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Twitter – another early adopter tool you might say – is being increasingly adopted by marketing and pr people. They start listening to what is being said about the brands they represent; they interact and try to connect in order to build trusted relationships or conversational focus groups I might say. Getting your stakeholders into constant conversations guarantees early insights and the option to influence.

I remember the days when we talked of blogs as early warning systems and means of engaging with your customers – it’s quite clear that Twitter replaced (will replace) them. Now while one conversational tool follows the other and while frequency of speech acts increases at the same time the amount of content per utterance decreases. It seems to me that we are somehow moving towards an ant-like state where based on many but simple rules and conversations a lot of things can be achieved.

But don’t forget only a tiny fraction of the living even have a slight idea of what I’m talking about in this lengthy post. It’s quite clear that both forms of conversations (blogs, Twitter) are still avant-garde to many of us except the younger generation that grew up with social network applications like facebook, bebo, myspace etc. Now I wonder about the generational gap that is slowly emerging. Is it just another juvenile disruption or a more fundamental shift towards an ant-state.

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Update: if you are willing to wait and overcome the frequent outages of Twitter

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- It is immersive, there is no difference between online and offline
- It is a geek culture, science overrules celebrity
- It is g tech (girls technology)

Please continue reading the details on Entertainment and Social Media.

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Entertainment. Concept, observations and assumptions

For the Nokia report about 9000 persons were asked about digital lifestyle, behaviour, and desires.

The Nokia report concludes that entertainment is going to be radically reinvented. It’s going to be fast-paced, bit-sized, and is shifting from broadcast concepts to bi- or even mulitdirectional usage patterns. Portability of devices and the internet emphasize the notion of anywhere and anyone. Nokia also predicts that 25% of entertainment (or content) will be created and consumed within peer communites.

Quote: “Entertainment will be centered around information access and the desire to learn.” (Timo Veikkola, senior futures specialist)

To further broaden the understanding of what’s going to happen or is already happening the report comes up with the distinction of the Current Episode versus the Next Episode.

Entertainment of the Current Episode is best described with those 3 notion:
- Transit Media: relates to time being spent commutin or office dead-time
- Wisdom Wikis: desire for knowledge
- Micromedia: Snack size due to devices. Means Twitter stays ahead of MySpace or E-Comics.

Entertaiment of the Next Episode further (projected to 2012) transforms that shift from traditional conceptions of Entertainment to the next level. Nokia calls this projection of entertainment Circular Entertaiment.

The notion if circular refers to the traits of the Current Episode but further emphasizes the user involvement and the desire for independency of the traditional content/copyright industry.

Circular signifies: sharing, collaboration within peer groups based on remixing, mashed-ups, forwarding
- It is immersive, there is no difference between online and offline
- It is a geek culture, science overrules celebrity
- It is g tech (girls technology) referring to these characteristics: collaborative, customizable, emotional

It’s a local culture which means services need to be available in the respective language, style and tone

Social Technographics

coined by Forrester’s, Charlene Li April 2007 describes as a term what roles and activities are commonly observed in online communities such as messageboards, social networks, sharing platforms, wikis – social media after all.

A quick general impression on user activity from InData, Jessi Hempel June 2007, displays the relations between creators and visitors/users:
It’s 0,16% on YouTube,
0,2 % on Flickr,
5 % on Wikipedia

The interest in user activity in so-called social media started with Ross Mayfield’s notion of the Powerlaw of Participation in April 2006. It is somehow modeled after Chris Andersons LongTail report and many other social network research

It describes in a nutshell what you can expect in any give social media but basically lots experiences of wikis are embedded. This is due to the fact that R. Mayfield was CEO of Socialtext, a wiki provider, at that time.

“From Collective Intelligence to Collaborative Intelligence” describes the different behaviours and the expected number of users that woul engange in those activities. More users cross the low threshold and very few (powerlaw) show high engagement.

Short before Mayfields report. Bradley Horowitz, then VP of Product Strategy at Yahoo, came up with the social pyramid based on research on Yahoo Groups in Feb 2006

Creator: 1 % start a group/thread
Synthesizers: 10 % partcipate actively
Lurkers: 100 % benefit (free riders)

In a comment he emphasizes that creators are also consumers. And that the hurdle to convert up the ladder is also a quality filter on social platforms.

Businees Week jumped on this issue and published data based on InData Sept 2006 and re-formulated the 1% rule
1 % rule
1/100 is creative
10/100 interacts with content
89/100 view content/interactions

The aforementioned Forrester report, from 2007, comes up with a social ladder that describes (based on their research) what you can expect to find on social media sits on average.

Conclusions for expetactions regarding user activities for user generated content platforms

The notion of 25 % encompasses a lot of diverse activties across the entire spectrum of so-called social software. Be it watching videos, uploading pictures, instant messaging, collaboratively editing a wiki, collecting links, creating ringtones, attend events in virtual worlds.

