The Network

Today is an exciting and loving day, as my wife Susan releases her first book - Feeding Eden - essentially a memoir about our family, how we have dealt with some serious food allergies my son has, and how as a result our relationship to food is now pretty different from most people.  No Foodie Nation for us. She calls it our New Normal.

More than that, to me this whole process is the story of a networked community. Almost 8 years ago when we found out that Eden was allergic to 7 of the 8 FDA determined most common ingredients to trigger an allergic reaction, there were few places to go to figure out what it all meant. Susan, who took on the bulk of managing this, instead had to create a community out of fragmented people, places, sites, medical studies and ideas. She turned to medical research journals, practitioners of various medical specialties, alternative and therapeutic healers, advocacy organizations and, most importantly, people all over the world. She connected with them, at least initially (and I would say most effectively), through the Internet. The tools were email, Twitter, a blog, Facebook, then a platform on Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and others she tried that didn't work as well.

The tools often led to a rabbit hole of hours lost in front of screens. But ultimately some worked, and she figured out how to make them work for us. A community of people experiencing similar "New Normals" but from an amazingly diverse set of experiences were connected. Ad hoc of course, but connected deeply nonetheless. If this had happened to us 10 years earlier, we would not have had the tools to construct and find and become part of this growing network. This community - and the organizations they support - not only publishes constantly online, they have also help to enact supporting laws relating to food labeling, restaurant regulations, emergency medications and the like.

So what was once an narrative of our son's medical conditions, later became an essay, and then a book.  But more than that, its backdrop is how *the* network can become *your* network if you want and need it to be.

If you like you can find the book here or here.

Cracks in the Sidewalk

"You know a lot of people consider skateboarding a dumb thing to do. But to me skateboarding made me reassess everything I did. If it was raining, I was bummed, because I couldn't skate. If I was looking at a street, I'd think that'd be a great ride, I'd be checking the sidewalks to see how many cracks it had. If I saw a curb, or a drainage ditch, I'd stop the car to go back and see if it was something skateable. All I was looking for was lines, all the time." Ian MacKaye, Fugazi

Six weeks ago I broke the third metatarsal bone in my left foot (tripping on a crack in the sidewalk), leaving me in a cast for that whole time. I just took the cast off on Friday, and only today feel semi-confident walking around. As a result,  my whole perspective on the city I live in changed.  Getting around was at best a hassle and at worst almost impossible.  Every interaction required forethought and planning - too much. Walking down the street required me to be much more alert - looking for the cracks, studying the slopes of the curbs, routing around drainage ditches, pulling aside to let people pass me. I studied the weather reports obsessively, down to the hour, trying to divine when rain would result in a wet cast or the inability to get a taxi.  I clustered meetings around each other to avoid having to travel, and had to bake in a ton of extra time to get around.  I couldn't carry my backpack because of the extra weight so I loaded my jacket pockets with whatever I needed, pared down to the essentials (Naproxen and an extra Ace bandage).  Most importantly, I left my headphones behind and for the first time in a long time travelled around without music blasting.

In all, as I struggled to get around, I was barely focused on the destination where I was going.  Instead, all the mattered was the path, the way I got there. I got intensely, obsessively and annoyingly focused on the minutiae of daily planning. When I got someplace I had the sense of satisfaction with just making it there, on time, without more injury.  The journey became way more important than the end result.  

The 1960s activist/improv group the Diggers used to have this thing called the Free Frame of Reference - a giant picture frame people would have to walk through to get to the servings of free food in Golden Gate Park that the group offered.  The idea was that through this exercise people "were literally changing the frame of their reference, they were themselves actors in the show and by changing their minds could thereby change the world."

Today I finally got to put my headphones back on (loud) and turned off the rest of the city as I hobbled into work, and it was great. I've always believed that it doesn't matter where you start in the world, what matters is where you end up.  It's just that I'm thinking now that the cracks in the sidewalk are the more vital frames of reference that guide that journey.

Information Does Not Want To Be Free

Stewart Brand is infamously reported as saying "information wants to be free"- the rallying cry against any limits on information ownership, the mantra for free content and ideas.

