Author Archive

  • Service principles for the post-modern news organisation

    Service principles illustrate the way a service creates, captures and sustains value for customers and shareholders.
    They’re a useful benchmark in making decisions, (eg. ‘‘Should we retain a proprietary or open service platform?’. ‘Does this process deliver value to the customer or simply make life easier for the business?’).
    This is a heavily adapted set of service principles we created for a client, a specialist financial newspaper behind a paywall (hence the first two principles) which we think might work for any news organisation making the treacherous journey from industrial to post-modern media. We’ve called this organisation The Newspaper.
    The list must have lots of holes – are there any big ones? – and is much too long – how should we shorten it?  - and shifts between strategic and tactical issues – does that matter?
    1. Shape the business model to sustain print subscriptions, but not at the cost of standing still
    OK, this is very specific to subscription services, and reflects the reality that print circulation and advertising still account for the vast majority of revenue. How do you make the transition to new revenue streams without killing the old ones. Digital revenues tend to cannibalise print revenues, yet you need to demonstrate the explicit value of digital. Ask Rupert. There’s more than one answer though: charging a stupidly small amount of money for print for a short period of time is one way, or a stupidly high amount for premium online services is another. However the latter only works in a niche market with exclusive value. Here’s an example of the no brainer ‘get print too’ deal (not our client).
    2. Launch against yourself (in a strictly controlled way)
    The Newspaper brand strengthens our ability to create new revenue streams, but The Newspaper legacy restricts our scope for action. We should act to limit these restrictions by thinking creatively, changing culture and ‘failing fast’ in a Laboratory environment (cf.); this will enable The Newspaper to confront digital native start-ups at lower risk to our existing business. Here’s another example of what we mean, from the same source:
    3. Establish online and mobile as integral components of The Newspaper’s valued services, not just an add-on.
    This principle has implications for everything we do and especially the way we organise and reward individuals and teams. The value of online content and commercial revenues should be re-evaluated and the status of achieving online financial and editorial success raised.  (In other words, don’t save the story for the front page, get it online; and stop the ad team giving away free online ads to sell juicy full page print display)
    4. Make regular assessments of what lies inside or outside the paywall
    Things move quickly on the internet and what’s exclusive to The Newspaper one day may not be the next. When charging for content or services, ask: Is it essential for its intended audience? Is it exclusively or first available at The Newspaper? Is it conveniently delivered; does it enable the audience to create value themselves? If none of these apply then the offer has become commodified – put it outside the paywall.
    5. The Newspaper online is a service as well as a product, and this means treating readers as partners, not consumers
    Service-not-product means that the brand, the services, the organisation (especially journalists and editors) come into more direct and frequent contact with customers and should act as a solicitous and considerate host; it means that The Newspaper is involved in more parts of the value chain between a customer’s desires and their fulfillment, including interactions in which the customer is a participant, not a consumer. This has an impact on design, culture and on resources, especially editorial culture and resources. Here’s an example of services (in green) around different content types (in pink) and their valuable bi-produts (in blue). Remember, the value is in the service around the content, not the content itself.
    6. Users may create the most valued content for each other.
    So give them the tools to make it. And add services to your content that enable your customers to increase its value – as above.
    7. Give customers a voice; their voice has value.
    Services that enable customers to express opinion (vote, rate, comment, share) create trend data and customer data with value in its own right that can be played back to the audience and/or sold on to premium subscribers, advertisers or corporate customers. And likewise, we no longer have a monopoly of privileged sources or information: our readers may no more than we do, better than we do.
    8. Services that enable users to personalize and store data encourage loyalty
    The audience has invested time to obtain utility, as well as generating useful customer information with value to advertisers. They won’t want to waste that effort.
    9. Creating valued niche products is vital to online success
    The Newspaper as one big package doesn’t translate online. The Newspaper online need not be one thing for all customers. Digital enables products and services to be packaged and sold and deconstructed with infinite variety, according to need, to niche markets; The Newspaper can and should vary the scope, scale and voice of the proposition for different audiences within the boundaries of quality set by the brand.
    10. Foster synergies between channels and recognise channel differences
    The Newspaper is the brand champion; the web has infinite depth and breadth; mobile offers ubiquity and convenience. Each product niche can exploit multiple channels. Each channel should point to the others (eg. a permalink for every newspaper page).
    11. The Newspaper is not of itself merely ‘a newspaper’ – The Newspaper is a brand.
    The brand offers information and products for the financial professional, the business manager, the private investor and the corporation. The brand can be extended into any area where its qualities – such as inside knowledge, professional network, good with money – have value
    12. Protect and build the value of The Newspaper brand
    There’s a tried and tested set of commercial and professional standards in newspapers – everyone knew the rules (around the separation of advertising and editorial, for example) that preserve the integrity of the editorial product. New principles are needed, and especially around commercial recommendations. Readers don’t mind being sold too, but they’ll buy because they trust you, so it better be the best. Don’t enter into partnerships that destroy the value of the brand.
    13. Print web first It’s not sustainable to behave as though the newspaper is the one and only place that important news can be published.
    14. We have unlimited space online, use it
    This means opening up the filing cabinet, replacing the news pyramid with the news iceberg – it goes deep down into the waters. Use the web to publish or link to everything you have: background, archive, source material, images – become a curator of themes.
    15. Connect to the rest of the web openly
    The Newspaper’s content and tools will live as effectively outside its URL as inside. If we make our content available widely, paid or unpaid, we raise our profile and increase our reach internationally and domestically; we also undercut clippings agencies and other copiers. Remember, the value is in the service around the content, not the content itself. So, use rss, third party feeds, The Newspaper API(s) and widgets to give people access to The Newspaper outside The Newspaper.com. And if in doubt, give it out.
    Our competition isn’t just other newspapers
    We’re up against every source of news over every channel and many news organisations act very differently to traditional newspapers, and so we will too, which leads us to…
    17. Treat competitors as partners
    This is how the rest of the web works. What makes us so different that we don’t have to give, share and collaborate?