There is no concise hint – in that report – how much the average share of (created/consumed) peer community content is of today. I conclude therefore that those 25 % represent a fundamental shift for stakeholders in the field like Nokia or others.

With respect to expected user activity on social media platforms I’d stick with what has been reported in terms of social technographies.
Since we observe pretty different scenarios but none that goes beyond 13 % (YouTube 0,16%) with respect of creative users I’d recommend to first define what is conceived of as user activity and not stick to the notion of the creative user as the one that creates a piece of content.

Examples for activities: commenting, recommendations, actual content creation, forwarding etc.

In terms of numbers I’d recommend having an eye on what you observe on any given platform. And finally based on the science of social network analysis we need to get a clear understanding of centrality of our user-, and content-base.

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Nach diesem Muster gilt es nun das gerade aufkommen Muster der Lifestories zu untersuchen. Es stellen sich folgende Fragen, welche Services versteht man darunter, welchen Nutzen stiften sie auf den 3 Ebenen und was sind kritische Erfolgs-Kriterien aus heutiger Sicht.

Collective Personal Web-Publishing

Ende der 1990er Jahre etwa hat man mit Personal (Web)Publishing all die Techniken und Tools zusammengefaßt, die es – technisch avancierten – IndividualistInnen ermöglichten erstmals kostengünstig einer – potentiell – breiten Öffentlichkeit gegenüber publizistisch aufzutreten. Der Journalismus-Professor J.D. Lasica (USC Annenberg) definiert Personal Publishing als eine durch Tools (web-based publishing Tools wie zBsp Weblogs) geschaffene Möglichkeit: „[...] for anyone to publish and report news.” Einer der wesentichen Neuerungen in unserem Medienkompedium war allerdings die Möglichkeit mit diesen Tools die klassische Dichotomie zwischen Massenmedium und Privatmedium aufzubrechen und einen dritten Modus zu unterstützen. Dieser dritte Modus wird auch Meso-Media (oder eben Social Media) bezeichnet. Gemeint ist damit eine Reichweite zwischen ganz privat und massenmedial mit zahlreichen Möglichkeiten der Many-to-Many-Kommunikation. Letzteres heisst Social Media bietet eine Vielzahl von Optionen wie Menschen mit einander via Publishing von Objekten (Text, Bild, Video, Hör-Profile, …) in Kontakt treten können. Der Konsument der Massenmedien kann zum Co-Produzenten der Sozialen Medien werden, muss aber nicht.

Mit dem Momentum der Social Media Bewegung wird das Web nun einerseits als ein Ort des gemeinschaftlichen Publizierens erkannt andererseits sehr wohl aber auch ein Ort der privaten multimedialen Produktion von Geschichte(n). Das Format Lifestories bedient beide Ausprägungen gleichermaßen und eine Reihe von – vorwiegend nordamerikanischen – Anwendungen bemüht sich um diesen Aspekt. Im deutschen Sprachraum gibt es zwei Player, die mit unterschiedlichem Ansatz an die Sache herangehen. Memoloop.de, Kölner Social-Community Startup, will “die Landkarte der gemeinsamen Erinnerungen” abbilden. Während einestages.de (ein Spiegel-Projekt) versucht die Materialsammlung outzusourcen, sich allerdings die redaktionelle Kontrolle vorbehält. Ziele ist es „die Leser zu Partnern in einem neuen und einmaligen Projekt: dem Aufbau eines kollektiven Gedächtnisses unserer Geschichte” zu machen.

Relevant sind die Anwendungen, deren Nutzen darin besteht, die Komplexität verfügbarer (Multimedia) Publishing Plattformen – Weblogs, Video, Foto, Dateien, Speicher – zu vereinfachen und an einer Stelle zu bündeln. „Crossing the Chasm” könnte man diese Entwicklung – um mit Geoffrey Moore zu sprechen – nennen. Zielgruppe sind nicht mehr die Early Adopters, die täglich neue Accounts bei neuen Publishing-Services anlegen, sondern eine breite Zielgruppe an Menschen, die ihre Lebensgeschichte bzw. Elemente (Schule, Jugend, etc.) davon im digitalen (web-basierten) Appliktionen erzählen/publizieren. Zielgruppe dieses Personal Publishing ist in erster Linie die Familie; es geht bei diesen Publishing-Prozessen um die Verknüpfung verschiedener Medienformate sowie der nachhaltigen Datenspeicherung und Authentifizierung. Im Schatten von Facebook entwickelt sich dieser Typus, der ausgehend vom persönlichen multimedialen Geschichtenerzählen in einem nächsten Schritt die Möglichkeiten des Netzwerkes zur Geltung bringt.

