Will the ABC be all spikes and no hub, or will virtual hubs rule?

Last month I blogged about innovation in media, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) move to develop widgets for users to aggregate ABC content on their social network sites. As I’ve said before, this is a smart move by the ABC. In taking this initiative, the ABC appears to have recognised the reality that social networks are the new hub for news and entertainment.

So it is interesting to contrast this strategy with the ABC’s primary vision to become Australia’s “virtual town square” – a hub for user-generated content. In May 2009, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, described the virtual town square as “a place where Australians can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from one another”. By November 2009, planning had advanced to the point where the ABC is to employ digital media trainers around the country to teach Australians how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

What strikes me about the virtual town square idea is that conceptually it is not  a new. Local radio chat shows are a long-standing example of user-generated content in media. The town square idea also rests on media institutions continuing to provide the hub or the space for people to use.  I just wonder how congruent the strategy is with social media has it continues to grow in importance in the everyday lives of Australians.

For when it comes to creating and uploading content, people are already doing this for themselves. The emerging social media hub is a personalised place, one that is open to friends, family, coworkers and other associates in the work place and in the community. The social media hub has user-generated photos and videos, status updates and wall posts for expressing views about whatever is of interest.  It’s a place to join groups of interest and for political activism. It’s a place where users aggregate  news feeds, music and videos from third parties, updates from their other social media sites, and feeds from people they connect with. It’s a place that links data from all over the web. In Australia, that could well mean some content from the ABC. It may well mean that data is collated and shared within user-created and run virtual communities. Users doing it for themselves.

Where might social network site aggregation and sharing go? Steve Rubel has suggested that user preferences for personalised social network sites may mean that the next great media company will not have a website, they will be “all spokes and no hub”. I’d say that is a good call.  With the widget initiative, the ABC is positioning to play in the user-defined media hub space. The corporation is doing that as well as playing host to virtual town squares on its own website. It will be interesting to see how these two plays pan out over the next couple of years.

Future of Social Media…and Media

The online media platforms of broadcasters and newspaper publishers have been integrating social media into their channels for some time now. Integration takes on many forms including offering space for comments, providing web widgets to share articles on the likes of Facebook, Twitter or del.icio.us. Recognising that people carry with them devices that can capture and distribute media in real-time, broadcasters and newspapers encourage people to send them information about events. Professional journalists have blogs and Twitter accounts. Indeed the inter-dependency between media and social media has evolved to the point that some say it is impossible to separate the two.

Media Futurist,Gerd Leonhard, describes the outlook for social networks and social media as an online operating system for individuals, for business and for government – for society generally. Whether you are communicating with people, looking for information or looking for other people or points of interest nearby, whether you are on the mobile web doing some purchasing or banking online, or some citizen journalism, whether your location enables information or advertisements about things of relevance to you to be pushed to your mobile device…you get the picture.

Portable identity tools such as Open ID, Facebook’s Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect allow users to share and aggregate news and information from one web site to another. These developments are regarded as forerunners to technologies that enable portable identities creating (according to a Forrester analysis on the social web) shared social experiences – where socially connected people take their digital identities with them and interact with their social networks over the Web. Those shared experiences are more likely to be contextual situations where their reality is augmented and/or mixed through digital online technologies.

For people entering this space – possibly up to a third of the population over the next five years – content will not be king, nor will their voice calls be mainstays for the telecommunications industry. Content will remain important, but its placement will be contextualised and personalised. It will be relevant to and timely for individuals and their social networks. As Gerd Leonhard says, content will be embodied, packaged and curated in ways that offer value to people. That’s the rationale behind Google’s Social Search – this posting by Mahendra Pasule explains why. I like the terms used by Mahendra too, particularly social relevancy. I feel we will see that term becoming a mantra for social media value-adding strategies.

For more information on value generators see media Futurist Gerd Leonhard’s Future of Social Media presentation delivered at PICNIC ‘09 in Amsterdam back in September 2009. I found the 30 minute video to be time well spent.

The direction that social media/media is heading in is not cross-platform. The operating framework is as a social platform, a shared digital media space. The ‘community hub’ will not be a physical location as such, it will be a socially networked space, where content and services are socially relevant in terms of who and what people are connected to, and their context at the time.

Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers and accountability journalism

Professor Clay Shirky spoke recently at Harvard on internet issues facing newspapers. Click here to view the video or read the transcript. It is very interesting and fascinating stuff, covering newspapers’ shrinking ability to produce accountability journalism. The focus is on the U.S. and the public good role that commercial media – in this case advertising supported newspapers – have played in accountability journalism.

