strategy. In any sector —fashion to rocknroll, tech to celebrity—there is a wealth of web-based data to be aggregated, scraped, curated, ranked, and regurgitated, but nowhere more so than in business media where data streams run the gamut from rich to richer. To have failed even to consider what that opportunity—the opportunity to deliver real reader value—means—and to have spent an estimated $100 million over two years on this ignominous failure—is just shameful.

Even as I write this, I’m reading media critics who are saying that Portfolio’s failure is merely an example of the failure of advertising or the failure to reinvent advertising. It’s the economy’s fault: “From an advertising standpoint, the goal was advertisers new to the company and new to the category,” David Carey told AdAge. “Strategically, check the boxes on all this stuff: a different voice, a different style, a different type of advertiser. All of that was on its way to being accomplished, and then of course, a significant hit to advertising from the recession.”

But none of that is true. Portfolio is simply the story of yet another media venture convinced that having a few digital trends and tactics—a blog here, a feed there, water as often as you can—is the same thing as having a real digital strategy. Well, here’s some news, friends: That’s merely another brand advertising outsert stuck on the web, and it doesn’t work. Even if you pour money into it.

Bye-bye Portfolio. You won’t be missed.

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The title of Time’s “experiment” in free, customized content: Mine,  Here’s how it works. You go to the Mine website, pick five of eight offered magazines (Time, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Money, Travel&Leisure, InStyle, Golf, Food+Wine), and about six weeks later, get a magazine composed of articles poached by  Time Inc. from those five titles, om print or digital format, customized to your zipcode. (Free info: mine were Time, T&L, Instyle, F+W, Money.)

Wow, you’re saying. That’s a lot of free content. Great value to the advertiser (Lexus sponsors the whole shebang). Geo-targeted. Wow, cool stuff.

Except, um, no. You can only get either digital or print edition. (You can also put an rss widget on your iGoogle page.) And the content, apparently,  runs from 2005 to 2009—let’s repeat that too, shall we: from 2005 to 2009—and is organized less like a single magazine than a bunch of magazines each separated in its own tidy branded cordon sanitaire with ad pages marking it off from the other brands. I haven’t seen the digital edition, so I won’t comment on its execution, but I think I have something to say about its general concept. After all, I was part of the team that first suggested this idea back in 1995…

15 years ago

Turns out this is an idea that’s been kicking around at least since the days of what was known first as Time Inc New Media and then, after ATT and MCI failed to convince us proprietary X25 networks were tomorrow’s big thing, the Time Inc Internet Project and finally Pathfinder. Locked in a bake-off for the top job, Jim Kinsella and I set out our competing visions of Time Inc’s internet future for our boss, Walter Isaacson.

My vision was Calliope. Unfortunately that domain was already taken—already in 1994! (If the domain was available, who knows what would have happened!) Calliope was to be a unitary effort from all of Time’s (then) 35 brands. One article from here, another from over there, sometimes even on the same subject, with community comments and email underlying the whole shebang.

Kinsella’s idea was Pathfinder: a home page designed to send you to each of those brand’s websites, and minimal editorial resources under that. Just what the name says. As I said to Jim (who ever let me forget it), Calliope was centrifugal, Pathfinder, centripetal. Kinsella, who has had an amazing career and is now chairman of Interoute, one of the largest European network providers, was right though: by pledging to keep Pathfinder limited in its intent and range, he could cobble enough resources to build the ostensibly decentralized brand into a strong centralized organization. (A brilliant corporate insight, I came to recognize much later.) My way would have meant the brands wouldn’t have had a base to build from without spending their own money (which they didn’t have or didn’t want to spend online) and would have created a new editorial hierarchy, presumably with Isaacson as king. (To his credit, he didn’t go for that, and 15 years later, he’s still just as savvy, kicking off the recent debate about  micropayments with a TIME cover.) One publisher flatly told me to go F myself. Isaacson didn’t support me. And as for getting the brands to collaborate? On his way out the door, Curt Viebranz, who came to TINM from HBO (and was later president of Tacoda and a top exec at AOL until Falco etc. pushed him out), famously said that working at Pathfinder was like trying to herd a group of cats. (A lot of this ancient history is in John Motavalli’s rather misguided Bamboozled at the Revolution.)