Bausteine von Lifestory-Plattformen

Modellhaft läßt sich diese neue Form anhand der Plattformen Storyofmylife und dandelife.com darstellen. Folgende Publishing-Services werden unterstützt.
- Tagebuch
- Geschichten (Kapitel)
- Profile zur Selbstdarstellung
- Datei-Management (Audio, Video, Bild, Dokumente)
- Langfristige Verfügbarkeit der Daten
- Genealogie
- Rechteverwaltung
- Netzwerk-Bildung über geteilte Objekte (Name, Ort, Interesse)
- Gruppenbildung auf Interessen-Basis

Das Leitbild von StoryOfMyLife.com ist “Story of My Life and its Foundation have an ambitious goal: to collect the life Story of every person who has walked the face of this earth – in the past, the present and our futures; and to keep these Stories preserved and accessible forever.” Ein hochtrabendes Ziel, welches wenn man an das Web 2.0 Motto, dass die Daten das wichtigste Gut sind, denkt geschäftlich Sinn macht und von vielen angestrebt wird. Allerdings – kundenseitig besteht Grund zur Vorsicht und Skepsis – wenn ich erstmals meine Lebensgesichte multimedial hinterlegt habe, und von Export-Möglichkeiten ist derzeit nicht die Rede, dann fällt es mir schwer den Service-Anbieter zu wechseln. Die Stiftung die oben angesprochen wird, dient dazu Vertauen und Sicherheit in die Verfügbarkeit und Redlichkeit des Services aufzubauen.

Einen weitergehenden Schritt in Richtung der Nutzung von Netzwerk-Effekten unternimmt etwa dandelife.com. Deren Motto – „a social biography network” läßt klar erkennen, worum es geht: Ereignisse werden kollektiv erzählt und schreiben so quasi eine „Geschichte von unten”. Auf einer technischen Ebene ist dandelife ein Mashup insofern es Daten/Objekte, die auf anderen Plattformen wie etwa Flickr liegen an einer Stelle sammelt und mit den Daten anderer Personen verknüpft. Gut ersichtlich in Form der Timeline.

Eine Reihe von Publishing Anwendungen versucht Normalverbraucher zum publishen/erzählen anzuregen. Im Spannungsfeld der eigenen Erzählung und dem Kollektiven Erzählen versuchen diese neuen Publishing Tools neuen Dimensionen des vernetzen Erlebens zu unterstützen. Das Web entwickelt damit eine eigene Formensprache, die allein technisch davor nicht mögllich war. Die Timeline stellt eine der attraktivsten Publishing-Formate dar, unten beispielsweise von OurStory.com. Diese Timelines stehen häufig als ein Widget zur Verfügung und können in ander Webdienste eingebaut werden.

Erfolgreiches Format der Digitalisierung

Zusammenfassen lassen sich diese neuen Publishing-Formate auf den drei Nutzen-Ebenen beschreiben. Persönlicher Nutzen wird insofern gestiftet, als es eine Art One-Stop-Shop für die Verwaltung meiner multimedialen Daten zu meiner Lebensgeschichte gibt. Eine langristige Garantie über die Verfügbarkeit bietet das Fundament für eine fortlaufende Erzählung. Zudem lassen sich an Ort und Stellen die persönlichen Daten mit denen von Familien-Mitgliedern verknüpfen. Hier tritt dann alsbald der Community-Nutzen hinzu; gemeint ist damit die Vernetzung und die Entdeckung (auch im Sinne eines Marktes and Personen) von Geschichten und Personen zu Ereignissen, die man gemeinsam – oder zuminest auf der sleben Zeitachse – erlebt hat.

Der springende Punkt letztlich, sollten diese beiden Nutzenebenen plausibel sein, ist die Frage nach den Geschäftsmodellen. Wie läßt sich ein Service dieser Art finanzieren. Die existierenden Geschäftsmodelle muten noch seltsam an, so versteht sich dandelife.com als eine Art Broker, der Nutzerprofile und -geschichten an Unternehmen verkaufen will. OurStory.com will via Opt-In Profile für Studienzwecke verkaufen. Kontextualisierte und zielgruppengenaue Werbung gehören zu Mix, sowie Premium-Accounts. In jedem Fall sind Druckereien/Dienstleister an solche Services angeknüpft, Lebensgeschichten können so in gedruckter Form bzw. auf DVD auch offline zur Verfügung stehen.

In Summe werden die Lifestories-Services ein weiterer Schritt in der zunehmenden Digitalisierung unserer Gesellschaft sein; gelingen wird das dann, wenn tatsächlich nicht nur die Early Adopters, sondern die breite Masse das Bedürfnisse erkennt ihre Lebensgeschichte – und sei es nur für die Familie – online zu publishen.

