'Pataphysical science in the home

The curation is king meme is having a day in the sun. This is the kind of article that editors love to publish — it declares a winner in a zero-sum game between the old champion Content and the contender, Curation. The article posits that Old King Content has been ousted “because it isn’t scarce. It’s everywhere, it’s overwhelming, and it’s gone from quality to noise.” Of course there’s too much for any one person to slog through, but if content is of secondary value, then what are we curating?

But Rosenbaum has got it very right on one crucial point:

He also seems to be saying that this victory of curation is a recent event. I’d take issue with that. The first Yahoo! directory was, at the time, state-of-the-art curation, not particularly scalable, rather unsocial and opaque, but it was curation. And, of course, Google’s revolutionary insight to use inbound links as a fundamental page ranking metric took people-powered curation into new territory.

Right on. Let’s drill down into the humanity angle.

The word curate derives from the Latin curare, meaning “to take care of“, something that we humans do for people and objects that are meaningful to us.

The Tummelvision crew (@heathr, @debs and @kevinmarks) have been exploring this human side of how digital communities and conversations are born and thrive. They’ve adopted “Tummel” as their verb of choice. It’s a Yiddish word used to describe the act of catalyzing others to action and I highly recommend tuning in to their show.

Just as Suw Charman-Anderson blogged about this way back in 2006, it still is fresh and true today:

Curators already exist. Some are people: Bloggers who sift through tonnes of stuff in order to highlight what they like, and who, if you have the same taste as them, can be invaluable to discovering new things to like. Some are aggregators: Site that gather lots of little bits of stuff and present them in aggregation and help us find the bits that the majority find to be good. Some are algorithms: recommendation systems and search.

What would I do without Kevin Marks’ curation?

In Three Tips for Curating Your Audience, John Sviokla writes about taking care of your audience, also known as customers if you happen to be in the business of selling stuff. (I’d take issue with the term audience for these reasons.)

Taking care of your curators means finetuning the curation. In socially-powered services like Facebook and Twitter we curate the people that we choose to friend or follow by keeping them interested in what we have to say and we also adjust our flows by un-friending or un-following in a more or less constant feedback loop.

And now, let’s bring on the ants!

Social bookmarking is a shining example of people-powered curation and was brilliantly executed by the creator of Delicious, Joshua Schachter. But what is stigmeric curation, HUH?

Did you ever wonder how ants manage to organize themselves into those superhighways of efficiency to bring the food back to the colony? Well, that’s stigmergy in action and this survival-oriented curation mechanism is how we create our own superhighways of inter-linked information  I actually wrote about this back on October 16, 2003. Take a look at “What do blogs and ants have in common?” to learn more. It’s a much shorter post than this one!

What are the “economics” of curation?

I was talking about this notion of online generosity with my friend ocrampal the other day, and he questioned whether curation was primarily generosity-powered as I was saying. In fact, I think he’s right, the answer is more subtle. Social networks and community-powered curation works not so much from generosity as from the very good deal that participation offers.

Let’s call it fair price curating. In other words, contributing to the system is the price you pay to get value out of the system. More often than not I get more out than I put in. It feels like I am getting my curated information below cost —  that I’m gaining much more than I’m spending in terms of time, effort and satisfaction.

I guess that’s because once everybody contributes their info bits, it costs the system very little to redistribute the information in infinitely variable combinations as requested by huge numbers of people and ever more sophisticated technological tools.

I haven’t yet read Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, but I intend to and would be curious to see how he sees it.

I also think about generosity in the context of personalized Q&A services like Hunch, Quora or Aardvark. Adrian Chan frames the problem this way:

Both questioner and answerer must have a satisfactory experience for the service to work. In fact the service really hangs on the experience of the answerer. The questioner has an immediate and present need or interest — not so the answerer. His or her motives for participation have to be incentivized or contextualized by other means.

Are earning a good reputation and earning increased self-esteem by virtue of knowing the answer sufficient social drivers? Time will tell what the sustaining factors really are as these services grow and evolve.

At the end of the day…

Curation is the central issue of our socially networked culture. This mutual mediating, to riff on Kevin Mark’s coinage, turns the firehose of our collective activity streams into a refreshing drinking fountain.

