Communities Dominate Brands

As web content migrates to mobile internet

This article is another installment in my thinking on what happens when the internet migrates to mobile phones. It is an ongoing megatrend - there are three times as many mobile phones as PCs. All mobile phones have at least basic messaging and the basic WAP browser. In three countries - Japan, South Korea and China, the transition has already happened, that the majority of web access now comes from mobile phones, not PCs. Japan was first to witness this, and now while mobile phone sales keep increasing, for the first year, Japanese PC sales started to decline last year. More countries will see this transition point during 2007. But it is not enough to consider "more users" - as we have to consider also the usage (and the money). So lets examine what happens when web content migrates to the mobile internet.

I've just been to two conferences looking at the future of mobile data services. I chaired at both, in  Tokyo at the 3G Evolution conference last week, and now in London at the 3G-4G LTE conference. I've thus met many of the leading thinkers in this space and exchanged thoughts about what is likely to happen as we move from a mobile world which is voice-centric into one which is data-centric. Regular readers of our blog know that I occasionally build on these themes such as the postings What Happens When the Majority Access the Web via Mobile Phone, and Making Sense of the Biggest Data Application on the Planet: SMS Text Messaging.

How much of that "internet" experience can we recognize in that future. The current, PC based fixed internet will become the legacy internet. The immobile internet. The access-limited internet. Lets start by examining a recent historical comparison.

Learn from Cinema to TV

In the 1930s our only multimedia mass media was cinema. In the cinema we could go and watch films, or serials, or news reels. Films are what we'd think of hollywood movies today. Serials were a weekly continuing series of continuing storyline films, usually shorter than the films. These were the 1930s equivalent of our Sopranos, Desperate Housewives and the Shield. The story did not end and we had to come back next week to see how it continued and so on. News reels were weekly collections of news films from around the world, similar to our TV nightly news.

Fast forward 20 years. In the 1950s TV started to enter in our homes. Even though the TV screen was a tiny fraction of the size of the movie screen, all of the content formats of the cinema soon appeared on TV. All of it worked there, on the "small screen". And lo and behold, the serial found a natural home on TV, and migrated permanently. We now watch the continuing storyline shows on TV, not in the cinema. And news reels, they transformed from the weekly collections to the nightly news. Films (Hollywood) continued on the silver screen but "all" movies also are shown on TV (if for broadcast regulation reasons not on live TV for being too violent or X-rated, they are all available for TV viewing at least on premium cable or via DVD).

Lesson 1. TV did not kill cinema. But TV did totally cannibalize two of the three major content formats from cinema (serials and newsreels). And the remaining content format, films, continue to generate viewers and revenues on cinema, but they co-exist (in often a slightly modified format, such as transferring widescreen cinema formats into the 4:3 TV screen format) on both.

Lesson 2. TV introduced new opportunities do deliver multimedia content, which was not feasible on cinema. After TV launched, whole new formats were invented. Game shows, talk shows, music videos and reality TV. These are all formats that do not work in the cinema. But they are now native to TV. So our second lesson. The new media gives us new opportunities BEYOND the previous media, to innovate and create services that were not even possible before.

Then previous total transformation of the internet

Ok, now consider the internet. It was not born on PCs. The original internet was a network of mainframe computers. Only in the 1980s when PCs started to gain modems, did some connect to the internet. The mass market internet did not take off until the the WWW browser (Mosaic and Netscape) came along and Time and Newsweek put the Internet on their covers in 1994. So if you think the PC-centric internet is the "natural way of how it should be" - you are totally mistaken. The current internet is an evolution past the original internet. Note we had e-mail on the original internet, and IRC chat, and file uploads and downloads via FTP, and a file management/discovery hierarcy around something we called Gopher. So this massive one-billion user internet is actually only a 12 year old phenomenon, and it is that which cannibalized the original internet. If this came suddenly and cannibalized its predecessor, why could it not be that another more compelling internet rival cannot come and cannibalize this?

Web today

Good. Now lets consider web use today. The biggest use of the internet is e-mail, and the second biggest use is search. We have lots of other uses for the web, such as buying songs on iTunes, playing multiplayer games in World of Warcraft, buying and selling second hand in eBay, etc.

