The Power of the Network's growing network...

The Power of the Network - now in it's second, 100-page extended, edition is slowly but surely forming into just the kind of social object I hoped it would become: an interesting thing people can talk about together - their conversations creating new ideas, action and value.

The new version's chapters are as follows:

1. The Death of Death
2. Don't Just Witness the Network (adapting to survive)
3. How to Go Viral
4. Communities of Purpose
5. Advertising & Marketing in the 21st Century
6. We're All Publisher's Now - The user is the destination
7. It's Not How Famous You Are - It's How Relevant
8. Digital Identity and the Long Tail
9. Why Media is the New Business Ecology
10. We Are the Eighth Mass Media
11. Hail To the Chief Node
12. How We Are Made Great






Review copies are either in the hands of or on the way to the following. If you 'd like to join the list, just drop me an email with details of your blog and your postal address.

If you've read, reviewed it, shared it or would just like to be included in the following list please let me know via comments or email. Thanks

The Power of the Network's Network (so far).

• Stowe Boyd
  
• Alan Moore
• Clay Shirky
• Neville Hobson
• Anjali Ramachandran
• Jonathan Macdonald
• Dan Thornton
• Gerd Leonhard
• Peggy Anne Salz
  
• Luke Razzell
• Mark Earls
• David Armnano
  
• Eaon Pritchard
• Paula White
• Michael Leis
  
• Alistair Crane
  
• Steven Ming Yeow
  
• Angela Wilson
  
• Roger Kondrat
• Neil Perkin
• Richard Marshall
• Matt Alder
• C Enrique Ortiz
  
• You?
  

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Eighth Mass Media makes it into the Wall Street Journal

Image by Enrico Fuente via FlickrPeggy Salz (founder of MSearchGroove) wrote a great piece for the Wall Street Journal (Asia) recently. I've added a pdf of the article (breaking usability barriers is key to seamless services) to scribd (see below) so you can view and share it.
You'll find it of particular interest if you're interested in digital convergence, and mobile tech.
Tomi Ahonen is in there talking about Mobile as the 7th Mass Media (and I'm co-hosting a course on exactly that with Tomi at Oxford University on December 2-3. Check here for the latest on that).
And I'm quoted on what happens after the sixth (internet) and seventh (mobile) mass medias - the concept of the Eighth Mass Media. You can view my Widget Web Expo slide deck and presentation on the subject here.

Wall Street Journal (Asia) Ceatec1 - Upload a Document to Scribd

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Gin, TV... and What Comes Next?

The seventh and final part of my interview with Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky appears below today.
Previous six parts are available on the blog already titled:
1. How algorithms caused the credit crunch
2. Why email stuffs Facebook et al
3. Humanising brands
4. Scoring collaboration in education
5. Is technology changing us
6. Why Here Comes Everybody avoids the copyright debate

In this seventh part Clay discusses his famous ideas about Gin, TV and cognitive surplus.
And we consider what comes next: a world of participatory media. The question remains - is this just the next heat sink (ie something we commit more and more time to as a way of coping with the huge societal shifts that mass collaboration (the power of the network) will bring?

Clay believes we are entering a period of massive experimentation to discover what kind of amateur work and global collaboration will work. Expect to make plenty of mistakes along the way.

And from this the new organisational rules of a group-forming world will emerge.

Watch the video below. If you want to see Clay live and in person, he's back in the UK in December.



I will be adding a full, unedited and higher-quality version (joining the seven parts together) soon on /Message. It'll be on google video.

I'm headed for Amsterdam today for an interesting co-creation project. If you're there this evening, look me up on twitter?

Clay Shirky on why email stuffs facebook et al

I interviewed Clay Shirky earlier this week. Here's part two of the series.

(part one: How algorithms caused the credit crunch)

In part two Clay explains why he thinks email is the most effective tool for group-forming (and therefore for influence on social and political change) right now. He describes the impact its 'dull' ubiquity is having on the US Presidential elections.
And we talk about the future of mass any-and-everything (though particularly broadcast TV) with reference to solidarity goods (value gained from shared experiences). Clay reasons that far from dumbing down, the fragmentation of the internet is demanding increasing quality from its hits.
When media and channels were scarce you got a share in the value of solidarity goods simply for showing up. Now you only get a share by being truly excellent.
Watch the video below. Buy his book here. See him speak here.

How to avoid extinction in an evolving world

I saw Rory Brown tweet about journalist Hugo Dixon talking about the death spiral of newspapers today. It's a subject dear to my heart. Newspapers were where I started my career 21 years ago. I was trained for print.
But we've logged their decline on this blog and many others. Microsoft, for example, predicts their extinction within 20 years.

The newspaper industry made, in my view, two key errors.
1. It missed the quality opportunity.
2. It spurned the R&D advantage it had

Now these are very grave errors. But if you're not in the newspaper industry I'd advise against form of smugness. For there, but for the grace of etc etc... (image by colin purrington via flickr)

Newspapers had (perhaps still have) an opportunity to do what the gift economy of the net couldn't: Invest in quality.