    Service principles encapsulate the way a service creates, captures and sustains value for customers and shareholders.

    They’re a useful benchmark in making decisions in unfamiliar territory, (eg. ‘‘Should we retain a proprietary or open service platform?’. ‘Does this process deliver value to the customer or simply make life easier for the business?’, ‘What limit should we place on advertising that interrupts the customer experience?).

    This is a remade set of service principles we originally created for a client, a specialist financial newspaper behind a paywall (hence the first and second in the list, which we shouldn’t get too hung up about) and which we’ve since adapted quite heavily to work for a generic organisation we’ve called The Newspaper embarking on the treacherous journey from industrial to post-modern media.

    See what you think. The list must have lots of holes – are there any big ones? – and it’s much too long at an unmemorable 15! – how should we shorten it?  - and it shifts between strategic and tactical issues – does that matter? How should we reorder them to reflect importance? It’s an unformed lump of clay, published on the principle ‘just get it out there’. Please weigh in, feel free. Here goes:

    1. Shape the business model to sustain print subscriptions and build new revenue sources

    This is very specific to paid subscription services where there’s a print legacy, and it’s hard to do; it reflects the reality that print circulation matters hugely because it determines the value of the biggest source of advertising revenue. How do you make the transition to new revenue streams without killing the old ones? Digital revenues tend to cannibalise print revenues, yet you might need to demonstrate the explicit value of digital. Ask Rupert. There’s more than one answer as to how to do it: charging a stupidly small amount of money for print for a short period of time is one way, or a stupidly high amount for premium online services is another. . Here’s an example of the no brainer ‘get print too’ deal (not our client).

    FT subscription ad

    2. Make regular assessments of what should be inside or outside the paywall

    Paid-for news services only work in a niche market with exclusive value. Things move quickly on the internet and what’s exclusive to The Newspaper one day may not be the next. When charging for content or services, ask: Is it essential for its intended audience? Is it exclusively or first available at The Newspaper? Is it more conveniently delivered; does it enable the audience to create value themselves? If none of these apply then the offer has become commodified – put it outside the paywall.

    3. Launch against yourself (in a controlled way)

    The Newspaper brand strengthens our ability to create new revenue streams, but The Newspaper legacy restricts our scope for action. We should act to limit these restrictions by thinking creatively, changing culture and ‘failing fast’ in a Laboratory environment; this will enable The Newspaper to confront digital native start-ups at lower risk to our existing business.

    4. Establish online and mobile as integral components of The Newspaper’s valued services, not just an add-on.

    This principle has implications for everything we do and especially the way we organise and reward individuals and teams. The value of online content and commercial revenues should be re-evaluated and the status of achieving online financial and editorial success raised.  (In other words, don’t save the story for the front page, get it online; and stop the ad team giving away free online ads to sell juicy full page print display)

    5. The Newspaper online is a service as well as a product, and this means treating readers as partners, not consumers

    Service-not-product means that the brand, the services, the organisation (especially journalists and editors) come into more direct and frequent contact with customers and they should act as solicitous and considerate hosts; it means that The Newspaper is involved in more parts of the value chain between a customer’s desires and their fulfillment, including interactions in which the customer is a participant, not a consumer. This has an impact on design, culture and on resources, especially the editorial culture that says “put the copy on the spike and move on”. Here’s an example of services (in green) around different content types (in pink) and their valuable bi-produts (in blue). Remember, value lies in the service around the content, not just the content itself.