One more person should be mentioned in all of this: Bruce Judson, a talented exec who came to Pathfinder with dual JD/MBA degrees and the rep of a Time Inc superstar thanks to his championing selective inkjet printing—the same (or very very similar) technology they’re using to print Mine.

Dumb and dumber

So why is a dumb idea from 1995 any better regurgitated fifteen years later?

It’s not. It’s even dumber.

Here’s why: in the Google era, mass customization, giving consumers the choice to design their own product from the limited set of a firm’s products, is not customer service for the masses. If anything it is the opposite—it is innovation with a limited set of consumers—and healthy margins—in mind. If you love Time Inc magazines more than all other content and think it deserves a privileged place in your home, then perhaps this is media for you. Of course if you really thought this way, you’d subscribe to all the magzines independently. As Scott Anthony says, this is innovation through the wrong lens: the lens of the guy who works at Time Inc and grabs copies of all the magazines that used to be given away free to employees in the lobby; he reads a few articles and chucks the rest in the john and the garbage. This is innovation to help himself, not the customer. As Anthony writes:

The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the markets’. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.

If Time Inc’s poobahs—the url says timecmg.com, so this is likely some consumer marketing group Ann Moore has lashed together including her publishers, Time Inc Custom Solutions, and somebody in online (i.e., the rump of Pathfinder)—were truly interested in innovating customer service in the media context—and if their CMS was up to it—they’d be looking for taxonomical matches between articles and metatagged subjects and user metatags. They’d be taking a page from the New York Times, specifically Times Extra, which lets you see the Times’s own headlines and stories right on the same page with external links to competing versions of the same stories. They’d be hackging the hello out of the Daylife API, creating filtered news programs running across the range of all Time Inc. content and affiliates. Or maybe they’d just do Time’s Mahalo, allowing search under the banner of high touch contextual curation. Yeah, I know it’s an experiment, but it’s not a good one. What’s the next experiment? Subscriptions for your customized magazine and micropayments for the online version?

This is how a dumb idea from 1995 is being made even dumber in 2009, relying on the hubris of publishers who think customers want customized magazine content over and above context created from across the entire web of news resources. What was innovative—but wrong in 1995—is no more innovative in 2009.

Some people never learn.

CODA, 4/19: The AP reports—and Time Inc is now apologizing—for botching the personalization of Mine’s first issue. Apparently few readers got the five titles they actually picked; most of the articles were evergreen, dating back to summer 2008, and at least one person, Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, found the personalized ads—all featuring Lexus— “’slightly creepy’ because they referred to where he lives, included his name and described him driving one on Route 6 to Cape Cod.” Argh.

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It’s happening. Agile is finally meeting media.

I noticed the trickle down about a week or two ago when Tim O’Reilly wrote about what happens when book publishing meets agile. Then, yesterday, I read a piece Ben Palmer from Barbarian Group, an up and coming NY webdev firm, had in AdWeek, “Agile in Adland.” Two mentions in a week: must be a trend, right?

Agile is not Flex

OK trendsters, if you don’t know Agile—sometimes called XP or Scrum; see your Wikipedia for the all important shadings—now’s the time. To begin with, Agile may be flexible but it has nothing to do with Flex (Adobe’s asynchronously data-driven version of Flash).

Agile is all about process. It began as the revolt of a bunch of software developers who were tired of the rigid hierachy that propelled most development through the early 1990s, and by 2001 were frustrated enough with that pseudo-military mindset—the so-called “waterfall process”—to set down their ideas in the Agile Manifesto (Shades of 1962’s Port Huron Statement if you ask me—and no I wasn’t around then!)

The seventeen (yep, 17) guys (yep, guys) who wrote that manifesto were in flight flight from the traditional hierarchical process of product management that basically aims to finish a project with military precision (is that an oxymoron?). The so-called “waterfall method” sets development in strict step order: from business requirements to func spec to code, design, content creation, and qa, etc—a strictly enforced product management demarche that leads, hopefully and purposefully, to a launch.