Five years ago, the screens on the top-end mobile phones were so small and grainy, that it was near impossible to understand traditional web pages on them. Most WAP phones had monochrome (black and white) screens. It makes a lot of sense, that while it was possible to access some web content (or at least WAP content) on those phones, few people could really enjoy doing that. Today mid range phones have screens that show about a quarter of a standard PC screen with about the same pixel resolution. It is not as convenient to view a web page on such a phone - but it is getting to be bearable. If for example your laptop falls and breaks down during the weekend. And you desperately have to get to your e-mail, and you can access it via the web - you could well do it via the phone, even if that is cumbersome. It is no longer unbearable.

Fast forward about a year. This summer we will see the launch of the iPhone. Apple's new smartphone has a screen almost double that of modern smartphones. And Apple promises us their phone will be an excellent web surfing device.

I don't suggest it is "as good as" a modern laptop with its full keyboard, mouse, and large screen. But now with the iPhone - and then the next responses from the Nokias, Motorolas, SonyEricssons etc - will bring the mobile phone to acceptable level of web browsing - of the current lecacy internet content.

If we - adults today in 2007 - want to consume "web content" as we have grown to know it over the past ten years or so, very soon a mobile phone can do a passable if not perfect replication of that experience.

Then remember cinema to TV. Some of the content suffers in the transfer (cinema from wide screen, to 4:3 screen size, some actors have half of their face missing etc). Inspite of it, EVERY movie ever made, managed the transition to a TV version. So consider some of our favourite pages, it is quite possible that very soon mobile phones will deliver an acceptable - while not quite as good - experience to display that web content for us.

Search and mobile

But then consider the transition. New reels from being a weekly show, transformed on TV to a daily (nightly) show. Now imagine when the majority of web access comes from mobile phones. Is it likely that the content owners will readjust their content, reformat it, to the mobile internet screen. Of course they will. Then think of our most used apps. e-mail and search? Do we need a 1024 x 768 screen to view the search findings or the headlines of our inbox? For many of the applications that we currently use on the web, it really does not dramatically change the experience, as long as the content is formatted from the start to the small screen. So, rather than seeing 10 search results, we only see 4. So we have to scroll down more times to get to search result 23. Fine, but search will actually work quite acceptably on the phone. I'd say search will work like movies - it won't migrate completely from the PC based legacy internet, and it may be a bit less convenient on the phone. But just like TV:s which are in many more locations than cinema screens, our search will be in our pocket, always with us, thus in many more locations than search on the PC based legacy internet.

e-mail and mobile

Then consider the other big application currently on the internet: e-mail and thus person-to-person messaging. Here we have a legacy messaging system which is cumbersome, tedious and slow - e-mail. On the mobile phone we can have e-mail (such as on a Blackberry). Many smartphones from the Treos to the Nokia E-Series do e-mail. So again, while it won't kill e-mail, the mobile internet can readily replicate the e-mail experience. And if you've ever seen the addiction of a Blackberry user (who call it the Crackberry for crack cocaine the drug) - then they DEFINITELY prefer e-mail on their smartphone than on a PC.

But the mobile phone has its own messaging platform, SMS text messaging. This is now the first of the new applications, like talk shows, game shows, music videos and reality TV were to cinema. Something that does not work in the old format, but is very compelling on the new. We ALREADY have a bigger service - by users and by revenues - than anything on the fixed internet. There are 1.1 billion people who use the internet, but out of 2.7 billion mobile phone users, 1.8 billion people use SMS text messaging. We have our first new web content category, which has only emerged on the mobile internet, and cannot even be replicated on the traditional internet (yes yes I know we can do it, but practically, it is very rare to find people using SMS on a PC. If not e-mail, on the PC they then tend to use IM Instant Messaging, not SMS text messaging)

Music and mobile

Remember iTunes? So yes, we can buy music - MP3 songs - on the current lecacy internet. We already can buy MP3 songs directly to mobile phones. The IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry, the global umbrella organization for the music industry) - just released its music report in January and found that half of all digital music in 2006 was sold directly to mobile phones. So yes, we can consume the "identical" or very similar experience of MP3 song purchases and downloads on the legacy internet and the mobile internet.

