Entries tagged with “community” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Lessons from Digital Disruption in the Music Business
Andrew Savikas
October 29, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen 
Last week's On The Media (mp3 download here) devoted the full program to challenges and changes during the past decade or so in the music business -- from the unanswered legal questions about sampling (check out Girl Talk for the genre taken to the extreme) to the shifting economics of concert tickets and promotion to the changing role of industry rankings like Billboard's Hot 100. (Fun fact I picked up while listening: more than 8.5 billion songs have been sold via iTunes.)
My favorite segment was near the end, about the changing nature of the relationship between artists and fans, a segment called "Why I'm not Afraid to Take Your Money" which featured a great interview with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls:
Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there's an infinite number of answers.
People don't love music any less. There might be a lot less money out there in the industry, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the fact that the live industry is tanking to a certain degree means that ticket prices are now going to be reasonable. As far as the music is concerned, maybe it ups the ante. If you're a teenager with a dream of being a rock star, maybe you'll really think about why. Were you doing this to be rich and famous or are you doing this because you really love music and you want to connect with people, and you'll do it even if it just means you make a living wage? If that's true, I'm - you know, I'm a fan of the new system.
Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online
Andrew Savikas
October 2, 2009
| Permalink
|
Listen
Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel).
Keith also offers up a nice post-mortem on the first book to go through the system, Programming Scala, where "over the months, nearly 100 people left a total of 543 comments. Ten contributors stood out in particular, giving more than a third of the total comments."
Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper
Andy Oram
June 17, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (38)
|
Listen
Bookbuilders of Boston,
a nonprofit membership organization for publishing professionals, held
a panel on June 11 about open publishing. It attracted an usually
large number of attendees--about 60--revealing the curiosity its
members have toward the potential changes created by this movement.
I was one of the panelists, along with managers from MIT Press and
Harvard University Press. In addition to a discussion of the core
topic of open publishing--that is, distributing documents free of
charge, often under a license that permits free alteration and
distribution--I laid out a larger vision that places the publisher in
a context where contributors hold conversations online and share large
amounts of material freely among themselves. That vision is the
center of the following remarks.
When trade publishers are invited to speak, we seem to be expected to follow a certain script. We must stress the importance of finding new ways to distribute and market our material online. We have to point out that only 15% of a book's cost goes to shipping and printing. We champion the importance of supporting authors financially, shed a tear or two for our sister industry, journalism, and so on.
When staff from O'Reilly Media are invited to speak, we defy expectations by throwing out all of that stuff, talking instead about the excitement exploring new technologies that can change people's lives, about working together to educate each other, about how sharing information in communities can help us all grow. This is the open source movement in a nutshell, as it were.
Tonight I'll take a somewhat in-between position: I'll talk about business models, but from the standpoint of open online content.
The bedrock principle in this environment is that the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper. Anything can go online to be linked to, rated, berated, or anything else people want to do with it. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.
Sound nice--but that puts us in a real quandary, because the elements of quality we have seized on so proudly over the decades no longer matter as much. We have to recognize the new environment we're in and find new meaning for ourselves.
This is a classic application of the principles from The Innovator's Dilemma, the classic book by Clayton M. Christensen, where he talks about changes caused by disruptive technologies. In our case, disruptive social norms are just as important.
In many areas of publishing--including certainly my own, computer books--there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Much of the material can be edited and redisplayed instantly, particularly on wikis. That is the context in which we have to define the publisher's new roles.
I won't discuss marketing in this talk because I'm not a marketing person and because the rules are changing so fast that I'm afraid of making any predictions about what works. Focusing instead on content production, I've divided the roles publishers play in adding quality into four parts. For each one, I'll discuss how we're affected by the presence of so much online material.
