Make Seriously | Design and Life

The End of an Era

Last night, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk on Twitter) did something remarkable. He showed the world (or at least the developed world) a truth. It’s no secret that the newspapers are dying. Blogs have become the standard source of media for millions, and news outlets moved their print articles online to stay relevant. The problem they’re finding, however, is that there is no viable business model if they want to maintain their business the way it was run before the online takeover.

Take the New York Times, for instance. Most of it’s content is completely free via the web, but consumers still have to pay for a print version. So what do even loyal customers do? Keep the content, ditch the bills. It’s great for the mass market, and it’s improved readership. But what this move can’t do is pay the bills for the reporters around the world who contribute to the Times. In other words, these businesses can’t keep their models and still hope to compete, much less thrive.

So what amazing thing did Mr. Kutcher do last night? For free, via video, competing against one of the largest media outlets, he streamed live video of himself to thousands of people across the world to declare victory in a competition for market share. Mr. Kutcher had one million followers before CNN. What’s so big about that? For one, Ashton doesn’t have a television station, video producers or a worldwide network to help him get followers. He has Lil’ Kim on YouTube, he has PDiddy on Twitter, and he has the know-how to use social media to create an enormous following without having to spend a dime. He showed that he, as a single person, can hold more clout than a media conglomerate.

So what does this mean for the media? It means their business model is threatened. I would even go as far as to say it was obliterated last night. If we were to look at the cost of production for battle between the two, there would be a huge discrepancy. CNN has to pay contributors, staff, camera men, writers; they have a whole lot of people working to push for the win. Ashton Kutcher had himself, a bunch of free software and a lot of community influence. He’s not the only one. Of the top ten Tweeters, seven are individuals and two are media outlets. In case you’re not convinced, here’s the whole list. The crazy thing is, it’s not just major celebs on the list, there are up and coming stars in their own right littering the top fifty influencers. That’s hundreds of thousands of followers for relative unknowns. And they’re competing with the likes of CNN, The New York Times and NPR. Did I mention for free?

So the business model is bust. Kutcher declared “check!” last night, and now it’s up to the media to decide how to respond. Wave a white flag? Bonzai rush down the hill? Or maybe, just maybe, they’ll rethink the strategy all-together.

Now: Pay Attention Class:

Things have been crazy at the MakeSeriously headquarters lately (located, appropriately, inside my skull). But fret not, there will be content coming as well as a new feature I’m hoping to do monthly. The plan, anyway, is to do an artist profile and this month’s will be featuring designer Dane Benton, who’ve I’ve mentioned before. So do stay tuned, and if you’re interested in being profiled in future months, let me know. Now for the regularly scheduled programme:

There’s a fellow in Britain by the name of Charlie Brooker. He writes for The Guardian and is one of those funny guys across the pond who can approach something very American and in a dry, curious way reveal that it’s completely absurd. Of course, this is America so we have lots of the absurd. About 40% of the Stumbles I make are popular primarily because they are absurd. Sure, it’s amusing and well worth seeing. But it’s neither useful in any utilitarian way, nor is it practical. What’s a bit frightening, however, is when people actually listen to the absurd as though it’s sane or rational. Unfortunately, the prime-time American media fits the “absurd” category pretty well, and here’s the humorous Mr. Brooker to raise an eyebrow at it:

It goes without saying that we should be paying some attention to the way things are presented to us as well as listening to the content. Marshall McLuhan is a name tossed around a lot lately because of his 1967 work “The Medium is the Message”. One of the ideas of the medium being the message can be summed up like this: the way an idea is presented, the medium that it is messaged through, is more important than the actual content. It’s something I think we all can understand in a visceral way, and that’s part of what makes the media so absurd. And dangerous. Think about the most passionate speakers you’ve heard. As they get moving, you don’t just hear and agree with them, nodding your head in silent assent. You begin to feel something. And that something is the result of the medium, the presentation itself rather than the words. To compare, it’s like a religious experience where the devotee must enter a state of emotions through worship. The medium of worship helps create the connection, it develops the visceral reaction.

The danger is when we confuse the visceral reaction for reality. There are times when it is real, when the passion is good. When Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech, I think few would call it inappropriate to feel passion for that speech. But the thing to consider is that Hitler spoke with a similar passion. The difference in the two was the message, not the medium and the danger is to confuse those two. That’s where Brooker’s commentary should make us all pause: are we hearing the message or are we confusing it with the medium? It’s called the news, but is that what they’re actually presenting? Are they pulling on our emotional side in hopes of persuading us to do something for them? They are good questions to ask, especially as the increasingly absurd television news media becomes more profitable and popular despite a decrease in quality and content.