Which obviously leads to scorn and mockery: "You'll often hear cypherpunk weenies with poorly-thought-out philosophies trot out 'information wants to be free' as some kind of pseudo-socialist Utopian vision."

Except Brand never said that information wanted to be free, and I don't even think he meant that.  What he said was much more profound, and as timely now as ever.  He said either:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Or this:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.

Either way, I believe that what he was talking about was NOT the value of information.  He wasn't purporting to opine, for example, about the inherent value to a user of content, or the equilibrium pricing relationship between demand for information (which is limited) and its supply (basically unlimited).

He was referring to the power of networks - the wealth of networks.  Human networks amplified by the Internet.  What networks do is that they take the traditional "distribution" roles associated with information - production, marketing, promotion  - and push those to the edges, the nodes, as opposed to a centralized source.  And they do so in more transparent, non-hierarchical manner.

In centralized systems, production, marketing, promotion and distribution are viewed as costs, expenses, and something to be tightly controlled and managed.  That's what traditional media companies do.  In the networked world they are opportunities, but they are pretty much uncontrollable.  In that way they are authentic.  And this is precisely the tension about which Brand spoke, for this represents maybe the final breakdown of the traditional media content producer/distributor/consumer buckets.

Those separate pieces  now become one, they blend into one another.  They aren't centralized core competencies anymore.  This is represented by the idea that there are no more consumers now, there are only “users”. As a result, this transformation alters fundamentally the whole media value chain. This is potentially disruptive to many companies.

But it does not mean that users will not pay for information or content.  To the contrary. For example, Hollywood’s best box office years ever were 2009 and 2010.  Similarly, publishing industry revenues expanded in 2010 almost 6% over 2008 (with ebook sales growth of over 1000%).   Hulu has over 1.5 million paying subscribers.

Therefore, it's not helpful if the discussion centers around whether information wants to be free or not.  For that is not the right equation.

Information (content) does not want to be free.  Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free.  That's a big difference, and also the massive opportunity that should be at the center right now.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

The Internet is not the problem. The Internet is the solution

My partner Brad Burnham appears in the wonderful video below which is called Innovation Blackout. Ostensibly it's about the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation.

And the video is about that, but it's about something more fundamental. A few minutes in Brad says "The Internet is not the problem. The Internet is the solution."

This is the generational divide that I think is playing out right now. At dinner the other night I told my family I was thinking about going on a business trip to Stockholm, Sweden. My daughter's immediate reaction?  "Are you going to get to meet Notch?" - referring of course to @notch of Minecraft fame.  This was in between weekly questions regarding why their school discourages the use Wikipedia.  Which happens in between my son's regular exhortations to "search twitter" when we want to know about a tv show. Which is separate but related to when he - all of 9 years old - used an ipad to go onto Google and find that Fender yes in fact does make an electric guitar for a kid with small hands like him, even though I told him they don't.  He has multiple and life threatening food allergies.  He spends a fair amount of time watching recipe videos - to find foods he can eat and make.  Which of course is related to the time my daughter tried to explain something complicated to me by saying "it's really hard, it's like one million lines of code."

The generational view of technology is right in front of us.  Brad is right.  The solution is right in front of us.

Cash Mobs

I first read about "Cash Mobs" a few months ago.  The idea is simple - a group of people organize themselves through social channels and get together at a certain time and go shop at a local business.  Cash mobs:

encourage people to go into small, local businesses and spend their money, en masse, to give the business owner a little bit of economic stimulus. We’d help businesses grow, we’d make people happy, we’d get stuff for ourselves, have a great time, and maybe we’d get a drink to celebrate afterward.

One can follow the Cash Mobs twitter account and see these things in cities such as Cleveland, Houston, Ann Arbor, Kansas City - and that's just this week.  Carrotmob is another organization: "instead of organizing boycotts, we offer to spend money as a group if a business agrees to make a socially responsible change."

It feels like an emerging movement, if it can even be called that, and in fact some of these organizers resist it even being considered something more.