Proofing for grammar, syntax, and consistency of usage
Publishers spend a lot of time making documents look professional and enforcing standards. We're obsessed with getting every comma and semi-colon right, ensuring that capitalization is consistent, and so on.I think this as a valuable contribution to quality. Sometimes someone reading an article will stop and as me, "Here's an abbreviation spelled two different ways--does it refer to the same thing or two different things?" And sometimes I'll read a sentence that's missing a word, and have to go over it two or three times to see how the parts fit together. Proofreading can resolve real problems in comprehension.
But many modern readers don't value proofreading, because it comes at a cost. This cost, of course, is the extra time proofreading adds to publication. The modern reader would rather have the document right now, so he can get his tweet out before his colleague does. First tweet wins.
Proofreading is also like cleaning the Aegean Stables. I've found myself in the situation where I edit a whole book and get it looking really professional, then find that someone goes in the files the next day to make some updates--and there goes all my hard work.
But publishers can still offer professional proofreading. The time this is useful is when an organization needs a professional looking document--for instance, when it wants to print an online book in order to show off the organization's capabilities to a potential client. In the same situation where you take off your T-shirt and don a pants-suit, you want a professional-looking text. And publishers may be able to get revenue in such situations.
Fact-checking
A more significant contribution publishers make to quality is fact-checking. Many newspapers and magazines hire staff to do it; technical journals and book publishers such as O'Reilly pay outside experts a few hundred or couple thousand dollars to perform the same service.
Few authors and readers online hold the view expressed by a blogger in last Sunday's New York Times who said, "Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap." But there is an attitude among responsible bloggers--which I adopt myself--that if you've gathered enough of the facts to propound a valid opinion, you can go ahead and put the opinion out for debate. If other people see errors or have evidence that weakens your argument, they can cite them in comments. If you write a wiki, they can edit it. In any case, you're encouraged to express yourself so long as you're sure you're heading in the right direction.
This approach is more limited than many of its adherents think, though. In the computer field I work in, especially, a lot of online participants hold to an essential philosophy of logical positivism. They believe that if enough facts are brought to bear and enough people comment, we will all converge on the truth. If this were the case, most of the articles in Wikipedia would be perfect by now.
But if course this is not the case, because new information, new opinions, new interpretations get added all the time, and with them new errors are introduced as well.
So there may be a role for publishing professionals in fact checking. It will probably not be a large part of our work, though because in the Internet age fact checking is a lot easier than it used to be. Just don't rely on Wikipedia.
Editing unclear and ambiguous passages
This task is probably where publishers create the most value, and where they can make some of their biggest contributions to Internet content. I find it sad when I read a document by someone who is clearly brilliant and knows his material well, and come across a passage that doesn't make sense because no editor said, "You have to work on this."
And every editor knows the work involved in making text comprehensible by ripping up paragraphs, rearranging points in the proper order, introducing connecting or transitional material, and even adding facts that the author took for granted but that the editor knows have to be explicitly told to the reader.
I've noticed that the give and take of modern online media compensates even for poorly argued text. If someone doesn't understand a point, she can just post a question. The author can come back to cover it in more detail, and after a couple rounds of discussion they work out the meaning. Other people can join in to offer explanations.
Still, I look at these exchanges and think, "A lot of people could have saved a lot of time if someone had just edited the document." And some projects are recognizing the value of having an expert eye look over a document, something few amateurs know how or take time to do.
Integrating facets of a large-scale text
We all know the difference between reading an anthology of diverse articles for different audiences, written from different points of view in different tones of voice, and reading a 250-page book so well integrated that you start on page 1 and can't put it down till you reach the end. Achieving this quality is where publishers shine, and I haven't found any process or mechanism in collaborative, online document production that can carry it off.
But even this has diminished value in the Internet world, because hardly anyone reads a 250-page book at once. No one has time. If we read chunks of a few thousand words at a time, we could just as well read documents the way they usually appear on the Internet: many small contributions by different people scattered among different web sites. (This very article, topping 1,500 words, is about as long a text as most people would tolerate.)