Call it curating, crowdsourcing, stigmergy, page rank, social networking, lifestreaming or a thousand other terms, its objective is to deliver information and entertainment that may be useful or surprising, silly or serious, funny or annoying — when, where and how we want it.

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Thanks also to JP Rangaswami for thoughts that inspired this post:

Curators add to relevance by stripping away the irrelevant and the unneeded and the shoddy.

In order to improve consume-ability and relevance, curators need the tools to do this. There are two ways these tools will come about, the “nice” way and the “nasty” way. In the nice way, the producers and distributors make it easy for people to point to, package and pass on the relevant pieces.

Location, location, location

If you haven’t heard about Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Scvngr, MyTown, Loopt, Geodelic, Brightkite, Where, Check.in, and could care less about other location based services, just enjoy the Pongo illustration and don’t bother reading any further! (I want to mention Layar here, even if it is not strictly in this category of applications. If you haven’t seen this yet, you really should check it out. It’s described as an augmented reality browser. Using the geo-location, compass and camera functions of your mobile device, it displays information about the stuff around you as you aim your camera from place to place.)

This guy with the crown has checked in here lots of times, using an application on his mobile phone. In order to keep him coming back here, I let him earn a crown and the title of mayor. That may be enough for the honeymoon period, but I’ll probably need to start offering him free drinks as long as he keeps coming back and keeps on broadcasting his presence to his friends.

What is the business model that will emerge from this scenario? I’m just going to wait and see, quite a few come to mind…

Hyperlocal, not hype-local

But there are three startups that are coming at the issue from a different perspective and I wanted to mention them here, Lasso, PaperG and BlockChalk. They all are focusing on the hyperlocal experience, the places where we spend most of our time and, not incidentally, most of our money.

Lasso and PaperG are quite interesting from a business point of view because they are sitting at the crossroads of a very real problem — local newspaper advertising revenues are shrinking, yet local media still have a sales force to sell advertising (and other promotional services) to small local businesses that a digital pure-play would have a hard time reaching due to the high overhead of selling to small advertisers.

First up, Lasso, who are building a kind of self-help hyperlocal ad server with a dash of Google AdWords:

Lasso is a platform positioned to enable local media companies to reach small and medium-sized businesses with attractive new offerings: integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and distribution through customizable widgets throughout a media company’s website…

“We [Lasso] have combined internet marketing expertise plus newspaper DNA. An effective product has to have the right metrics, and in terms of landing it appropriately, it has to be done in terms that newspaper ad sales people understand,” Treadaway said. “If people don’t feel like they’re getting value, the churn will be very high. The product demos very well, looks very slick by newspaper standards. Most of the response has been: ‘when will you come train our people.’ (from LostRemote)

PaperG takes a different approach:

PaperG is testing a software system called PlaceLocal that automatically generates ads for local businesses by crawling the Web. The system scrapes the Web for basic information about a business such as its address, phone number, and opening hours. Even if the business doesn’t have its own Web page, data can often be pulled from third-party services such as Yelp or Google Maps. The system then uses semantic analysis to find and extract photos and positive reviews, and it builds an ad automatically using Adobe’s Flash software. The business owner or newspaper ad sales representative can customize the ad, so if PlaceLocal didn’t choose the best photo or review, it’s easy to select another.

Lee expects PlaceLocal to help representatives sell ads in the first place. “The sales rep can have a beautiful ad designed for every lead sheet,” Lee says, “which makes a real difference in the conversation.” (from MIT’s Technology Review) (The NYT writes about it here.)

BlockChalk is taking a much different approach, the social media classic — build traffic and figure out how to make money once they get traction. The only reason I’m putting them in this post is because of their unique usage model. You don’t have to sign up to the service to use it, and you remain anonymous until such time as you decide to share your identity on a case-by-case basis with other users of the service.

Since anonymity opens the service up to spam and all sorts of abuses, and denies the service a registered user base and profiled social graph, I am really interested to see what kinds of checks and balances they build into the system. But the really cool part to watch will be to see what kind of behavior users will adapt on their own in this wild west of a service. What will be the equivalent of the Twitter hashtag, what cultural norms will people develop and adopt?