But again, the mobile internet has already innovated in this music area. Ringing tones. They are worth over 6.5 billion dollars (already over six times larger than the size of digital music downloads such as iTunes). Please don't turn snobbish at me now, and claim ringing tones are not real music. Fifteen years ago when the internet came, a lot of old fogies suggested e-mail was not legitimate communincation because it did not transmit on paper and could not have a signature. All kinds of music innovations have been dismissed by older generations as "not being real music" such as rock n' roll which was supposedly not music, and rap which many said was not music, and the recent innovation of sampling and mashing existing music, etc. Ask the person forking over the money. If that teenager spends two dollars to put Shakira's music on the cellphone, who cares if it is of lousy sound quality, and extremely short duration. It is music.

And ringing tones were a content format invented for the mobile internet, not the legacy PC based internet. We have another of our new service categories, optimized for the mobile internet.

Social networking and mobile

Then look at MySpace, the massively successful social networking site online. With 90 million active users. 19% of Americans maintain a profile on MySpace. But look at Cyworld in South Korea. It offers similar profiles like MySpace (and much much more) - but offers access not only by broadband (South Korea is the world's most connected society, with highest penetration of broadband) but also access via 3G mobile phone (South Korea has highest penetration of 3G phones). On Cyworld today, 43% of all South Koreans maintain a personal profile. Can web content migrate to the mobile internet and if optimised, become a BIGGER success there? Of course it can.

YouTube? The massively successful video sharing site with 120 million users worldwide. Cyworld's 22 million 3G cameraphone users upload more videos daily than YouTube's users. The mobile internet is inherently superior, because we have the content creation device (cameraphone/videophone) in our hand - and in our pocket - all the time. AND it has permanent connectivity at high speed.

Oh, and let me show how the mobile internet is already influencing the fixed internet. We've written about SeeMeTV here at our blogsite. The 3G mobile video sharing service, where every time when someone looks at your video, YOU get paid a royalty. A radical innovation in user-generated content. Invented on mobile. Now consider yesterday's announcement by YouTube that they will start to pay the content producers of the most-viewed videos. This concept was invented on the advanced internet, the mobile internet, and now copied onto the legacy internet.

Voting and mobile

The mobile internet has also the built-in payment mechanism. We can charge for every link, every message, every web page. One of the uses, is to pay for TV voting. This is something you cannot do on the legacy internet. But it is inherent to the mobile internet. Think about it. Imagine trying to make money in a country where they don't have money. The system has no money. What do you do? It would be very tedious and slow to try to figure out how can you exchange something of value with someone else, to do business. But the mobile internet was built with a payment system to it from day 1. Thus we have for example the voting on reality TV shows, like Big Brother, American Idol, the Apprentice and Survivor Island. How big? 1.2 Billion dollars in 2005 and probably near double that in 2006 (I don't have that data yet).

Now please don't think that a vote for American Idol is "not real web content". Of course it is. You go to Amazon and you see the votes there. How many stars for this book, is it a good movie or a bad movie, do you "Digg It" or not, etc. Voting is an inherent part of participation on the web. We have it also on the mobile internet. The beauty of it, on mobile, is that we can CHARGE for it.

Old Fogies can't accept it

So what do I think? I think that all content on the legacy internet will appear also on the mobile internet. Some of it will be cumbersome. Others will transition quite easily to the mobile phone. As the majority of users migrate to mobile, all content owners will reformat their content for mobile. Some content will coexist in an equivalent experience (iTunes vs MP3 direct sales to musicphones). Other content will be new that appears only on the mobile internet (like ringing tones). Some applications will transform and eventually disappear (e-mail which young people almost refuse to use, and prefer either SMS or IM)

Some will say this is a preposterous view. They will probably say - thinking of themselves, old fogies that they are - that the internet is inherently better on a big screen. If that is so, then the Playstation Portable could not have succeeded. Going from a TV size screen to a pocket size screen. No, screen size is a red herring.