That doesn't mean the problem of integration has disappeared; it has just shifted. Now the public needs help finding their way among the different documents. Hints are needed as to what to read first, where to go when they encounter a new concept they need to learn, and how to harmonize documents that use different terms or approach a problem from different angles.
I think publishers can play a major role helping to organize content culled from around the Internet. But the process is a lot different from organizing material into a book. It requires a new online tools and a type of different interaction between experts and those tools. I will leave you with a pointer to an article I wrote proposing some tools, and another pointer to my collection of articles about community educational efforts.
In summary, publishers still have roles to play when we are no longer gatekeepers. But we have to renew our relevance in environments where enormous amounts of information are put online by different participants, with ample facilities for commenting and linking. These new technologies and norms force us to look at every area where we traditionally boast of adding quality, and to find new ways to apply our skills.
New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System
Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs:
Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.
You can see the system in action at the site for our upcoming book Programming Scala.
"Bite-Size Edits" from BookOven
Andrew Savikas
April 2, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (12)
|
Listen
Hugh McGuire's startup BookOven has opened up an alpha version of a project they're calling the Gutenberg Rally, an attempt to harness collective intelligence Mechanical-Turk style to proofread Project Gutenberg texts for typos and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors. In "divide and conquer" style, the system presents just one small snippet of text at a time (with some surrounding context), effectively breaking down a mountain of a task into easily managed molehills:
I had a nice chat with Hugh on Wednesday morning, and what he told me about what's to come from BookOven was quite exciting (though apparently still very much in development).
This isn't the first attempt to harness eyeballs for finding and fixing OCR errors (see ReCaptcha), but reviewing the text in context is a much more satisfying experience, and left me wanting to read more of several of the books I was seeing only in snippet form.
Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation
Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare:
It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books, they tune you out when you try to stay on message. If they wanted to rehash cover copy, they'd read the back of the book.
Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
Mac Slocum
November 19, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Consistent blogging and Web-based interaction often fall by the wayside when other projects demand attention, but venture capitalist Fred Wilson makes a compelling argument for keeping connectivity on the front burner. He charts the trajectory of a recent post focusing on Boxee, one of his investment companies: it went from a blog, to Techmeme, and then looped back into tangible interest for the company.
I know that one person out of the 100 I invited this morning will be incredibly impactful for boxee. It could be five people, it could be ten. Who knows?
But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference.
And that's one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large.
Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations
Mac Slocum
November 18, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Scott Karp expands on claims that Hulu is nipping at YouTube's heels with 10 pointed observations about the future of media. Karp's full list is recommended reading, but the following points inspired a few thoughts of my own:
1 . Professional content still has A LOT more value than "user-generated content."
This bodes well for publishers, studios and other companies that have attained professional status, but there's another aspect that deserves mention: The concept of professional in the digital realm is transforming from exclusive to inclusive.
Under traditional models with limited channels, a professional was someone who achieved a certain title through luck, talent and output; the content produced by these people was deemed professional by default. But digital platforms allow consumers to choose material on their own terms, and with that comes a shift of the professional label from job association to consumer impression. If consumers deem a piece of "user-generated" content to be professional, then it is (to those particular consumers). And if enough consumers assign the same value to the same content, advertisers will eventually get on board. We're in the very early stages of this professional transition (and the ensuing debate), but I'm excited to see how a reimiagining that includes both traditional companies and upstart professionals plays out.
8. Most analogue media businesses, when fully transitioned to the web, will likely bear little resemblance to the original businesses.
Karp summarizes something that's been gnawing at me for months: the old models just don't hold up in the digital world. Distribution went from narrow and expensive to wide and cheap; audiences once limited to specific channels have dispersed across a broad landscape; Web advertising revenue will not replace traditional ad revenue; and, after 10-plus years of Web use, consumers now expect basic digital content to be free. Fighting against these changes delays the inevitable, but acceptance opens up enormous opportunity to build leaner businesses that use content, community and the Web's efficiences to sell scarce products (i.e. targeted research, consulting, education, events, experiences, and access).
Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire
Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (5)
|
Listen
LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In the following Q&A, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project's beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between "professional" and "amateur" efforts.
How did LibriVox start?
LibriVox came about in August 2005, when I was looking for free, full-length audiobooks online for a long car trip. I went to gutenberg.org, but found mostly machine-read stuff there, which I don't like. Eventually I found someone who had recorded half of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was enough for my trip, but it occurred to me when I got through the first half, that i would have to wait months to hear the rest.
At the time, I'd been thinking and writing about a fair bit about the free software/open source movement, and how it might apply to non-software projects. Wikipedia was a big inspiration there, as was Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, and his call for, "universal access to all human knowledge." I'd been enjoying podcasting, and in particular had been excited by AKMA's project to get a group of volunteers to record and distribute Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, also an inspiration. Project Gutenberg has been a long-time inspiration, too.
So all those things percolated together, and I thought, well why not try to start a big open source project to get volunteers around the world to record public domain texts for free? I put up a blog, sent out some emails, and had 13 people agree to read our first book in the first day. Three months later, we'd completed eight books; within a year later we had 257 books.
How many audiobooks do you offer?
Currently our collection includes 1,896 completed works, all free, all public domain. We produce anywhere from 60 to 115 works in a given month, which puts us among the most prolific publishers of audiobooks in the world. We've got books in 26 different languages, including Finnish, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and German. Our books include classics from Twain, Austen, Nietzsche, Zola, Plato, Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, as well as many more obscure books, such as The Romance of Rubber.
What file formats are LibriVox audiobooks available in?
128kbps MPe, 64 kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. All our files are hosted on the Internet Archive.
How many volunteers have participated? How do these folks find LibriVox?
We have 12,362 users registered on our forum, 2,476 of whom have volunteered to read. Many of our volunteers started as listeners. The rest just find us one way or another on the Web.
Do volunteer readers typically read entire books? Or, do books feature multiple volunteers reading different chapters?
Roughly half of our projects are collaborative projects, and half solo projects. That ratio has remained stable over the past few years (and, frankly, was something of a surprise to me: I did not expect so many people to record entire works, since it is a challenging thing to do).
What do you think motivates people to participate?
A whole range of things, but probably the main thing is our volunteers enjoy recording texts. Many were read to as kids, and enjoy being read to, or reading to others; some of us have idealistic motivations, about free access to knowledge; others have ambitions to become professional voice actors (a number of our volunteers have gotten gigs as pro readers). There is probably a certain satisfaction of being the voice of a writer you love for thousands of people. For a long time, Pride and Prejudice was our most popular book, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, read by a library student from Missouri. I expect that's a pretty wonderful feeling, having so many people get so much pleasure from something you've done for your own enjoyment.
We also have a wonderful, helpful online community, so I think many people just enjoy hanging out on our forum. The main thing that motivates people, and keeps us going, is that it's fun.
Do you find that the same core group of volunteers continues to participate year after year, or do volunteers come and go?
There is a core of a few of us who have been around since the beginning, but we've had lots of turnover. It's the kind of thing that becomes an obsession for many people, and so there is a natural burnout process. But there always seems to be a new crop of people to jump in. We have about 25 moderators/admins, and probably adding and subtracting about three people every three months or so.
As with Wikipedia, a huge portion of our recordings are done by a small number of readers. The 20 most prolific readers have read 30 percent of the sections in our catalog (!).
Was there a moment when the LibriVox community seemed to take on a life of its own? If so, when did this happen and how did you know it?
That's easy: on Sept 12, 2005, when Boing Boing wrote about us. Traffic went from a couple of hundred a day, to 10,000 in one day. Nothing's been the same since!
What are the biggest challenges you've faced in building and maintaining the LibriVox community?