Cash Mobs” isn’t a political or social organization, a corporation, a movement, or meant to be an answer to economic crisis. By and large, those that organize Cash Mobs are simply people trying to make a positive impact on the businesses in their communities (and have fun while doing it)!

The book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption posits that there is something hugely transformational in peer to peer commerce, sharing and consumption ("Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services").  It uses examples of business that allow people to share excess capacity - Airbnb, Zipcar, Bag Borrow or Steal are the iconic ones.

But instead of sharing excess capacity around our stuff - our cars, apartments, clothes - what if the most powerful thing about collaborative consumption is organizational. For many decades we've been trained as consumers to receive offers - discounts, coupons, groupons, daily deals - from entities who want to sell us things.  Many of these offers are valuable.  But we receive them as they are marketed to us.

Instead, what if we defined the offers ourselves, around the local communities and merchants who make up the fabric of our daily lives?  What if people became their own self-organizing local marketers?  Maybe then the idea of Cash Mobs is so interesting because it is a reverse-daily-deal, a reverse-Groupon, type of business relationship.  One that, by shifting the production, marketing and distribution of the product to the users themselves, is entirely consistent with the peer-to-peer power of Internet and social connectivity.

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Small Things

Normally, I'm against big things.  I think the world's going to be solved by millions of small things - Pete Seeger

One of my favorite quotes, said with typical humility by Pete Seeger on the celebration concert in honor of his 90th birthday.

I was reminded of it the other day while watching Terrence Malick's brilliant movie, The Tree of Life.  That film is about many things, and almost impossible to summarize. But ultimately I think it's about how the small things in life define the essence of our existence.  Those moments of humor, compassion or cruelty; the odd funny events; the fleeting images and sounds; the comments spoken or not; the memories that fade.  These small moments comprise the whole of our lives moreso than the "big things."

I remembered that last year I read how the writer Austin Kleon keeps an annual logbook - a simple daily planner in which he keeps track "of the little details of my day":

And then I realized why I think people adore (and use) social media services, the ones that connect us.  Because they too are comprised of small things, millions of them, and provide platforms for the sharing and recording of small things. Thoughts, music, images, sounds, essays, randomness. It's why the service Findings has such potential - it allows us to track the marginalia of the things we read. Why Twitter is so addictive - the thoughts in our heads. Why Wordnik is so weird - the words we love.  And so on. Maybe in 2012 I will focus more on paying attention to the small things.

All the while remembering, of course, that Bruce Springsteen wrote: "From small things, mama, big things one day come."

Talking About A Generation

Generations is the title of a a fascinating (and dense) book by William Strauss and Neil Howe that theorizes that history advances cyclically based on repeating types of generational characteristics. Generally, history creates generations, and generations create history.

More specifically, under this theory, each generation passes through four cultural phases. Strauss and Howe believe we currently may be in the part of the generational cycle known as a Crisis: "an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival."

Hard to tell whether this theory is correct or not, but just in the past week I've noticed certain similar descriptions of unrelated events that has me thinking more about it.

First, on December 9th, Andy Baio, in writing about movie remixes on Youtube, wondered aloud:

Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote. What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office?

Second, while reporting in the New York Times about the unprecedented protests in Russian on December 10, Ellen Barry describes the

"Younger protesters — so digitally connected that they broadcast the event live by holding iPads over their heads."

Finally, in explaining why he thinks the Stop Online Piracy Act would seriously inhibit the growth and innovation of the Internet, Yancey Strickler, the founder of Kickstarter, just yesterday (December 12) says:

"This is not a small issue. This is a generational issue"

Of course, this could just all be an unrelated set of events and people trying to cause a big sensation. It could also be something more, something related to individuals and groups of people who are figuring out how connectivity, unrestricted connectivity, has not only given them more meaning, but also more potential for learning and creation and possibilities for self expression and empowerment. All happening during a week when not only did the comedian Louis C.K. decided to distribute his own content, directly from his to his fans (and he took to Reddit to talk about it), but my kid took to Khan Academy to get more help with Linear Equations.

Perhaps all unrelated but I think its more, something about how attempts to restrict this empowerment or preserve prior regimes or hierarchies will bump up, often messily, against a generational shift.