Oh, and Brooker is hilarious.

Simplifying Really Simple Syndication (five times fast…)

For those who have waited with baited breath, here’s the third installment in my web2.0 series:

If you’ve used the internet for more than fifteen minutes in the past several years, or you’ve used Outlook or Firefox, chances are you’ve seen a little orange box with a radio signal in it. Well, that happens to be the icon for RSS.

RSS you say? What on earth is that!? — Well, it’s not that easy to explain, but it’s a really useful tool that could very well make your virtual experience easier. It certainly helps mine. And, what’s more important, it could help you keep users coming to your site, inform your “customers” (whether they’re buying products or simply reading your material) of any news, and it can help you streamline information you want to provide subscribers.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It has been other things (Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary) but for all intents and purposes we’re going to stick with the name that makes the most sense. Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it sounds like: you publish information or content on your page, and the RSS web feed is syndicated so that subscribers get content without much or any need to seek it. It’s kind of like (or exactly like) a newspaper or magazine company. You write material, it publishes it and sends it to the people who have enrolled in a subscription. So, imagine you’re Sports Illustrated. You’ve just written an article, and as you publish it on your website your RSS feed will syndicate it so that your subscribers will get it at their doorstep (or in this case, a virtual mail-box like aggregator).

Those articles will appear in what’s known as a “feed reader”, which is really a tool used to collect newly published articles by people you’ve subscribed to. Those feeds will include either the full article or a summary (your choice) as well as author information and the date. The readers come in both web-based and desktop-based formats, and the long list includes readers like BlogLines, FeedDemon, FeedReader, and NewsGator. Most Browsers also include an aggregator, and typically it just requires going to the “feed” link on a website and bookmarking it. When you do that, you’ll often see the name in your bookmark bar followed by a number in parenthesis like : New York Times (25). In this case, it means I’ve subscribed to the NYT and I have 25 published articles that I haven’t read. The great thing is that the aggregator does all of the work for me. I don’t need to update or refresh it. As articles become available, the number will change accordingly.

Because the history is long, boring, and techy (and most of you probably don’t care) here’s a brief summary. The first significant contribution was a format created in 1999 by Ramanathan V. Guha for Netscape. (pretty much the only browser in the eighth grade!) This format was mostly limited to my.netscape.com users, and was pretty much destroyed in AOL’s restructuring of Netscape in 2001. After that, UserLand Software and RSS-DEV Working Group took up the banner, and in 2002 UserLand released our current version, RSS2.0. For the designers out there, 2005 marked the official acceptance of the ubiquitous orange RSS icon as IE and Opera adopted it from Mozilla.

I personally subscribe to several feeds, including those at Quipsologies, BrandNew, Ryan’s Blog, and numerous web aggregators.

So, make your life and website content really simple, and syndicate it, stupid! (MYRSSS!)

Yes, I’d like pizza. Now back to the show.

Advertisers have had an increasingly difficult time reaching their target audience since the advent of DVR. Because users have the ability to record their favorite shows onto some disk media, they also have the ability to fast-forward through commercials. Ever since the dawn of man, we’ve been subjected to advertisers selling us products for thirty seconds up to around five minutes at a time. It seemed at first like we could escape those pesky ads when television went online, alas we find ourselves assailed even there. (Strangely, it appears more effective to have commercials paired with online vs. live content, coincidence? No, DVR destruction!)

Then, in a stroke of brilliance, years ago, DVR saved us from that awful fiend “the television commercial”. It breathed it’s last, kicking and screaming but slowly fading into the abyss.

Or so we thought.

Instead, advertisers adapted. In 2000, Pizza Hut went down under and broke a deal with iTV to create interactive commercials for Aussie users. At the press of a button, iTV owners could order a Big New Yorker and then the ad would disappear. (I’m sure that it was advertised during Weeds, That 70’s Show, and FX Aussie’s rebroadcast of Half Baked) Fast-forward to ‘08 and you’ll find that LA’s women’s basketball team (The Los Angeles Sparks) used this method to get brochures out. And apparently it works. 43% of those who receive the ads don’t just tolerate them, they actually look forward to them.

Why is this happening?