In the early days the main challenge was dealing with the growth in the community and production. With a few books I gathered all the files myself, and uploaded all the files to the Internet Archive as they came in. But by the time we got to 10 projects that was too much for me (and I'm no good at organizing that sort of thing); at 100 projects we needed to streamline our system. We currently have about 400 active projects (that's typical) and we are releasing an average of eight hours of audio a day. So the whole management of that process evolved organically, but took a fair bit of thinking about.
The other challenge more recently is a change in the sorts of people who are deeply involved in the project. In the early days, it was kind of like the wild west, and we attracted a motley crew of open sourcey types, with a broad range of skillsets (Web design, coding, etc). These days it seems like there are fewer of those kinds of people around (or, because the community is much bigger, it's harder to find them), so some things we'd like to get done (for instance making our Web site more accessible) have been on the back burner for a long time. So that's a challenge we have yet to figure out.
Have you marketed LibriVox, either through traditional advertising channels or via grassroots campaigns?
We've never done any marketing, except sending the odd email to Boing Boing and places like that. We get something like 40,000 visits a day on our site, all of it driven by general interest on the Web -- small blogs writing about us, podcasters talking about us, and once in a while a big media piece (New York Times, Reason, LA Times, BBC, NPR etc). But mainly it's just old-fashioned netroots marketing that seems to take care of itself.
Which titles and genres are most popular? Why did these titles/genres catch on?
The big ones are Bronte, Twain, Austen, L.M. Montgomery, Thomas Hardy, Dickens, and Conan Doyle. I think these are the classic stories of English literature, and so they are the writers most people seek out. But Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory" has been downloaded 38,000 times, so it's a pretty broad range of interest displayed by listeners. There are a number of sites that select out the best-of LibriVox, and that probably drives a fair bit of traffic, but it's all a bit of a mystery to me how certain things in our collection become popular.
In previous coverage, it's been noted that LibriVox's goal is to "record every book in the public domain." Do you have a sense of how many books that would involve and how long it would take to accomplish that goal?
I have no idea how many books that would be. In theory, the corpus of texts in the public domain should increase every year, as copyright terms expire. But the US Congress keeps extending copyright term, so we seem to be stuck with a fixed number of texts, mainly those published before 1923. Maybe someday that will change. I hope so.
But to the question: Project Gutenberg has 25,000 public domain books available to us, and the Open Content Alliance/Internet Archive just passed the 1 million mark of scanned public domain books. The there is Google's project. So, I'm not sure what the total number would be, but ideally we'd like to do all public domain books in all languages. We have our work cut out for us.
Our plan is to continue our efforts until we're finished. If we up our production a little bit, to say 1,000 books/year, it will take us 1,000 years to get through the Open Content Alliance's collection (which contains the entire Gutenberg collection). But if we can really get cracking and push to increase production by a factor of 10, we could cut that to 100 years.
Let's split the difference and say 550 years.
Is there any distinction between "amateur" and "professional" on LibriVox? How do you define quality in a volunteer effort? Does quality even matter in this case?
No, there is no distinction really. Everyone is encouraged to join us. We have a wide range of quality, from truly exceptional (in a traditional sense), to good, to not so great. Our goal, however, is to record the books, and to make a platform that allows anyone to contribute to the effort. We ask no questions, require no auditions, make no judgments about style or technique, and are happy for every single audio file someone chooses to contribute to the project. So in many important ways we are not like a traditional publisher: our focus is more on our volunteers, helping them to record in order to contribute to our mission:
"To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet. "
And in some ways it's a wonderful side-benefit that the world gets free audiobooks as a result of our efforts.
I personally like the more idiosyncratic recordings in our collection -- the birds chirping in the background, and the rustling papers, the odd cough or stumble. These bring a different sense of humanity to the books than do professional readings. But that's my personal feeling, and I do love the more traditionally "good" recordings as well.
But my general feeling is that the Internet is very good at sifting through piles of complex information, so other sites should come along and rank and sort our content, by whatever criteria they find important. It's out there and available for all to use for free, however they would like to do so.