Or they say we need a full keyboard and a mouse. Again, old timers talking. Look at teenagers today - the heavy users of the mobile internet. Their first OWN communciation device was their mobile phone. They can send text messages without looking at the phone, with the phone in their pocket or under the table. 48% of teenagers admit to sending text messages while they talk to someone. 10% of British teenagers send 100 text messages PER DAY. In South Korea it is already one third of teenagers who achieve that message throughput. If you can type blind, and send 100 texts a day, you will never complain that a phone keypad is inconvenient ! On the contrary, these kids will probably write school essays faster on a phone keypad than a 101 key PC keyboard. In fact they'd probably drive a car better if it had a Playstation gaming pad rather than a traditional steering wheel, and accelerator and break pedals..

Teenagers find this the natural way of things

You reading this blog are like Alan and me. We are digital immigrants. The teenagers are the digital natives. Don't project your personal bias to this equation. Examine the behaviour of your teenager kids (or nephews and nieces if not your own kids) and consider - do THEY already feel addiction to the mobile phone. Do they already download ringing tones and play videogames on their mobile phones. Are they the generation that will PREFER to have a cool, high-performance, expensive iPhone or N-Series of Walkman Phone or Chocolate - with 3G web access and high resolution camera and MP3 player and videocamera - which they can always carry with them - rather than "waste" that money on a laptop that sits at home all the time.

Generation C (Community Generation) is addicted to the phone (and SMS). They will find it no problem to consume web content on their advanced phones as they mature into young adults. THIS generation will push us dinosaurs into the graveyard. We will be left with our legacy internet. Some of us will successfully transition to the mobile internet but others won't be able to make that adjustment.

In sum

But there are 3 times as many mobile phones as PCs. Phones are replaced every 18 months while PCs every 3.5 years. All phones already have browsers, and most sold today have colour screens and cameras. PCs cost twice that of phones. PCs are not subsidised, but in most markets, mobile phones are. The performance gap between an PC and a mobile phone is shrinking (but probably will never close). Increasingly the web enabled phone becomes a compelling proposition as a web access device

Then the content owners discover this and start to adjust. In China, Japan and South Korea, where over half of all internet access is from mobile phones, all content is preformatted for phone display, not PC display. Now just at the end of November, Telephia and comScore reported that the first five major USA websites have crossed the threshold with more web users coming from cellphones than from PCs. Those first five are Accuweather, ESPN, Weather Channel, Yahoo Weather and G-Mail.

It is an inevitable transition. The reason Apple dropped Computer from its name and announced the iPhone, is because it knows the future of the computer industry is with mobile phones. That is where the internet will go. Microsoft has known that for six years already since it entered the mobile phone operating system market. Google's new CEO announced last year that the future of Google and the future of the internet is mobile. It is no longer crazy futurists like this Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore here at the Communities Dominate blog. Now the major players in the telecoms, PC and internet industries all see the transition. Yahoo and AOL are deploying search that is optimised for mobile phones, etc.

So this is a follow-up piece on the transition from the legacy internet to the mobile internet. What happens to web content as it migrates to mobile phones. For readers who might like to understand these issues more, the following blogs might be of assistance:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html

Mobile is the 7th Mass Media, as different from internet as TV is from radio

SMS as the biggest data application on the planet

What happens when the internet transitions from PCs to mobile

Mobile Social Networking now migrating to mobile

The power of the network - the wealth of the network

I came across this interesting business called Four51

What do they do?

Four51 enable the sales and marketing collateral, print supplier and distribution, and indirect goods markets by helping companies in their respective supply chains use common web-based technologies and open architectures as a better way to transact and do business with each other.

Over the last seven years companies have been using Four51 technology and adoption services to build their private online commerce networks by connecting buyers, sellers, distributors, suppliers and manufacturers into a common web-based application and database provided by Four51.

As a result, Four51 have enabled significant effectiveness and efficiency in the way these constituents conduct business with each other within their private networks.

Thousands of Private Commerce Networks are operating and growing virally at Four51. The result is nearly a half-million users, millions of product versions, hundreds of thousands of monthly transactions, thousands and thousands of companies of all shapes and sizes (including global 100 companies) on the network today. In fact, two to three dozen companies come onto the Four51 Network every day.