I read the transcript to learn about the role that social media is playing in this…and was not disappointed. Social media disrupts the traditional role that media has played in deciding what information is bundled with the ads. Newspaper web sites by and large have mirrored the print copy of newspapers, assuming that readers would go to the web site just as they picked up a newspaper to read. With social media, that assumption no longer holds. Instead of going to the web site, people go directly to the storey, because someone in their network Twittered about it or put it on Facebook or sent a link in an email. So the audience is being assembled not by the newspaper, but by other members of the audience. Now, that’s true for me too. I spend less time on media web sites and on RSS feeds and more time on Twitter & Facebook because of the quality of information I’m getting through my social network.

There is little doubt that social media is a disruptive force in media and in advertising. Companies born digital are taking on more social dynamics into their business model. Take Google for instance, having just released an experiment with search going social.

Professor Shirky’s presentation goes into the public good generated by the social distribution of news online. The public good comes from republication and reuse on a scale that was not feasible from just hard copy print alone.

People can share or forward commercially produced articles online very easily right now, but for how long is unclear.  If newspapers put news and information behind a pay wall, that would block republication and reuse. But then, as Shirky says, the internet enables non-commercial models for news and information production and distribution, including socially produced material. So whatever newspapers do, they will need to rebalance with these alternatives. But the uncertainty is whether the alternative models will be effective substitutes for accountability journalism. Shirky thinks a transitional problem is looming due to the rapid decline of the newspaper industry (particularly in the U.S.); and the uncertainty about the nature and length of time of the intervening period until the (or whether the) social media ecosystem has evolved to fill the gap, particularly in respect of local journalism.

Biodiversity and water scarcity – what role for social media?

I participated in a sustainability forum hosted by Melbourne consultancy group Futureye yesterday. This posting provides a brief overview of the issues and notes the role that ICT’s play – and might play even more –  in the process.

Guest speaker was Dr Megan Clark, CEO, CSIRO. The theme of Dr Clark’s presentation was on the coming together of three tempests: the global financial crisis, climate change and the greatest migration of humankind to urban areas in the world’s history that may mark a fundamental turning point in the evolution of the world’s economy. In meeting the ensuing challenges, Dr Clark believes that society needs to move from a paradigm of resource exploitation to one where ecosystems and their services are properly valued. This is starting to occur in terms of the increasing commoditisation of water and carbon. She suggests that the same will inevitably need to happen with the biodiverisity and ecosystems that provide our food and amenity values.

The new scarcities in society are water and biodiversity. If ecosystems were to be valued on Australia’s balance sheet they would show as diminishing assets – although Australia has a comparatively rich biodiversity to other countries apparently. On the liability side of such a balance sheet would be carbon – too much carbon in the air that is. Even though our knowledge of biodiversity is relatively low, making it difficult to value, increasing scarcity awareness has given rise to venture capitalists buying rights to biodiverse land. Thinking of reviewing superannuation plans anyone?

In comparison, Australia knows more about water and the value of it – an outcome that the CSIRO has contributed significantly to. In developing and continuing to build on our knowledge about water, the CSIRO has developed a Water Resources Observation Network (WRON).  In developing WRON, the CSIRO use sensor networks in rivers, web robots in its distributed ICT network, and platforms such as Google Maps to monitor and record rainfall events and monitor dam levels. “Web-based reporting tools can be delivered to suit the individual needs of various end-users, and raw data, forecasts and predictions processed by sophisticated computer models can be used to support and justify informed management decisions” (extract from WRON website).

While I feel that the CSIRO is showing great leadership, I wondered what greater role communications and media might play, not only in monitoring and reporting on the state of play with regards to water and biodiversity, but in building awareness and motivating action. In response to my question along those lines, Dr Clark said that the CSIRO are still learning how to utilise these tools to much greater effect. That’s good – let’s watch this space. At this stage though, I can’t help but feel that  communications and media has a greater role to play – particularly social media – in building awareness, in contributing data, and in creating valuations for our scarce resources. For there is one significant difference between the early 21st century and the prior history of humankind: we know have information abundance together with the potential for massively networked social action. Powerful forces indeed that could be harnessed to help meet the challenges of the three tempests.

Social self-regulation

There have been some interesting issues around social media/social network self-regulation over the last few days. 

In the UK right now there is pressure on Twitter to lift their self-regulatory performance. As far as I can see, Twitter gets rid of users that post harmful or illegal content. Maybe not as fast as they could though.

I think it was Facebook (FB) that recently got rid of some 5,000 sex offenders from their site.

However, in an interesting twist, FB has gone social in developing a new set of self-regulatory controls. FB has proposed a set of principles and rights & responsibilities on their site and invited users to comment on them. I’ve copied the draft Rights and Responsibilities statement on safety to illustrate what is being proposed. There is clearly a significant burden of responsibility proposed on users.