Churning out the same press releases anyone can find repeated 1000+ times on the internet may be cheap but it's also self-destructive. If you can't beat the web on price, you can't beat it on relevance and you can't beat it on speed (and you can't) you'd better find something else to beat it on. Quality seems the only game left in town. The creation of the point-worthy.

The R&D advantage was spurned too. When the print barons had piles more cash than the gift economists of the likes of wikipedia, google, youtube et al, they could have invested to make the kind of structural change required to match the networked world.

Now, ever more fearful, they are reduced to picking through the wreckage and looking for further efficiencies.

They chose not to invest in survival strategies for a world of complex adaptive systems (such as the net, such as evolution) and instead persisted with the linear mass-efficiencies models which worked so well in a mass industrial age.

Ok, so newspapers are having it hard. What's that got to do with you (if you aren't a print journalist, for example)?

Well, I don't think all of the troubles newspapers are facing are caused by the medium.

Anything which seeks to mediate in a networked world faces the challenge of being worked around, that's for sure. That is the impact of group forming network theory in practice.

But perhaps of even more impact is the way traditional companies and corporations are responding to, or are able to respond to, the huge changes being wrought by the networked world.

The death spiral Hugo Dixon describes is that of a company managing efficiencies. This is the mass industrial response - the fnal phase of the S-curve seen in many businesses (as referred to by Professor Malcolm Mcdonald among others).

When you have run out of innovations you turn to the accountants. More and more effort is focused on saving, less and less on growth.

You save until you can no longer spend.

This applies to newspapers.

It may also apply to a business near you.

Seth Godin joins the call for human interaction

Fantastic. Seth Godin says what David Armano, Mark Earls, Jackie Danicki and myself have been banging on about for not a little while.

(Seth Godin, the first law of mass media)

One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from "you" to "me" to "us" to "the corporation" ...

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win. Image by Steam Talks via flickr

It's that last line that should be getting your action hands twitching.

• Here's what you should do.
• Here's how you can think about it.

I'm in media! Oh really? So are my children...

I responded to Paul Bradshaw's interesting question about the future of training for journalists here and by way of introduction mentioned that: "I've been in media for 20 years, unless you count the fanzines I wrote as a kid."

Actually, I was in media as soon as I could be. I even made my own comics and newspapers before I had any means of distributing them.

Which makes me think today's kids will be in media rather earlier and rather longer - and they'll understand the power that gives them rather earlier.

As soon as they connect via the likes of habbo hotel, club penguin, or many of the other social networks for kids they are in media. (image by Terry Lloyd Smith)

They have the tools to enable what we've all become:

We're all publishers now, we're all distributors now, we're all advertisers now, as I've said before.

Which means as soon as we start forming into groups via the network we're in media.

Perhaps we are really in media even before we reach out for our first mouse - part of the eighth mass media I've started exploring here and here?

Twitter: The newspaper of tomorrow?

My old mum says she hardly reads her daily newspaper these days. She's been getting the Daily Express delivered for as long as I can remember.

Habit is a powerful thing so the executives at the Daily Express may sleep safe; I don't think she's about to give up paying for her daily copy. It's just she's "seen it all on the TV" by the time the paper arrives.

There's no use telling me you're setting your own news agenda, ploughing your own furrow etc etc. Your user thinks you're just reheating old news. Sorry, but there it is. (Image by kamerakrazy)

Her son (that's me folks) has never had a newspaper delivered in his life. Plenty to worry about for national newspaper folk then.

There's nothing new in this. Microsoft predicts the death of newspapers within 20 years.

Some of the debate about the skills journalism students need, which you'll find here, suggests that while there may still be printed mass distributed things in the future, we may only persist in calling them 'news' papers out of habit.

The thing is, my old mum does still read her weekly local paper. She doesn't do that out of some loyalty born of the fact it was where I started my career. No, she does it because it carries content she has not had access to elsewhere.

She doesn't have access to the internet, and the broadcast types behind the likes of teletext have never gone hyperlocal enough to become relevant or convenient enough for her.

So the local paper remains (for her, at least) a source of unique, relevant content which she is prepared to pay for. Even the advertising in it - by virtue of its focus on the local - for the most part, is of some value to her.

There are hints here for all services - print and digital:
Relevant = useful = valued

Imagine if you knew enough local people on twitter, people you have connected with and maintained connections with through the metadata you have exchanged - so that you trust them and can believe what they have to say.
Imagine if you could select 'My location' on twitter - and only receive tweets from people with x miles.
Imagine you could toggle this on and off when it matters to you.

Perhaps this is the shape of the newspaper of the future?

Whatever tools your communities choose to use, what is clear is that 'news' (read information or content) that people find relevant is that which is niched, either by topic or location or both.

Communities of purpose are the groups to make that happen - just another reason why they will play out as the business units of the 21st century.

Twitter; The newspaper of tomorrow? Well yes, in as much as it is a very effective way of discovering, filtering and distributing information with levels of relevance no printed medium yet has been able to compete with.

It is not alone in asking tough questions. The new digital tools of human connection (of group forming) consistently raise them:

• What is the value of mass/broad?
• What is the value of mediation?