Charlene Li of Forrester Research moderated a panel of leading technology companies offering solutions in online publishing that focus on personal knowledge management and user-generated media. Charlene noted that 12 percent of U.S. households are reading weblogs weekly, a huge leap in just a few years' time. It a population of leading thinkers, critics and the couch potatoes who consume the others' outputs. What are these technologies and why do they matter?
Marisa Levinson from SixApart focuses on blogging software, and she walked the audience through "old-fashioned" blogs with basic entries, comments and archived with a relatively crude presentation, and then more modern blogs, which have a far more sophisticated look that is more the output of a full-blown but relatively light content management system. SixApart works mostly with large enterprises that are trying to reach their markets and to empower internal staff to communicate more effectively using the highly decentralized capabilities of weblogs to develop content quickly with highly effective content management software based on open source software and widespread standards that requires very little babysitting. It allows companies to reach very finely defined niche markets in a way that wouldn't have been cost-effective before and to implement knowledge management internally to use weblogs' highly flexible standard structure to help content be created and communicated effectively to knowledge workers.
Bret Taylor of Google heads developer programs and interfaces with "mashups" using Google content from its mapping products and other key sources. Bret highlighted the housing maps .com. Bret notes that mashups are similar to other service-oriented architectures being deployed these days, but oriented towards relatively simple development tools such as Javascript that allow people with limited technology abilities to deploy powerful ideas quickly and effectively. Google Maps pedometer is a site that allows runners and hikers to give athletes exact mileage of planned routes to allow them to create strategies for various routes. Unlike other technologies Bret notes that mashups are tools for developers, not users, but new interfaces are coming from Silicon Valley startups to allow users to create their own value-add interfaces. Charlene shoehorned in to show a sight called delight.ning.com, an online site that allows users to design fairly sophisticated content, in this instance for shoe-lovers.
Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint demonstrated is a relatively new online tool that tries to combine the best of weblogs, wikis and collaborative tools to create powerful community publishing. Ben highlighted WikiFido, a live demo site that has many familiar tools such as a keyword cloud, and listings of online profiles, all powered by a highly friendly user interface that makes it much easier to input content than tag-oriented wiki editing tools. The wiki-like capabilities power pages such as "my dog is cuter than yours," attracting content from contributors to develop depth and interest. Tagging and classification is easy to implement, allowing the content to self-organize in the hands of its users and contributors. "'Easy' is hard," Ben notes, but it provides the appeal to build content quickly and to build conversations that go beyond the lone soapboxes of weblogs.
Josh Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, demonstrated the capabilities of his Yahoo-owned social bookmarking service, using his own personal bookmarks - listing others who have contributed similar tags. The core group using del.icio.us is still highly tech-oriented, but Josh noted that the breadth of topics has spread out quite a bit since the tool's introduction.
Kevin Rose, founder of the social tagging service Digg, provides what Kevin terms a social news service that allows users not only to post tags to news stories but also to promote popular content to the site's home page. Stories get posted to one's home page, which can be compiled into feeds from friends' home pages to understand what other people are "digging" at a given moment. Digg has helped to break news stories through a real-time interface that acts as a scrolling news reader of stories that people are bookmarking at a given moment. It's a little like a stock ticker in which you can tune into what is moving people's minds instead of markets. Kevin's Mac portable desktop is a very abstract heatmap of stories that are moving on Digg. A tool allows one to develop akin to Inxight's StarTree desktop tools to build visual representations of how's "digging" whom and to understand relationships of people using Digg. Kevin demoed an interface showing a cool way to trace users as they move from one story to another.
Charlene's question: how do these tools change things? Marisa noted that even basic things like feeds have changed things, allowing users to subscribe to and collect content quickly and effectively. Ben noted that these tools blow away what publishers have been trying to accomplish for years, allowing content to be discovered, shared and have market impact far more quickly and effectively than via traditional channels. It's a very different publishing paradigm, one that makes some publishers very uncomfortable by a quick show of hands in the audience. Josh notes that content is increasingly selected by peers rather than content producers, in effect creating their own publications with editorial input from themselves and people in their social and professional circles. Kevin that sites like Digg level the playing field, providing enormous boosts to traffic and to encourage writers to break away from established media channels. Josh noted that not allowing users to share important content is "insane," cutting out of important conversations. "There is a conversation out there regardless, you can guide a conversation and learn from it," Marisa noted. Bret noted that some publishers closed down some user feedback tools that opened up feedback without any filtering that they felt uncomfortable. By contrast, users in sites like Digg can help users to filter effectively. Marisa noted that the Washington Post, one of their clients, seems to be moving beyond the fear phase and learning how to interact. Charlene noted that media companies are moving away from content and channel exclusivity and moving towards aggregating audiences (quite true). She points out CNET as a good example, pointing users to good stories.
How do you generate revenue? SixApart charges for software, WetPaint is ad-driven, Digg gets 9 million eyeballs a day for its AdSense ads, Google gets ads, of course. Would Digg be willing to expose its APIs to publishers as well as users, but there are no real answers yet for good integration seen from these panelists. Ben points out that many publishers are still in fear mode, but are beginning to look at developing community around long-published content in the "long tail." How to get started? "Get started," Marisa quips in reply, saying it's not that hard and it's easy to progress rapidly. Publishers can implement progressively, she recommends, staying open with your audience and to start small to learn gradually as adoption builds. "It's not scary, and you're going to get a lot of reach for your company," she notes. Ben notes that small private experiments can succeed wildly and build interest; if they don't succeed, it's easy to walk away from them. "You need to be friendly," says Bret, "if you don't your competitors will."
Great stuff. It's interesting how easily the revenue questions is answered these days with social media. There's a lot of skepticism about revenues from the publishing community still, but in essence social media has made the Web a self-monetizing publishing community, requiring mostly genuine interest from enthusiasts to start the ball rolling. Certainly no publisher in the room is in danger from any of these services specifically, but lack of aggressiveness in embracing these technologies is going to lead readers elsewhere. Consider these tools the gateway to highly powerful contextualization tools for content that's generating new audiences for content that would otherwise go unharvested. Managing key issues such as how much content gets integrated into social tools is important, but consider "fair use" the cost of doing business with technology-empowered audiences that have created their own standards for content quality and relevance.