Agile, in contrast, focuses on getting stuff done in and through a group process that emphasizes progress over documentation, collaboration over silos. Instead of aiming for the Mission Accomplished banner over the ship’s prow, Agile posits that end products never really come to an end, but are rather destined for  a lifetime of lifecycle iterations. (Shades of Google’s infinite beta.)

That process actually begins on day one of development when a team—if you’re lucky, a truly self-organized, self-assembling group—comes together to tackle a project, a problem, in a closed, face-to-face working environment designed to lash together individuals across the silos: all the internal customers of a project in one place. Sales and marketers. Coders and designers. UX/IA folks and content strategists. As Dr. Bronner says: All One.

Projects are drafted as “epics” and “stories,” planned in “backlogs” (before there are actual backlogs) and then worked through  “sprints” and daily “scrums.” Working face to face, bringing business owners in contact with business creators, getting stuff done on a daily basis together: these are just some of the adaptive realities of the Agile and scrum process.

But notice that I said nothing about Business and Edit. The church/state divide that inhibits media innovation has been immune to organizational as well as editorial change. These articles by O’Reilly and Ben Palmer may mark the start of some real change in this regard.

Making media agile

indeed, imagine magazine editing and book publishing were run this way. (Newspapers represent different problems.) Not just on the digital “side” where, already, some  companies have already adopted Agile, but in the strategic allocation of resources that combine content creation with digital output. That’s right: what would happen if you put marketers and editors and coders and business managers together in a room to work on projects all the time, not just four (two?) times a year? Lots of big companies pay lip service to teams and to restructuring around teams, but there’s no process around that decision or around the team work environment.

The implications are massive, and they run directly to the kind of Luceian survivals of Church/State Business/Edit wall separation that still, madly, survive in traditional editorial businesses (and nowhere else more than in newspapers). Mind you, I’m not advocating the dismantling of this structure. I’m questioning its process.

Image via Wikipedia

Take book publishing. What would happen if we began to think of acquisitions not only as bets on a title’s author based on previous sales, other comps, and sniff, but rather on the constellation of natural community resources that clearly attach to a title? You can see obvious relationships to almost any non-fiction trade title, fiction a little less so. A little while ago I was in someone’s office and picked up the first book on his desk to illustrate the point: It was a forthcoming title by a mom with addiction problems. Bingo: pre-assembled communities of interest around addiction and parenting. Now instead of making the acquisition and then letting the author go away for a year or two to write that book, what other marketing resources in the house could be marshalled to support the book’s publication when it happens? What Twittstreams exist or can be created by the author to support this book? What blogs can the author create or manage or make sure his feed gets to? How can we create a place in the publisher’s own site to actively support the pre-sale and post-publication addenda to the book? Yes, we’ll need to rethink the business assumptions of p-books and e-books and the costs and revenues of all this new activity, but it’s better than wallowing in the duck ‘n’ cover fear that e-books are coming and will ruin p-books (or, ridiculously, that e-books won’t survive).

One more thing to notice: as workflow, this is not a once in a lifetime event but rather an ongoing cooperative, collaboratve process.

Magazine publishing makes that ongoingness even more tantalizing: How do we think through each and every article as an opportunity to catalyze the preexisting community an article captures within various publication frequencies? (And yes, I am most definitely thinking print here, but also not only print.) How do we bring photography to the writing process from assignment day? How should the writing be angled considering the mix of other pieces in an issue? What online elements—blogs, twitterstreams, interactive tools, live online panels (remember them?), etc.—should advance the story? What sources can be pulled in that the writer doesn’t have access to. What resources does the title have that the writer wouldn’t know about. What links can we aggregate around the story? What business can be sold against the story (travel ads for “Escape from New York,” in the  New York magazine, for example)?

Yes there will be times when business considerations will need to be looked at by editorial and vice versa: so how do you set processes and practices in place to ensure a free editorial culture? This is where it gets tricky with newspapers. Business side considerations may be welcome online but at the print entity, still behind its cordon sanitaire—I’m thinking more about newspapers like the NY Daily News for example, where the edit side sits on the other side of the building from webdev and then the other side still from business—they’re nowhere to be found.