We have a policy against rating, and against un-asked-for criticism on our forum. It tends to discourage participation, and we need as many people to help out as we can convince.
However, you can search our catalog by reader; you can search for just solo works; and you are also encouraged to submit another version of recordings. A good number of our books have multiple versions.
So in short: we don't do the sorting ourselves (though we have started to compile a list of favourite recordings from among our community), but we encourage others to do it.
BBC Shifts Conversation Style: Go Where They're Already Talking
Peter Brantley
October 13, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
I think this deserves to be pondered. BBC News is moving away from merely hosting comments to inciting discussion in a variety of formats and locations. From Reportr.net:
For the US presidential debates, it [the BBC] has opened channels on video services Qik, 12Seconds and Phreadz. Some of the videos were subsequently edited and posted on the BBC News website.
The purpose, explains [BBC Editor] Matthew Eltringham, is "to join in conversations wherever they were happening rather than expect people to come to us and host them on the BBC's platforms."
This is a major change in the BBC's approach to user-generated content. It signals a shift away from the idea that the BBC should host the conversation. [Link added]
Do Publisher Brands Still Have Relevance?
Peter Brantley
October 3, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (5)
|
Listen
Kate Eltham espies HarperStudio, asking whether they should have a separate Web portal/site, or just operate with a blog. She wonders: can a publisher drive a brand these days? Or just authors? What would make the return on investment worthwhile?
Personally, growing up, discovering reading, I remember some imprints with fondness, and I might see their name as an added validation of quality -- e.g. Black Cat/Grove always meant something specific; so did Pantheon (not the same thing!). But I would never purchase solely because of the brand "hey another Black Cat by an author that i've never heard of -- I'll give it a go!" That never has happened to me.
Anyway ... back to Kate:
And all this got me thinking ... is the author the only brand? Isn't it possible, however unlikely, that some publishers could create an identity so strong and a community so vibrant that audiences seek out their books because they trust and like the people producing them? It's hard to imagine of the multinationals, but not so hard to imagine of the quirky independents who have well-known identities associated with them, such as McSweeney's (Dave Eggers) or Small Beer Press (Kelly Link).
Of course, even a wildly successful publisher blog is unlikely to generate the kind of audience that would shift books in the quantities required to make the ROI worth it. Then again, when you look at blogs like Boing Boing it's quite clear the awesome power of conversation and community. The publisher as brand may not be something to write off just yet. Perhaps publishers just haven't worked out how to do it well in the new paradigm.
Open Question: How Do You Use Web Video?
Mac Slocum
September 22, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Joost, a much-publicized video service, is overhauling its technology and adding social networking services in a bid to boost its user base. From MediaWeek:
At the center of the new social-centric Joost.com is JoostFeed, which much like Facebook's signature News Feed alerts users about what shows their friends are watching or have recently watched - hopefully stimulating more group viewing among Joost's users and more "I didn't know they had that show" moments.
Joost was originally released as a standalone application that required cumbersome download and installation, so the new Web-based version certainly offers a better user experience. But core technology has never been Joost's problem. The old software app and the new Web interface sport sleek interfaces and strong platforms, but the functionality doesn't overcome Joost's lack of interesting content.
Joost isn't alone. Every Web-based delivery platform is trying to find the right mix of content and technology. Since audience development is the ultimate measure of success in all of these video projects, I'm interested in hearing how the TOC Community interacts with online video:
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
Peter Brantley
September 18, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
LibraryTechNZ mentions an interesting engagement of a European library with its community, something that bookstores could also do:
The library at the Hague in the Netherlands has introduced a simple form of tagging in real life. They now have two returns drop-boxes. One is for all items, and the other is for amazing books. Staff take the 'amazing' books and put them in the 'amazing books' display for visitors to browse. But they also tag them 'amazing' in the Library's collection database.
"Spore" Backlash: Is DRM Officially Bad for Business?