Apprently running and effective podcast strategy, Four51 have added blogs as part of their marketing efforts. Check theirs out here

Good blogs, can act as a great piece of pull communications. If you get it right

23 reasons why the future of work will be more collaborative || Spreadshirt || Why is mobile social networking worth $3.45b?

YouTube co-creation rev share

YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity".

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

Interesting. Copyright issues?

Via Auntie

Chad Hurley said

We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up

more on youtube

New distribution models - via skype

That old warhorse Le Monde has embraced the digital age

Le Monde Diplomatique has put its monthly English publication online as a digital edition, along with a year of back issues.

Le Monde Diplomatique has opted to go with Exact Editions, which offers online replicas of print editions rather than emailing a digital version to the subscriber, which is what Le Monde the paper had done up to now. Exact Editions is building up an impressive collection of major print titles: it only launched in March 2006 but clients brands include the Spectator, Prospect and Red Pepper as well as various specialist lifestyle titles.

The Skype angle

You'll need to subscribe to read Le Monde Diplomatique on the site, though a sample edition is available to view. Subscriptions are £19 for one year, but if you subscribe to other titles on the Exact Editions site you can cross-search. Those kind of cross-search functions are an advantage for advertisers too; a search for Volvo, for example, would bring up not just editorial but relevant ads. Another interesting gizmo is that phone numbers become click-able in the digital edition, which means Skype automatically opens when you click. Nice.

The value is in the archive. More Long Tail anyone? Its very tasty

BBC to develop social networking Web sites

The British Broadcasting Corporation plans to develop its online presence by providing social networking sites based on its most popular brands such as Top Gear, a BBC spokeswoman said on Thursday.

The world-renowned broadcaster is looking to tap into the popularity of such sites as MySpace, in which users contribute comments and video footage to share with other users.

The spokeswoman for BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the corporation, said there was no time plan in place but that it expected to continue to develop its online service over the next year.

The sites will carry more interactive sections and be targeted at consumers who are already interested in such brands as the popular motoring show and BBC Good Food.

And so our predictions in our book are playing out in front of us in real time. A BBC spokesperson said

The teen part of this (trend) might have reached capacity, but there might be other communities that we could explore given the brand and our existing online presence. If appropriate social networking opportunities arise, then we would look at them very seriously, because it's a growing area of business that we're not particularly in at the moment. It seems to be the way that Web sites are developing.

And

A report by consultancy Deloitte this year said traditional organizations such as the BBC and newspapers were in fact ideally suited to benefit, because the trend develops consumer loyalty.

More social networking is about a persistent conversation, its about engagement. That means less push and more pull

Via Reuters

The Guardian writes

BBC Worldwide has a £350m kitty for social networking projects and acquisitions . Oh - and the BBC is thinking of selling TV Centre. Any connection there?

OK, so it's a vast organisation, and Worldwide is technically a separate beast, blah-di-blah. But as Matt Wells wrote today, closing TV Centre would signal the end of an era: "symbolising the shift in the balance of power away from media companies towards independent producers and individual consumers".

The internet has empowered those individual consumers of course, and media companies are battling to weigh up which technological tools will help them engage with consumers and help them build new audiences.

The strategy of building community sites around successful brands is not radical, and we'll only see much more of this as broadcasters, publishers, the music industry and just about everyone else work out how to exploit the marketing potential of the social networking trend.

The end of the TV schedule looms large

Revolutions, paradigms and the "surge" of development

From Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

A great surge of development is defind here as the process by which a technological revolution and paradigm propagate across the economy, leading to structural changes in production, distribution, communication and consumption as well as to profound and qualitative chnages in society.

Importantly

The process evolves from small beginnings, in restricyed sectors and geographic regions, and ends up encompassing the bulk of activities in the core country or countries and diffusing out towards further and further pheripheries

Therefore

Essentially what this means is that bringing to fruition the wealth-generating forces of each new paradigm reuires massive and matching chnages in the patterns of investment, in the organizational models for maximum efficiency, in the mental mapas of all social actors and in the institutions that regulate and enable the economic and social processes.