The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

"Let the products sell themselves... fuck advertising, commercial psychology ... psychological methods to sell should be destroyed." - The Minutemen, Shit From An Old Notebook

We have enough data now to realize that display advertising on the Internet doesn't work. Some suggest click through rates are as low .09%, a shockingly low number. It seems like click through rates are trending towards zero. Users don't notice the ads, they don't click on them. Ultimately, will we eventually see Google giving impressions away for free?

No amount of targeting, behavioral or otherwise, will solve this problem.
There are a number of reasons why, but the main one is that display ads online are the wrong metaphor. They come from a construct where web services were viewed as "pages" - magazine pages. They were invented by applying an old model (magazines) onto a new medium (web services) and assuming that the user is a "reader" and will accept being interrupted. Over time, the web has proven both these paradigms to be untrue in a truly profound way.

In short, web display ads are not web native; therefore they do not and will not work.

However, it also feels like we are about to enter a new, maybe a golden, age of Internet advertising and monetization. Even the word “advertising” in this new golden age is not accurate. Josh Stylman said to me that “advertising as we've known it is dead. Marketing on the other hand, may be entering a golden age with the ability to spread ideas in a way that pundits only dreamed about 10 years ago.”

Web services now exist at a scale that dwarfs the old “web page” model, and the value that many of these services deliver derives from users as contributors, not simply viewers. They then lend themselves to native business, or advertising models (again, the word advertising hardly applies here because this is not like advertising as any of us currently imagine it).

These new emerging revenues streams will be native monetization models that are consistent with the fabric of the product, that run with the grain of how users interact with and use the service. Google ads are the perfect, and prototypical, example, because they deliver a unit in a manner consistent with the way the user is using the product to search for information. These units generally work because they align the interest of the three interested parties in a search: users, marketers and publishers. Users get what they are looking for; marketers' get performance on their spend because they buy against the search action itself; and finally publishers generate traffic from the content.

Other examples - new marketing products - now emerging that are beginning to solve the user behavior/marketing experience include StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, Twitter Promoted Tweets, Buzzfeed Social Content, Facebook Sponsored Stories, Percolate Brand Curators, foursquare for business. Those are just six examples where the “ad” unit is consistent with, and integrated into, the very fabric of those social services themselves. Six examples developed only in the past few years.

I imagine Tumblr, Instagram, Soundcloud and other services will introduce similar initiatives, again that are consistent with the way their services natively work. These platforms, as James Gross of Percolate likes to say, are brokering interest across vast information networks, so in order for a brand to succeed they must broker interest in a native way that makes people enjoy them.

These are all new, and as a result will cause some confusion amongst the “buyers” of the products (as Fred says, The Fragmentation of Online Marketing), in the same way that Google ads originally did. They will take a while to be adopted, maybe even years. But I believe they will work and scale. Because when they do, hardly anyone will even notice them. “You want to not look like an ad at the first glance, but to look like an ad on the second glance.”

The products will sell themselves.

American Censorship Day

Today is American Censorship Day, so named because there is legislation working its way through Congress that would materially harm innovation and impede speech.

You can read about why so many of us feel so strongly that this legislation is particularly harmful in these places - I picked out just some of what I have read this morning that articulates how harmful this would be:

USV - Help Protect Internet Innovation

Bijan Sabet

Embedly

Albert Wenger

It's worth being informed here, these potential laws would affect how we all interact with web services. It's why the censorship logo will remain on this page for now.

5 Minutes of Happiness Each Day

My friend Mike White told me the other day that he uses the photo sharing service Instagram because it makes him happy. That stuck in my head.

So I remembered that the mission statement for the Cheezburger Network is "5 minutes of happiness each day" and I was thinking about that statement and how powerful it is.

It says nothing about the product or service, but says everything about the way they want you to feel after using the service. If you didn't know what the Cheezburgers were all about, you can imagine any number of things they might deliver to give you those 5 minutes of happiness.