Mac Slocum
September 16, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
Update 9/24/08 - Responding to consumer complaints, Electronic Arts has relaxed the digital rights management restrictions on "Spore."
If the backlash to Electronic Arts' new game "Spore" serves as a sign of things to come, strict digital rights management (DRM) restrictions are transforming from consumer annoyances into full-fledged business mistakes. From Forbes:
In just the 24-hour period between Wednesday [9/10] and Thursday [9/11], illegal downloaders snagged more than 35,000 copies, and, as of Thursday evening, that rate of downloads was still accelerating. "The numbers are extraordinary," [Eric] Garland [CEO of Big Champagne] says. "This is a very high level of torrent activity even for an immensely popular game title."
Electronic Arts had hoped to limit users to installing the game only three times through its use of digital rights management software, or DRM. But not only have those constraints failed, says Garland, they may have inadvertently spurred the pirates on.
On Amazon, "Spore's" one-star customer rating is driven by anti-DRM sentiment rather than analysis of the game itself. It's likely only a small percentage of "Spore's" potential customer base knows or cares about DRM, but Amazon's star-system shorthand makes no distinction between reviewers passing judgement on the game and those engaging in DRM activism. Deserved or not, a one-star rating averaged from thousands of reviews is the very definition of caveat emptor, particularly for casual shoppers who encounter "Spore's" listing down the road.
The combination of "Spore's" long history on the gaming world's radar and the publicity push surrounding its release will undoubtedly lead to good sales in the early going (anecdotal evidence suggests this is already the case). But "Spore" is one of those hyper-immersive games that's shaped by its users, and this DRM flap may ultimately limit adoption and future product opportunities.
Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One
Mac Slocum
September 9, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Finding the balance between the content you take from users and the value you give back is tricky business, especially since "value" and "money" are rarely synonymous in the user-generated space. Yelp, a volunteer-driven hub of local business and restaurant reviews, is one community that seems to have struck the right chord with its most active members. From the New York Times:
Yelp identifies its most consistently praised, prolific and witty reviewers as members of the "Yelp Elite Squad." The company says it looks for those possessing "a certain je ne sais quoi -- we call it Yelpitude." I find that it saves time to read the reviews submitted by the Elite Squad and ignore the rest.
Singling out the best and the brighting contributors in the early days of a community is putting the cart before the horse. You need critical mass -- or a route toward critical mass -- before the natural audience strata appear. Nonetheless, it's smart to develop a notoriety plan in the off chance you catch lightning in a bottle. This could be a complicated mechanism like Yelp's Elite Squad or Slashdot's moderation system, or it could be driven by organic relationships between community moderators and promising users.
Note: Some community systems associate coy user types with users who've met certain thresholds -- i.e. post 100 comments and become a vaunted "Senior Member." Auto-generated user types have a degree of value, but a true notoriety initiative requires a lot more effort.
Even with adequate notoriety tools, the most successful communities still suffer from turnover and diminished interest among key users. When I developed my first few communities I mistakenly assumed that once the audience was in place, the natural organization within the community would replace my development efforts. But that's not how it works. Most members have a lifecycle within a community -- it's a linear progression with an endpoint, not a constant user pattern. It's important to acknowledge this natural line and counter inevitable user drift with ongoing user development.
Twitter Tips for Publishers
Mac Slocum
September 4, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Mark Bertils makes the case for Twitter use and offers eight tips for tweeting publishers. From Index // mb:
For a minimal investment of time, you can ping a heap of people. Why wouldn't a book publisher want to do that? Truth is, most already do. Email newsletters blast-out to book readers from all over. Publishers' feeds and podcasts do the same. Twitter is yet another great way to keep people engaged.
Tim O'Reilly: Social Networks as Infrastructure, Not Apps
Mac Slocum
August 27, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Using Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari as a jumping-off point, Tim O'Reilly stresses the need for social network interoperability. From Radar:
Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I'd love to see a firm commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network as infrastructure rather than application.