3. Safety

We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your help in order to do that, which includes the following commitments:

3.1 You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications to users (such as spam).
3.2 You will not collect users’ information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.
3.3 You will not upload viruses or other malicious code.
3.4 You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
3.5 You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
3.6 You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.
3.7 You will not promote alcohol-related or other mature content without appropriate age-based restrictions.
3.8 You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
3.9 You will not facilitate or encourage any violations of this Statement.

The question is, will self-regulation be effective? Where should the onus lie – on the service provider or the user: social self-regulation?

People-centric media

I agree with Sean Howard, this presentation byJessica Clark rocks!

View the full presentation here: Public Media

There is also a great quote from Doc Searls, “The customer is the new platform”.

Main take-aways for me are that:

• Organisations and institutions are still important, but are not central to public media
• Public media is networked, not centralised

Value Chain 2.0

I’ve just read Value Chain 2.0 by Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang 0f ThinkStudio. The authors hypothesis was that when consumers shift from being passive to active, they become integral parts of the value creation process – Value 2.0. I agree.

This analysis contributes to the expanding literature on the economic and social consequences arising from the Participative Web. My last two postings (in reference to changes in the work place and social capital value accruing from social networking) are also subsets of the Participative Web.

Participation is reshaping the media too – instead of passively sitting back to take whatever broadcasters and publishers distribute, consumers are now producers and distributors – prosumers as they say.

Instead of passively taking in media accounts of political developments, citizens are now journalists and they communicate directly online with senior politicians. So it goes on.

The authors of Value Chain 2.0 observed that a company’s support environment (especially Internet-based industries):

• does not belong to the company itself anymore, but to the “whole ecosystem in which the company is immersed” (page 5). Being an ecosystem, there are multiple stakeholders
• the internal processes of a company must connect with the non-linear, complex and networked realities of the participative economy
• the value chain 2.0 is only valid for companies that have opened up their value chains to integrate their customers.

The authors refer to the ‘infrastructures’ of a company connecting directly with the infrastructures of the other stakeholders. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable but I am left scratching my head some what. There is an assumed complementary relationship between value chain 1.0 and 2.0. But it seems to me that dynamic is really the tricky bit. How much would value chain 1.0 change in the course of connecting with value chain 2.0? Will a new and as yet unknown value chain emerge? Possibly.

Measures of network capital

Social networking and social media are changing the way economic, social and political activity is organised, content is created and distributed, and how influence and reputations are built and maintained. The growth and importance of social networking and social media has been outstanding, quick and global.

For business, effective social networking outside organisational boundaries creates value through tapping into cost savings or knowledge networks that lie beyond the capacity of any one firm to retain. Social media has an international reach that is not possible within the confines of traditional media. Traders have customers around the world, nations connect with citizens around the world. For government agencies and not-for-profits, social networking beyond jurisdictional boundaries creates influence and agility. All organisations benefit from the scale advantages of reaching beyond institutional boundaries.

What measures are obsolete now? What theories of the firm, of management and of political science are dated? What the positive and negatives inter-relationships between the established institutions and practices and digital networking?

Who are the masters of networking online? Why are they masters? I’m talking about more than who wears suits and who does not.

Substantive socio-economic changes are under way. How are they…or perhaps, how should they be measured? What are the quantifiable as opposed to qaulifiable measures? How should networked influence be measured? Can these measures be scaled to an individual, a firm, a community, a nation? What should an organisation do to leverage the advantages of social networking and social media? What are the pitfalls or disadvantages of social networking? How do communities, regions and nations compare? What are the cultural, political, economic and geographical influences on the effective use of social networking and social media? Who are the losers? Who are the winners?

Enough questions to be going on with. I intend to get to the bottom of them. Perhaps prepare an index of measures or benchmarks. Who would find such an index to be of help?  I know that many of the questions I’ve posed would have been asked by others, and some of the answers would have been identified.

But I am not aware of an index of network capital. Would that be of interest to you as an individual, to your organisation or to your country?

Contact me at conem2 at gmail dot com.

Social media in government and enterprise

It’s been just over three weeks since my last blog post. What with being on vacation, visits from friends and deadlines at work, I’ve spent much of my time recently offline. I did spend some of that time reflecting on my increasing online activity level and on ways to get more leverage from it. And I’ve chilled out a little…I am just not worried about having 1000+ Google Reader items to action. More on that soon.

This posting covers some recent material on the actual and potential use of Web 2.0 applications such as social media tools by government (hence the ‘Government 2.0′ label) and business, and some insights into the Australian Government’s consideration of IT to enable continuous regulatory reform.

Social Media

In his speech to the e-Government Forum in May 2008, Lindsay Tanner (Minister for Finance and Deregulation) said that “the growth in recent times of collaborative platforms with potential application for government has been staggering…Web 2.0 platforms will have a dramatic impact on policymaking processes and the institutions of government”. Reference is made to an upcoming trial government consultation blog to “give the online citizen a chance to interact with the bureaucracy and make contributions to an area of government policy review”.