Finally, these adaptive elements need to be considered against the entire lifecycle of a book and possibly even a story. Writers do lots of revisions; revisioning now needs to take place pre- and post-publication. This is blog country. Does it make sense for a weekly? For a monthly? What kinds of resources need to be applied here. To my mind it’s kind of a no-brainer that you’d want to do this—except for the obvious and glaring remunerative question: are you going to keep paying writers and editors for continual updates? (The answer is probably that you do it on a rev share based on continuing impressions.)

Beyond organizational happy talk

If you read this and you say, my edit organization is already Agile, already in Scrum mode—and you can do it with a straight face after reading this, cool for you. But for those who do the happy talk of collaboration without set processes, it’s time to stop bellyaching that there’s no innovation in media when the tools are lying all around you. Publishers and editors of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your paper.

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Ning is powerful and easy to use: within a half hour, I had what I called Park Slope Kids & Parents—or PSKids for short—up and running. Now, just 36 hours later, there are 60 new users.

Meanwhile, two new listservs have come online to replace the soon-to-be-$25/year Park Slope Parents. Both, unsurprisingly, are Yahoo! Groups, just like the original Park Slope Parents. For both, their raison d’etre is the fee: they don’t want to pay it even though they obviously believe moderators are at very least needed.  One of the groups theotherparkslopeparents already has moderation and rules in place; the other, FreeParkSlopeParents, is getting there.

Listservs: powerful, simple—and weak

From the start, my reaction was not only to the fee but to the very form of a listserv. Listservs are decent for  connecting in real time with a large group of people, but they have obvious problems. Read as individual postings, they clog up your mailbox with each reply while as a digest, they become insufferably long, forcing users to read or skim the entire contents to reach an individual post or reply. Since they are plain text, they also eliminate the possibility of photos and videos—the only connection outside the senders is via html links, and those are by and large copy-pasted.

I realized that a good part of my disinterest in PSP had to do with it being a listserv. With my kids (twin boys) now four years old, I’ve become more confident as a parent, and haven’t felt like skimming every posting to find the nugget of neighborhood news I need. I needed a threaded solution, and moreover, more interaction than ASCII affords. With a list, there’s the list and then there’s face-to-face contact, and not much in-between. My experience with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., have convinced me that I really want more from the communities I belong to. I want to meet and learn from other parents, not just read their occasional messages. I want relationships. I want to create subgroups without leaving the community (French speakers or Greenmarket chefs!) I want to post pictures of stuff to sell or videos from the last Dan Zanes show. I want to chat in real time with other parents struggling through the pre-K lottery situation.

As I’ve said in other posts, I don’t believe these relationships need to be moderated; in my 20 years working in digital community, moderators have seemed essential only in commercial contexts. In self-organizing communities, the community is what matters, and moderation is really just an outgrowth of membership, culture, and the passions of the folks who are there in the first place. Self-assembly is self-policing, if you do it right.

But what does right mean here? There’s no guidebook to community that reckons how various cms and software packages apply their “opinions” to user interaction. None that tell you how to engage and irritate the user base so they’ll post. The recipe is in the relationships that pre-exist, covertly and overtly. The foundational days of electronic community in that respect resemble almost any other ecosystem of relationships, with hidden (sometimes not so hidden) hierarchies, relationships, and different layers of followership and leadership. I can’t figure out whether listservs flatten or exaggerate this hierarchy and these relationships; likewise, I don’t know what Ning will do to them.

However I can tell you that Ning seems well suited to the task at hand, replaced PSP. Ning has threaded discussion groups and you can set your mail options to get just the content you want whenever you want it. If you want to read and reply to all topics and all readers, you can do that; if you want to read just things about 4 year olds or high schools or selling cars, you can do just that. Ning has live chat and “friend groups,” blogs and photos and videos, and even a shared calendar, so you don’t miss a thing. Ultimately, Ning is closer to  Facebook than a listserv: you only see and read what you want to; you post photos and videos; you blog and add status reports; you have real time chats and make small “friend groups,” etc. Getting the day’s email is just a part of it. How this plays out in user interaction and behavior is another question, but if Facebook is any guide, it does seem to be relatively self-policing.