Heard of the film Loose Change?

well you will have soon. In they forced us to listen , A Guardian cover story. Tim Sparke of MercuryMedia, which handles international distribution for the film

This is unlike anything I have worked on. It has forced millions of people to question whether they can trust big media, and by bypassing the broadcasters through internet distribution it has altered the media power balance profoundly. With a little money and passion, anyone can make an important film.

The stats

Google Video acts as a portal for the movie, where you can also see the running tally of the number of times it has been viewed since last August. As I write, it stands at 4,048,990. By the time you read this, it will have risen considerably higher. On top of that, the movie was shown on television to up to 50 million people in 12 countries on September 11 last year; 100,000 DVDs have been sold and 50,000 more given away free. Then there are many more who have watched the film but are never counted, as a result of the active encouragement the film-makers give their supporters to burn the movie and distribute it to their friends. Avery says 100 million people - "easy" - have seen it. That may be an exaggeration, but it's fair to say that something extraordinary is going on.

This is an poignant example of the breadth of what the technological, and social revolution is all about.

How distribution channels, can radically alter the status quo. Equally communication technologies have historically wrested control from incumbent institutions to give that freedom to the people formely known as the audience. What we make, how we make it, how we distribute it and how we make money from these activities is now in flux.

The final test for Avery and co is yet to come. They are putting together Loose Change: the Final Cut using an upgraded Power Mac G5 (price $5,000). They have filmed original interviews with Washington players, employed lawyers to iron out copyright issues with borrowed footage, commissioned 3D graphics from Germany, and recruited a theology professor to act as fact-checker and consultant. The end result, they hope, will be seen at Cannes and have a cinema release in America and across the world on the sixth anniversary of 9/11.

If that happens, they will have squared the circle. The underground film-makers will have come up for air, exposing millions more people to their argument - and themselves to intense scrutiny. Stand back and enjoy the fireworks.

Wikipedia bigger than google?

John Naughton examines the loop between Wikipedia and the major search engines and asks whether the encyclopedia is now as dominant as Google

Wikipedia is as much part of our cultural fabric as is the notion of search. My daughter asks me a question - I first ask her has she used Wikipedia? Not have you looked it up in our out of date encyclopedia...

We google someone, something, somewhere....

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who think Wikipedia is amazing, wonderful, or inspiring; and those who simply cannot understand how a reference work compiled by thousands of 'amateurs' (and capable of being edited by any Tom, Dick or Harry) should be taken seriously. Brisk, vigorous and enjoyable arguments rage between these two camps, and provide useful diversion on long winter evenings.

What's more interesting is the way Wikipedia entries have risen in Google's page-ranking system so that the results of many searches now include a Wikipedia page in the first few hits. There are several reasons for this. One is the sheer size and comprehensiveness of the online encyclopedia (1.6m articles in English when I last checked). Another is the burgeoning trend whereby bloggers, when mentioning a person, place or product, link to the relevant page in Wikipedia to avoid a digression from their discourse. They use Wikipedia links, in other words, as footnotes. A third is that fact that if you add the work 'wiki' to any Google search, you will be given the URL of an apparently relevant page from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, you are the strongest link Nice headline.

And in fact I am guilty of this very behaviour myself.

Sensational Journalism has become part of the mainstream

Perhaps in a desire to keep readers, national newspaper have apparently become more sensational and personal - or is it something else? Personallly I don't know.

But

Sensationalism, over-simplification and "emotionalisation"'. Research commissioned by Die Zeit , the country's leading weekly newspaper, finds that its Fleet Street counterparts are replacing reasoned analysis with emotive reporting, spattering news coverage with first-person accounts, and employing ever-more dramatic language.

However....

Die Zeit's survey demonstrates that the British press continues to hold a unique fascination for foreigners. But the paper's UK correspondent, Jurgen Kronig, concedes that trends found by the research are evident in other countries, including his own. 'It's happening everywhere. The industry is governed by the same needs and laws.' Even German titles like Die Welt and the heavyweight Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung are not immune.