I use Wordnik all the time. Not because I am looking for word definitions (though it delivers that), but instead simply to look at words. Their mission: "Wordnik is all the words, and everything about them." Again, nothing really about the specific product functionality. I have a list over there called "Good mouth feel words" - words that sound nice when saying them.

Turntable.fm is also a daily stop for me, particularly the Folk/Americana/Blues/Soul-It's All Connected room. That service's theme: "we believe music is better with friends." Music. Better. Friends.

Defining services around a grand theme or even emotion allows them more flexibility to deliver interestingness (noun: "the power of attracting or holding one's attention because it is unusual or exciting etc.) and over time iterate on that delivery - how it might evolve. Flexibility should be a hallmark of an evolving business.

But defining a service thematically should also provide more opportunities for new, native business models to emerge from their usage. You can't slap magazine style advertisements on these services and expect them to work - for the user or the advertiser. I bet however that business models centered around "themes" - whatever they may be - will work.

Self Expression through Social Media

Chris Poole, founder of Canvas, "a place to share and play with images" gave an amazing talk the other day, Self-Expression through Social Media, you can see it below:



Chris speaks about how identity intersects with the forms and methods of self-expression. He says that, for services that enhance self-expression, it's not the audience that matters, it's a users' context within that audience:

"Its not who you share with, it's who you share as . . . Identity is prismatic . . . We are all multifaceted people, we are more like diamonds, you can look at people from any angle and see something different and yet they are still the same."

Pseudonymity provides opportunities for rich expressiveness. Further, pseudonymity not only accurately reflects "prismatic identity" but it can also enhance creativity by allowing for creation and sharing from different sides of the diamond. One only needs to look at Canvas, or Tumblr, or Reddit for many examples of this.

"Its not who you share with, it's who you share as" is an amazingly insightful description because it recognizes that the power of social applications comes from the people, and even moreso its comes from what they call themselves when sharing.

Everybody wants to be special here (In praise of pseudonymity)

In real life I am who I am. As Boon and Watt once wrote: "Real names be proof."

But does a name, a real name, an identity, capture the full richness of personal self-expression? I'm not sure it does - indeed I believe that one of the promises of the Internet is that online social networks can allow for different personas - ones for different times or different subjects or different modes of expression. And this is an amazing thing, for one identity does not fit all. It's also amazing because it allows for the full spectrum of human expression.

Identity, like most things, is not monolithic. It's rich, varied and textured. And our online modes of expression should allow for that texture, particularly in what we name ourselves while expressing.

I use tumblr to express myself through music - songs, photos, quotes, randomalia. I go by the pseudonym newspeedwayboogie - not using my real name - because, well because I don't want to be Andy Weissman over there. I want to be someone else, the part of me that is obsessive compulsive and ridiculous about another subject matter.

So over there I chose to use that pseudonym, and not be anonymous, but instead to have a persona that reflects that subject and my expression of it - and nothing more. Sure, that expression may have resulted from late night dorm room shenanigans, but so what? And as a service tumblr makes it easy - and in fact I think encourages - the use of pseudonyms as personas. I've met some fantastic friends who use pseudonyms - Miles Smiles, Vast and Grand,Further From Age. Most of the time I have no idea of the real identity of these people, and I don't really care, because I can tell you so much about them and who they are as people. Their identity is secondary - their expressive persona is primary.

Certain services in fact thrive in creativity in proportion to their embrace of pseudonymity. Examples include tumblr, but also many more - Live Journal, Twitter, Canvas.

Chris Poole - Moot - says that anonymity enables users to express uninhibited creativity in a completely unvarnished, unfiltered way. "Anonymity is authenticity" is how he puts it. I think he is really talking about pseudonymity here - as Jyri Engstrom recently wrote: "A service that aims to become the default arena for online social exchange globally should allow pseudonymity (which is really what we're talking about when we talk about anonymity) and, in some cases, even encourage it."

Or, as Jyri also puts it: "Were you ever the nail that sticks out, at some point in your life?" To which I would add, that nail reemerges in life, often and always. People need places to express how they stick out while being able to assume other personas, for whatever reason they think is appropriate.