Fragmentation is annoying. We now have three groups—together nearly 200 people—but there’s a long way between these 200 dissenters and the 6000 (give or take a few thousand) who are part of the PSP listserv. What surprises me in the end is the strength of listservs—as well as the opinions they create among their users. I can’t predict what will happen to the 6000 when the fee starts. Will they go to another listserv, or will they, like me, look for a different solution, a different kind of community? The only thing I know for certain is that I’m not in charge.

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Over the last year, the folks who run Park Slope Parents, a terrific Yahoo!-based group (actually two groups with corresponding but not much used websites), decided they were overworked, and—since they are volunteers—underpaid. PSP has to be one of the best electronic communities I’ve ever been part of. The Yahoo listservs—one about parenting, the other for classifieds—are free of abuse, commercialism and flames, and the community just seems to grow and grow—it now stands at nearly 7,100 Brooklyn parents, who, despite the best efforts of Gawker to portray us as over-protective parental narcissists—ok maybe we’re a leeeeetle bit overprotective—use the boards to get info on everything from “help! my baby won’t sleep” to “i need a divorce lawyer” to “i need a nanny” to “i have 2 pair of size 3T boys shoes to sell” to “we’re having a stoop sale this weekend.” As they say at the site my wife works at: “We’re not perfect, we’re parents”—and the same is true of PSP. It’s a real, functioning, and by large protective community. It ain’t perfect or purty, but it works—and it couldn’t have been built without Susan Fox’s focus and dedication.

A year ago, Fox and her core group of volunteers, announced—with no group discussion—that they were moving the classifeds listservs behind the website wall. Not a paywall, at least not yet (although they soon announced fees for real estate postings), but the clear intention was to begin booking revs from the website. The hue and outrcry (remember this is Park Slope) was pretty immediate, and three weeks later, they backed down, reopening the Yahoo listserv (albeit preserving the fee for real estate listings).

Flash forward a year. About a week ago, Fox and co once again tried to mount the revenue question. This time, starting (again) with an Announcement from On High—i.e., without any attempt to solicit comment from the user base ahead of time—the PSP folks again declared their intention to take the groups down from Yahoo! and move them behind a paywall with a $25 annual fee. There are literally pages of reasons why they might want to do this, and the debate has been pretty intense. Although it was kind of dumb to merely announce via ukase this rather momentous change, I give Fox props for defending the idea.  But that still doesn’t mean I agree with her.

No to moderators

I certainly don’t begrudge Fox the right to make a living from her baby. I just don’t want to pay $25 to be part of it. And I don’t like her old media way of handling her community. A good part of why PSP works for me is that it has the freewheeling, open electronic ambience of a broad set of people—without being too small. Critical mass, in my experience, really does amount to something when it comes to social media, especially when you’re actually trying to sell something or have vital needs at stake. (In many instances, there is no “too small.” For example, I was user 11 when EchoNYC was started in 1985, and watched it grow from 11 to 50 to 500 to 1200 to nearly 5000—and I can definitely say there were diminishing returns after 500, but that’s another story…)

My biggest objection to the change wasn’t about paying the $25 but rather the idea—the big idea behind the subscription—that moderators need to be paid to keep the site from deteriorating into a Babel of baby-crazed Park Slopers: debauched dads, monstrous moms, crazed real-estate agents, and loony stroller-obsessed lesbians: that is, the entire LoserGawker stereotype.

Here’s what I wrote on the listserv:

I’d like to add my voice to those who believe that PSP should remain
as it is—a self-assembling, self-organizing community.

This isn’t the first time the PSP folks have made this mistake. Last
year, they tried, unsucessfully, to move us (and we are an “us”) to a
walled off web site where it was envisioned they would be able to
collect either advertising or subscription fees to subsidize the hard
work of its moderation staff (and supposedly add new features and
functionality through a walled off community.) This year, clearly
having thought the issue through less—because both Yahoo and Google’s
group rules forbid “sale of access” —they are trying to replace our
work as a community with their own.

Notice I said “our work.” Let there be no doubt: Susan Fox and Rachel
Maurer and all the administrators have done a terrific job. They
invented this. They grew it. They’ve enabled the self-assembly of an
organic community to turn into a very real online community. They
deserve nothing but kudos. Their hard work and moderation has laid the
foundation for this list to remain free from advertising, free-riders
and commercial exploitation.