So what's the point? Is the point that Carma the research agency have used their own sensational headline to get publicity for their research? Should we be questioning where our press standards are going? Or, should we be saying that this is a last gasp of clinging to our familiar analogue world as the the digital one rises before us, in all its rude glory?

Funny, its only through the blogging and writing and reading that I for one think first, hmmm interesting article, then go, hmmm no its not because its motives are not clear.

Archaeology in a connected world

There are times when you feel that you are going over the same old ground.

So then - its great when the words Archaeology and Communities find eachother.

And why not. Why can't archaeology be more collaborative?

So here is a post which makes up for that 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference

that actually leads me to discuss one of the other papers, as I think the idea of uncertainty is closely related to that of tagging and folksonomies. Mia Ridge discussed possible Web 2.0 uses in archaeology and cultural heritage, and one of the clear uses is allowing users to tag cultural objects, as you would photos in flickr or websites in del.icio.us. At first glance, this is a little scary as we like our standards and our proscribed ways of describing things.

However, the world is messy, and there are multiple ways of describing most things, particularly archaeological monuments or artefacts where most of our knowledge is based on interpretation of incomplete evidence. Tagging allows people to acknowledge that uncertainty as well as allowing them to make more instinctive associations between things. Finally, I think we as archaeologists should acknowledge that what we do is quite specialised and a bit of a niche- which, as far as I know, makes us part of the Long Tail and we should exploit that.

Crowd Modelling

Is it true that there is no community in web 2.0?

Asks Francois Gossieaux in her article Is it true that there is no community in web 2.0?

CIO Magazine’s Chris Koch is not seeing real objective evidence that Web 2.0 and more specifically, social networking, are creating real communities (via Mario Sundar & Damon Billian). In the article he says: “I think community is the code word of denial of the 00s, allowing people to slide past any discussion or proof of real value, just as collaboration was the code word of denial of the 90s for the disastrous wave of online b-to-b exchanges that wasted millions of investors’ dollars.”

Hmmmm, I don't quite get that Chris. :-( Francois says

First off, there is no question that there is enough value for the members of those communities to participate in those social networking sites - a big distinction from yesteryear’s online marketplaces where nobody wanted to join and see their offerings being commoditized. A recent Hitwise US Consumer Generated Media Report makes that point clearly when it reported that visits to Myspace increased 51% between March-December, outpacing the 34% overall growth for the social networking category during the same period (via latest issue of Revenue Magazine). Other social networking sites, like Orkut and Bebo, beat those numbers with traffic growth of 63% and 95% respectively for the same period.

And I absolutely agree with her. I think its worth quoting her final summary

There is no question that given the right environment and incentives, you can build a community around just about anything, including power tools and kitchens - just take a look at the Do It Yourself community.

Or indeed the tons of examples we have on our blog site, from Forum Oxford to spreadshirt.com or sneakerplay.com or in fact the elephants dream project

All that being said, there are inherent risks to “commercializing” personal relationships as P&G does in some of their communities - specifically the VocalPoint community of 600,000 moms where they do not require members to disclose the fact that they are working on P&G’s behalf when pitching products to friends. This could indeed lead to the destruction of word of mouth marketing and community marketing much the same way as spammers killed email marketing.

Whether there is community in web 2.0 or not is irrelevant - that is like saying that there is no collaboration happening in collaboration software. That may be true, as there are plenty of reasons, many of them going beyond the collaborative tools themselves, why groups of people may not embrace the collaborative environment for their collaboration. Web 2.0 is about the net as the platform, it’s about collaborative cumulative creation by users, it’s about applications that become better the more people use them, it’s about software as a service, it’s about lightweight programming. Community is about people interacting with other people, not about technology. In the case of business communities it is about people interacting with companies around certain business processes - and not just marketing as described in the article, but also innovation, customer service, and new product development. let’s not forget that some of the most successful communities were able to thrive with little help from technology - using simple discussion boards or groups.

So let’s stop confusing web 2.0 with community 2.0.

Lets stop confusing interruption with engagement.

What we do see is many companies trying to shoehorn old practices into new models. It just won't work