First, 38 million Americans used this method to subscribe to digital cable, the only 2-way medium that would allow for users to respond to the ads. Unlike web ads, television “call to action”s required the end-user to get their butt up off the couch, march down to the store (or perhaps over to the phone) and place an order. Now, they can sit comfortably on the couch and at the press of a button, ¡presto! they have a Big New Yorker at the door.

Second, and most importantly, there are over 112 million cable users total. You may or may not have heard (I hear it all Sunday while I’m trying to watch football) that all broadcasts are switching over to digital. That means those basic users are going to have to upgrade, bringing the pool of users up almost four-fold. (1 out of 3 Americans!)

And if you think it’s just a fad, don’t blink. The Sparks and Pizza Hut aren’t the only ones who’ve caught on. Nike’s doing it. Disney’s doing it. Bertolli is doing it. So why can’t we do it?

It’s a question advertisers should be asking their clients.

Sometimes, being the stumbling block ain’t so bad…

In my last (and thus far only) installment in my web 2.0 discussions I went over Twitter and it’s uses for marketers. I know far less about how to creatively manipulate todays subject: StumbleUpon. I will make the best of it, however, and show some of my own startling results due to the use of this content networking tool.

StumbleUpon is, at it’s core, a virtual network that collects user ratings, reviews, and recommendations for online content and passes it on to other users. That is, to say, it allows people to say what they think is cool and noteworthy. If enough people agree, the network begins to emphasize that content. So, if 500 people “stumble upon” Radiohead giving away their album online (without any other press) and all of them say “hey! look at this!” it will start to show up in other users StumbleUpon content. Then those people will be encouraged to visit Radiohead’s site, and if they think it’s cool then the momentum builds. In a bit more detail later, I’ll explain why this has some pretty incredible potential.

A little background first. StumbleUpon is relatively new. It was founded in 2001, and only breaking the million user mark in 2006 (and then rapidly growing it’s user base). It was founded by Garret Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd, and has received investments from bigwigs at the likes of Google, Mozilla, and First Round Capital. In 2007, it was purchased by America’s favorite online auction site: eBay. (I prefer Amazon, myself…)

What is StumbleUpon
That’s the real question. It’s also where the train moves fast, so buckle up and hold on tight because I’ve never been accused of having a way with words (also a great radio show on WFYI radio on the weekends…)

StumbleUpon (hereafter referred to as SU) uses a process called “collaborative filtering.” This process begins as users submit their “stumbles”, basically providing their human opinion. This is where they let everyone know what they think it worth looking at. In the second part of this process, SU uses “machine learning of personal preference” to work through the submitted information and segment the users into virtual networks of like-minded users. This means that SU has a mathematical, intuitive formula that says “these people all tend to like these things, so I’ll place them together into segments”. It’s sort of like a venn diagram with five million spheres of influence. Here’s an example of how interests could overlap and result in a single common interest that puts a single user into multiple spheres of influence.

So, as users “stumble” new content, their profiles are updated and SU generates a peer network based on that information and links users by common interest. These networks are arranged to disseminate information that is explicitly recommended by other peers in the network. As each user in that network stumbles it, it has the potential to spread to other shared networks. Users can also, if they choose to be social, participate in rating one another and joining in on discussions in the SU message boards.

In 2006 SU extended their process to include videos. StumbleUpon Video aggregates videos from YouTube, Google Video, Myspace and Metacafe and uses it’s process for video content. A version of SU Video was released in early 2007 for Wii users.

SU also has sponsored ads that take advantage of it’s segmentation method and can target very specific user groups with material relevant to their interests.

Now for the real power of SU. A while ago, a friend read my blog and “stumbled” it. Now, I’m nothing big or important, but here’s how my daily traffic pattern went: 3, 3, 4, 2, 0, 0, 3, 1, 140, 32, 15, 3. Notice something there? That was the day I got stumbled. Now, if all of you slackers took my advice with Twitter, you could have subscribed to my feed. When I post, you could “stumble” my work, and then it kind of would maybe mushroom cloud from there. Of course, what I write about is maybe slightly amusing at best, so people would catch on quickly. BUT, in the meantime, I could once again experience how it feels to be one of the cool kids in high school as my narcissistic side screams “look at me! I have a blog!”

As a business model, however, it is clear that it’s a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other social “news spreading” tools. So, sometimes, being stumbled on isn’t such a bad thing. (now go stumble me darnit!)