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I can tell you all those self-publishing services are time bandits. First it took me two months to figure out that Booksurge (an Amazon company) is supposedly run by inverse mechanical turks. Either my sales agent didn’t reply for weeks or was not capable to answer my questions and sometimes after some time she (or it) sent me commodified marketing mails about their service. That really drove me nuts. She would have failed the Turing-test in any case.

Eventually I decided to cancel my engagement with Booksurge for the sake of making the book public before the turn of the decade. It’s a pity though because – and that was my interest in the first place – I wanted the book to be part of the Amazon.com directory and not only the Amazon.de one. I have no clue how to achieve that – I’m grateful for any help on that.

In the end I decided to go with Books On Demand (German) again: Another pain in the ass (ask Jan) to get the files the way their publishing engine can accept it. And we haven’t seen any results yet.

For your information here is the cover and the link to my (very personal) intro to the book.

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After 2 months of usage that certainty made it evident for me that with blogs and the related networks we do have a very powerful personal publishing tool available that will augment our personal scope of networking as a base for learning enourmously. I was quite certain that this will not only effect the private usage but even more the organizational usage of it. Since then I am most interested in transfering the lessons learned in the open web into the professional and organizational context.

So in 2002 after a brief introspection I decided to organize a conference on that topic and together with Max Scheugl the first draft of BlogTalk – the first international conference on weblogs – was created. It turned out to be a huge success and had a successor in 2004, thanks to Markus Toyfl for helping to design it, and eventually turned for its third edition – that was conceived and organized together with Jan Schmidt – into a more general conference on social software – a practice and phenomenon that took shape already in late 2002.

The conference and the people that dropped by – from all over the world – to either present their visions, research, projects and ideas or to listen and to talk to each other represent what you could call a gathering of lead users that sought and are still looking for innovation – on several sometimes contradictional levels. We all – and I dare to claim that – are still looking for better ways to communicate and relate to each other be it for the exchange of knowledge or the exchange of experiences. And finally we are all aware that it is about connecting with like-minded people. A connectedness that primarily benefits us personally and on a second level it somehow creates what you might call a collective awareness and value that surpasses what we were used to accept as the boundaries of human intellect.

That might be entirely conventional from an anthropological perspective. Human beings are here for conversations as a prime base for anything else that can come to one’s mind. After all we humans represent and create networks of conversational animals. To imporve on that by shifting it to the virtual realm makes it a relevant aspect for me: it is where the virtual becomes indistinguisghable from the real.

During the last years I had the change to participate in a paradigm shift. On the one hand the web is clearly an effect and cause of what is termed globalization on the other hand it has a lot to do with innovation. And I am extrmely happy about that latter part. Experiencing innovation, even being part of it is exciting in itself and challenging on the the other hand. Just think of transfering your experiences into a world that does not participate in that innovation. A world that by the very virtue of not being part of the innovation is creating that notion of innovation at the same time. Just think of translating that for them and it becomes quite clear what is at stake. I realized – mediated through the conference and its aftereffects – that language and images are the relevant membranes that separate innovation from its acceptance. And if something truely new is here to stay than you first need to find the right words (metahphors) for it.

Hence, a new media evolved from being a mere instrument for doing a lot of things better and faster into a phenomenon that now constantly creates new concepts of how to make use of it. Concepts that by far transcend the simulation of existing media. The last 5 years were the most exciting ones and I have to thank the the people that build the web that connected me to that pieces and people.

Thus please go ahead and consult this volume as a representation of what the conference BlogTalk and its related conversations were about.

Thomas N. Burg, March 2007

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Sometimes there are those moments you didn’t anticipate that make you think about your fundamental believes. And we should be grateful for those moments of slowdown and re-evaluation.

Does it make sense to develop software in a small team in Europe or elsewhere? Does it make sense to subscribe to 1, 2, or more different pieces of software that fulfill the needs of you clients and apply them just like tools? Is it worth open sourcing you work (that sits on the shoulders of others)?

One thing is for sure: on first sight it is something special to develop software. Even better if it is functional, stable and offers broad opportunities to deploy it. On the other hand: does it make a real difference to invest time/money/spirit in developing software if there is so much already provided worldwide. Wouldn’t it be better and more valuable and sustainable for the whole of us to subscribe to existing codes, help improve and distribute those lines. And to help people to understand those lines of code or better what they can afford.

Is it eventually more useful to act as an interpreter (t d f) than as a poet? But then what is poetry (t d f) after all. And is there a difference between those two? And if: would it make a difference.

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The journal claims to be the first one that deals exclusively with knowledge-management (t d f). They ran two article on a similar topic a year ago (2004/05) unfortunately the archives are closed. If someone could share a copy I’d be greatful. Guess I’ll document the process of writing the artice here or at my wiki.

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