Paul Westerberg (in perhaps his greatest song) wrote that "Everybody wants to be special here" - which has always struck me as the most astute observation about human nature. The best online services are the ones that allow us to be special there, and name ourselves whatever we want in the process of expressing how special we are.

How I Get Excited About New Ideas

My friend Anthony recently wrote about a six step process he uses to determine whether a new idea he finds out about, or a new company someone is starting, or a new product being released, is interesting to him.

He emailed and asked me how new ideas catch my attention. For me, it's not a methodical list, but there are certain aspects of ideas, or companies, that always seem to grab me:

1. Can I relate to the problem being solved: does it solve some rather large problem that I, or someone close to me, has experienced and that I (or we) have explicitly acknowledged how the solution would make our lives (and the lives of many others) easier or better. In other words, does it matter to me? Similarly, if it doesn't matter to me specifically, does it look like it may matter to alot of other people. Did the inventor of this new idea create it to solve a problem of their own.

2. Can I relate to the pleasure being induced: does it make me happy, smile, laugh or cry? Do I feel an urgent need to call my wife asap and tell her about it? Is this something I'll mention at the dinner table that night ("guess what I saw today"). Did the inventor of this new idea create it to produce a pleasure they wanted to experience themselves.

3. Does it do something in a new and unusual way? Does it make me think (or say, upon initial glance) "Oh shit that is really cool." Does it let me experience something in a completely novel way.

4. Does it look pretty? If it is a web service do I remark to myself how amazing the things that can be done in the browser these days are? Am I sure that there is no way that I - who can barely draw stick figures - could ever conceive of something that looked and worked like that.

5. If I am thinking about something as a business, does it seem like it could be a company and business that captures and exchanges value in a new way; is there some business model whereby it can generate revenues and profits in novel and unusual ways - in ways that are consistent with the grain or fabric of the use cases it engenders, and not simply as bolt-ons.

6. Is it something that I could not imagine being done five years ago? Does it feel like something that can remain unusual or unique five years hence.

7. Did I encounter this idea, service, business, in a completely random, unexpected and serendipitous way.

8. If its about music I will sine qua non be interested ;-)

How do new ideas catch your attention?

The Fitness Function of a Venture Capitalist

"The fitness function of a venture capitalist — meaning the metrics of performance, the report card — is pretty pure. You show up with money, and one way or another more money has to come back than goes in." Bing Gordon

Oftentimes it's best to reduce things to the base elements, in order to really understand things. I am fascinated by the transformation that has occurred over the last five years in the funding of early stage technology companies, and the resulting transparency around this process. Angel investors, seed investors, micro-VCs, angel lists, secondary markets, no-cap convertible notes, liquidation preferences, etc - these terms and concepts, once arcane, are now discussed and debated openly and with vigor. And this transparency leads to efficiency.

But it can also lead to a form of confusion. For the job of a professional investor is simple - to gain a return on money. To deliver outsized returns relative to the risk - some level of returns greater than can be achieved by, say, investing in public liquid markets.

A venture investor can achieve this with numerous tactics: stage focus, sector focus, geographical focus. Expertise in financial matters, marketing, relationships. Friendly, fair terms. Incubation. Doubling down. All these matter, but they are merely tactics.

The strategy, in turn, always remains the same - "more money has to come back than goes in." I like to say it as "own large pieces of very big companies." Either way, the spread between the money that has gone out and that which has come back is the measure of success, and it is the only measure of success for a venture investor.

What's Old is New

The folks at the Tribeca Film festival were kind (or silly) enough to ask me to write something for their Future of Film blog.

Which I did - entitled "The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get."

I'd been thinking alot about how users are getting content, how they are experiencing it. It seems that in an on-demand video world (which if we are not there yet, we will be soon), the problem that is being solved is "what can people watch." But the real challenge, however, is not what can people watch, but what should they watch. I think that social media will solve this, to me much more interesting, problem. My thesis that I wrote about over there is that:

Social media changes everything – at least it should. So how can it change the way catalog content is distributed and experienced?

And the solution may just be that social media can make events out of the back library of content that comprises our experiences, our passions and our lives.