That is if it lasts long enough for a culture to develop…

Is it a good strategy to base your web business idea on a cool tool? Well, if you’re the talented Loren Brichter, the answer is probably YEAH. He created and distributed the premier Twitter client for the iPhone, an application that cost me €2.39 on iTunes. His 1-man shop made a good income from sales and then was acquired by Twitter and he was hired on, in a presumably pretty sweet deal.

Yet the percentage of developers who are able to make a living from the sales of client applications is rather small and once a few big applications gain traction, it’s going to be very difficult to compete. And let’s not forget that in most segments there are a plethora of good enough clients being distributed for free.

It makes a lot more sense to think of your cool tool as facilitator, one that does not call attention to itself, but that enables, simplifies or reveals an experience in a way that is better than what currently exists. The business opportunity will be found in the value that you can create in the experience, not necessarily in the tool itself.

As an example, this is what Foursquare, Facebook and the other slew of mobile location-centric applications are all about. The holy grail here is to help connect local businesses with existing customers and for them to be introduced to potential new customers. Putting it together correctly, businesses will be happy to pay for more, and more frequent, customers while users of your cool tool enjoy the benefits of social discovery, special deals and the nearly magical power to know the best nearby places even if you’ve never been there before.

Sing along! Or watch this version of the old spiritual as shown in the amazing The Singing Detective. The song starts at around 6’30″, but you should watch the whole clip.

Ezekiel cried, “Dem dry bones!”
Ezekiel cried, “Dem dry bones!”
Ezekiel cried, “Dem dry bones!”
“Oh, hear the word of the Lord.”

The toe bone connected to the heel bone,
The heel bone connected to the foot bone, (more…)

The future is wearing a neutral mask.

If I were to characterize the world right now, the operative word would be liminal — not quite here anymore and not quite there just yet. We exist in a threshold hurtling through space, in a future in the past tense world in which the present never seems to catch up to itself.

Sometime between 1948 and 1956 Jacques Lecoq, the influential French acting instructor created the neutral mask in collaboration with the Italian sculptor Amleto Sartori. By putting on the neutral mask, an actor could enter into liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”), a transitional state of in-betweenness in which identity is ambiguous and meaning must be gleaned from context and movement.

I bring this up because as I was sitting in a conference room last week, listening to a panel of experienced, well-informed and well-spoken people trying to explain the social media to a business audience, I was doodling in 3-dimensions with a hunk of white plasticine modeling clay. My best stuff comes out when I stop thinking and let my fingers take over. I realized that I had made a sort of neutral mask, shown above.

Well, of course it would be… The panel discussed issues, alternately hailed as panaceas or condemned as mirages, such as the contradiction between the desire for online popularity and that for privacy, the ethical issues raised when public-facing brands use Facebook or Twitter profiles and the growing power of the people formerly known as the audience. But from the exchanges during the Q&A, it became clear that different people were experiencing these concepts each in their own way.

Check it out, check it in.

Once upon a time, the verb to check-in was something that you did at a hotel or an airport, and only at a hotel or an airport. Not any more. Popularized by foursquare, the check-in is becoming a standard gesture, one that will be baked in to many social applications, to indicate your physical presence at a specific location. And, OY, the once innocent verb, like, is now poised to take over the civilized the world!

So maybe grammar is a helpful framework to think about the future of this device-mediated social future of ours. We will follow, like, dislike, share, bookmark, invite, post, buy, listen to, broadcast, check-in, read, create, delete, favorite, join, leave, gift, friend, play, connect, tag, save and tummel around issues, articles, lists, photos, videos, music, people, groups, applications, events, discounts, games and more. And we will do some of these things online and publicly, and others privately with physical tools or else in an endless variety of combinations.

Jyri Engeström has been talking about building services around social objects and the verbs we use to animate them for quite some time. I’ve recently started to follow the work of the activitystrea.ms group, another instance of the object/verb approach for describing and standardizing the evolution of online behavior as observed in the wild.

Yet despite all the observing and describing, many ambiguities remain. Remember, on the Internet nobody knows if you’re wearing a mask.

That will bring us back to Do-Re-Mi.

Is the pace of change going to remain so frenetic as to create a state of permanent liminality? Will we always be betwixt and between?

It seems appropriate somehow that my first post on this new blog should marry two of my current interests, plasticine sculptures and mobile devices.

Over and out.