Amazon Acquires Shelfari
Mac Slocum
August 26, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Amazon is turning its investment in Shelfari, a book-centric social network, into a full acquisition, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Financial details haven't been released, but Shelfari CEO Josh Hug confirmed the acquisition on Shelfari's blog:
We've got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon's expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you'll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you've always known and used on the site.
Amazon earlier this month acquired AbeBooks, which is a minority investor in Shelfari's chief competitor, LibraryThing. As the Seattle P-I notes, LibraryThing had a few choice words about Shelfari's business practices in 2007.
Update 8/26/08, 11:25 a.m. Tim Spalding from LibraryThing weighs in on the Shelfari deal. (Via the Reading 2.0 list)
The Crowdsourced Cat Book
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog:
The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July 2008. To spend my time, I posted the following two tasks on MTurk:
1. What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write at least one paragraph about a funny, unbelievable or otherwise memorable incident involving your cat. This should be a real story that happened to you or your family.
2. Sketch a cat. With or without an environment and toys. The cat can be drawn in software or on paper. Do not upload photographs of cats. Have fun!
Before I got out of that terminal, it was already clear that the submissions were too good to keep to myself. My fiancee Tania suggested turning the stories into a book. So, after a few days of collecting, I selected about 25 stories and 20 images and spent an evening doing a nice layout for a Blurb book.
The book can be previewed here.
(Via the Reading 2.0 list and Boing Boing)
Web Community Management Tips
Mac Slocum
August 4, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
Whether intentional or not, Bob Garfield from NPR's "On the Media" reopened an old wound when he questioned the need for user comments on newspaper Web sites.
The "comments issue" is polarizing. Die-hard community advocates believe comments are an integral part of the online experience. Detractors draw a straight line between user comments and the apocalypse. It's a contentious topic with very little middle ground.
For our purposes, there's no point in looking at all the arguments and counter-arguments. The comments debate has been going on for at least 10 years (much longer, if you count Usenet), and it will persist as long as trolls continue to lower the conversational bar. That's just the way it is.
However, this latest flare up offers an opportunity to redirect the focus to some of the time-tested best practices for managing Web communities. Derek Powazek (whom we recently interviewed for an unrelated piece) offers an excellent starting point with "10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments," and Cory Doctorow's "How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community" is also recommended reading.
I've also picked up a few bits of wisdom from my own experiences as a community manager:
- Nurture the Good -- The majority of people want to do the right thing. They want to engage in fruitful and fulfilling conversations. They want to build and protect special communities. These are the people you focus on.
- Push Trolls to the Margins -- All popular communities will eventually suffer through a troll infestation. The trick is the minimize a troll's impact by not taking the bait. Moderators should never engage in a public argument, and key community members should be encouraged via private messages and back channels to ignore troll attacks. A marginalized troll is a useless troll, and they know it.
- Share Ownership -- I focused on inclusiveness in my first community because I was unsure about my own voice and opinions. In a serendipitous twist, the "we're all equal and we're all in this together" perspective led to a shared sense of ownership. It took a while for folks to buy what I was selling, but a consistent focus on collaboration and equality eventually led to individual responsibility and effective self-policing. I've used this same technique on subsequent communities and the results have always been positive.
- Calm by Example -- Experienced community managers know that the Web is a fickle place; today's egregious opinion often evaporates within a matter of days. A measured community manager allows fiery debates to run their course without spilling out of control, and on those rare occasions when guidance is required, a calm force is far more powerful.
What community tips do you have? Please share your thoughts in the comments area (unless you're a troll).
- Stay Connected
-
TOC RSS Feeds
News Posts
Commentary Posts
Combined Feed
New to RSS?
Subscribe to the TOC newsletter. 
Follow TOC on Twitter. 
Join the TOC Facebook group. 
Join the TOC LinkedIn group. 
Get the TOC Headline Widget.
- Search
-