But the reality is that the community exists because of us. Moderators
help, but we are the community. And as we’ve seen over and over in
electronic communities—and I’ve been involved professionally and
personally with online communities since 1983—whenever self-assembing
communities assemble, moderators organically spring up to safeguard
the open community interaction.

To put this another way: Moderators aren’t the key to making PSP work,
participants are. We are. The moderators who want to be paid now will
be replaced through our own interaction. Don’t misunderstand:
commercial exploitation and “bad posting” is also an organic
phenomenon of online community. However, if we were to move our
community to a new platform, over time, new moderators would emerge to
take the reins of self-censorship. This is essentially the Wikipedia
model, where (as Clay Shirky writes in his brilliant Here Comes
Everybody), “a few users account for a majority of the edits, even if
they make up a tiny minority of contributors.”

Charging for community will naturally result in a smaller and less
useful community over time. It flies in the face of the natural
lifecycle of parenting. Parents need PSP most when first having kids.
By the age of 3 to 5—pre-school—when kids are a little more
self-sufficient and parents a little more confident, there’s less need
for electronic community to tell us how to deal with cranky babies who
won’t sleep. Similarly, classifieds drop off after the pre-school
years: In the early years when parents need the basic newborn kit,
classifieds are a lifesaver, but as babies turn into pre-schoolers,
classifieds drop considerably—probably because people either throw
away or donate old clothes, but recognize they can repay their early
investment on scarce baby stuff bought only a couple years ago.

It may well be that the walled-off paid community that Susan and the
current PSP want is just different from what some/many of us want.
Something free, self-policing, and perhaps intended for a wider
parenting lifecycle. Something that also allows us to share more
including photos, videos, and more. Something that is selfsupporting
via Google Adsense. That community can be started in minutes, for
free, via Ning.com. I’m not interested in being a moderator or a
founder, but if there are enough people who are interested, maybe this
is the time to experiment. Please get in touch if you feel similarly.

I got about 15 responses from that. And yes, I did start a Ning group—with Ning, PSP becomes a real social community, and the listserv rides right along—but I wanted to test the waters first before opening it up. Besides which, as I said, I have enough on my plate right now…

From farfel to Ning

Around 2:30pm yesterday, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the Passover farfel my dad had requested for our seder—check out the awwwwesome recipe in that link—the phone rang and Jennifer Fermino from the New York Post was on the other end. She’d interviewed a few other people about the raging (har) controversy on PSP, and wanted to talk. Of course I explained that it was pesach, but as soon as I finished the haroset, I gave a call back and told her pretty much what I have here…which was then followed by the Gawker version which is even less illuminating. (By the way, add some brown banana to your haroset for an extra hit of flavor, texture, and yumminess.)

So now’s the chance to open it up social media friends. What is the value of moderation? Do the lowered transaction costs of communities rule out or rule in moderation? How big is *too* big? How do we balance the interests of communities with the financial interests of those who run them? What pay model (forget business model) do leaders of ad hoc communities deserve, if any? Are moderators replaceable? What’s the value (in ROI terms) of a moderator? Of a user? Does self-assembly and self-organization really work? Yes, it’s true, Wikipedia is written by a tiny number of people and there are people there who make it their point to be editors—but they aren’t paid. So many of these questions are at the heart of community and hyperlocal news media generation. What lessons can hyperlocal news sites, whether it’s outside.in, the New York Times, or the Tim (now-of-AOL but-of- Google til last week) Armstrong-funded Patch Media learn from this p’tit brouhaha?

And lastly, is there anyone out there with good CSS skills in Park Slope who wants to have some fun with me?

UPDATE: Before I’d even finished this post, I looked at the Ning account and realized that even though it was private, people had already been signing up. That’s enough indication that there’s a need to be filled for me. So I completed the design, and sent out a notice to PSP—they actually sent it out!—and since 6pm tonight, there’s been about 10 new members an hour. If you’re a Brooklynite parent,  please join us. Come visit http://parkslopekids.ning.com/?xgi=dhZER7n and get acquainted.

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