More recently, the Minister participated in an online forum ‘Better Regulation ‘ hosted by openforum.com.au (an independent & collaborative think tank hosted and moderated by Global Access Partners). I think it’s great that the Minister participated in such an open and informative way about the challenges of continuous regulatory reform and his interest in using Web 2.0 tools to experiment with crowd-sourcing (such as the use of wikis to aid the policy/regulation development process, including participation by government officials). Crowdsourcing – in the form of outsourcing – seems to be on a growth path in the SME sector as well.

Now on to the use of social media tools by business. Recent research in the UK (see Network Citizens by Peter Bradwell & Richard Reeves, Demos & Orange) into the relationship between social networking and organisational structures found that “the dynamics of the workplace are being reshaped [and that] the turbo charging of networks by certain forms of technological advance – in particular the rise of online ’social networking’ – is also clear”. In a more damning critique of institutional organisation (and partly in response to the global economic meltdown) Harvard University academic Umair Haque points to a deeper malaise – one of institutional decay. Haque claims that “the centuries-old institutions of orthodox capitalism cannot support the transition to a hyperconnected global economy” and consequently “are increasingly unable to allocate capital efficiently”. Haque goes on to proclaim that next-generation businesses are build on new DNA, or “new ways to organise and manage economic activities”. Social media tools provide the platforms for global hyperconnectivity…and apparently, a part of the new DNA of economic activity.

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) is hosting a half day seminar in December 2008 on Web 2.0 & Government. AGIMO intends to further disseminate information about the use of Web 2.0 applications and best practice in government at the seminar.

New influencers, new digital divides and Facebook

I’ve posted before about the emergence of social media as a new form of influence. Social media includes blogging, social network sites, wikis, web forums etc – anything that’s interactive and online. A few recent developments reinforce this trend and is indicative of new forms of digital divide.

Technorati has been tracking the state of the blogosphere since 2004.

By July 2005 there were 14.2 million blogs globally with 80,000 new blogs per day. By April 2007 there were 70 million blogs. By August 2008 there were 133 million blogs with 120,000 new ones launched each day. The number of blogs almost doubled between April 2007 and August 2008.

In May 2008 eMarkerter reported there were 94 million blog readers in the US in 2007 (about 50% of internet users). In August 2008 ComScore put the figure a little lower at 77.7 million or about 41%.

In Australia, the only figures I have available are those produced by Nielsen which indicated that 48% of internet users (7.1m) had read a blog and 16% (2.36m) had created one (source . I do not have other sources to check on the reasonableness of these figures – that is the only data I have. But the data in terms of blog readership by internet users are consistent with US data.

The figures do not take account of newer forms of blogging such as Twitter, FriendFeed (microblogging) and video blogging.

Is blogging mainstream?
Technorati claims that blogging is now mainstream. That seems to be so in the case of US newspaper industry – 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.

ReadWriteWeb (RWW) concluded that reading blogs is becoming mainstream, but not writing them. The demographics are interesting (and may shatter a few myths) – 74% of US bloggers are college grads; 51% reported a household income >$75,000 US.

But here is an interesting point – only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week. That indicates to me that blog readership is in the direction of a small number of bloggers (relative to total number of bloggers). I may be wrong and it would not be the first time. But it’s consistent with my research on social media participation – as little as 1% account for 90% of the activity. If my hunch stacks up, those 1.5 million bloggers are influential – the new influencers. Of course some of them are from mainstream media, but from my experience a good many of them are not.

It takes effort and skill to regularly update a good blog. Social networking and microblogging are less demanding in terms of written literacy skills. It’s easy to update your message status on Facebook or MySpace, upload a photo or whatever. I would say that regularly updating an influential blog will never be mainstream.

RWW say that blogging “may become centralized, professionalized and increasingly scarce”. Maybe, but the number bloggers continues to grow rapidly, even during a time when social networking sites and microblogging took off. So we shall see. Blogging, no matter how often they are updated, continues to grow significantly. In any case, the top bloggers have become influential in my view. I may be bias though – I spend more time reading blogs each day than reading newspapers.

btw, Facebook released stats on its growth by country in the first half of 2008. Australian Facebook user growth for 2008 (to 29 July) was 43% to a total of 3.4 million users or 18% of the population on Facebook alone). Outside of the US, Australia is the 4th highest in terms of user numbers after the UK, Canada and Turkey.

Digital divides
About one half of internet users read blogs, one half do not. Add that to the number of Australians that  use the internet largely for emailing and banking etc (not user content), it adds up to a lot of people not engaging in social media. My take on this is that internet use is segmenting – there are ‘digital divides’ within those classed more generically as internet users. Analysis of internet use segmentation is likely be of interest to policy makers, businesses, educators, health service providers and other service providers – just as much as who has an internet connection and who does not.