    News services

    6. Users may create the most valued content for each other.

    So give them the tools to make it. And add services to our content that enable our customers to increase its value – as above.

    7. Give customers a voice; their voice has value.

    Services that enable customers to express opinion (vote, rate, comment, share) create trend data and customer data with value in its own right that can be played back to the audience and/or sold on to premium subscribers, advertisers or corporate customers. And likewise, we no longer have a monopoly of privileged sources or information: our readers may know more than we do or better than we do, let’s use their knowledge.

    8. Services that enable users to personalize and store data encourage loyalty

    The audience has invested time to obtain utility, as well as generating useful customer information with value to advertisers. They won’t want to waste that effort.

    9. Creating valued niche products is vital to online success

    The Newspaper as one big package doesn’t translate online. The Newspaper online need not and should not be one thing for all customers. Digital enables products and services to be packaged and sold and deconstructed with infinite variety, according to need, to niche markets; The Newspaper can and should vary the scope, scale and voice of the proposition for different audiences within the boundaries of quality set by the brand. We might want to create a portfolio of service brands to reflect this.

    10. Foster synergies between channels and recognise channel differences

    The print edition is the brand champion; the web has infinite depth and breadth; mobile offers ubiquity and convenience. So each product niche can exploit multiple channels and each channel can point to the others (eg. a permalink for every newspaper page).

    11. The Newspaper is not of itself merely ‘a newspaper’ – The Newspaper is a brand and that’s where its value lies.

    We’ve built a reputation that represents a point of view and a set of values over the past [insert number] years. Under our imprint and around our content we offer all sorts of products and services that fit with our point of view and values. The brand can be extended into any area where its qualities – such as, for example, inside knowledge, professional network, good with money, political nouse – have value. So funnily enough it’s not content that’s king, it’s the brand.

    12. Protect and build the value of The Newspaper brand

    There’s a tried and tested set of commercial and professional standards in newspapers. Everyone knows the rules (around the separation of advertising and editorial, for example) that preserved the integrity of the old editorial product. In digital, where fact and opinion and product and purchase start to merge dangerously into each other, new principles are needed and especially around commercial recommendations. Readers don’t mind being sold too if they’ve chosen to express an interest, and they’ll buy because they trust us so long as what we sell fits with how they perceive us at our best. In short, we mustn’t enter into partnerships that make short term commercial sense but destroy the value of our reputation (it’s amazing how often companies do this, especially where individuals are paid commissions for short term gain).

    13. Print web first

    It’s not sustainable to behave as though the newspaper is the one and only place where important news can be published.

    14. We have unlimited space online, use it

    This means opening up the filing cabinet and putting it online, replacing the news pyramid with the news iceberg that goes deep down into the waters. Use the web to publish or link to everything we have: background, archive, source material, images – become a curator of stories and themes.

    15. Connect to the rest of the web openly

    The Newspaper’s content and tools will live as effectively outside its URL as inside. If we make our content available widely, paid or unpaid, we raise our profile and increase our reach internationally and domestically; we also undercut clippings agencies and other copier/reusers. Remember, the value is in the service around the content, not just the content itself. So, use rss, third party feeds, The Newspaper API(s) and widgets to give people access to The Newspaper, paid for or free, as we decide, outside The Newspaper.com. If in doubt, we give it out, because we treat people who share and re-use our content as friends not threats.

    That’s enough principles [Ed.]

    1 Comment

    1
    William Owen By William Owen

    22nd July 10

    1 comment

     Uncategorized

    innovation

  • Three fallacies of newspaper thinking (and how paywalls cracked at the Frontline Club)

    My first trip to the Frontline Club last night (thanks, @saradotdub) was rewarded with a lively and contentious debate on the future of newspapers featuring The Times digital director, Gurtej Sandhu, enduring a severe cross-examination on Murdoch’s paywall strategy. It came from all sides: the Chair (the subtle and persistent Steve Hewlett) fellow panel members and the floor.

    My takeaway was that the discussion highlighted three fallacies that still govern much newspaper thinking.

    Fallacy Number One is that the internet is free because of a mix of habit and a spurious moral right, and that if you can change habits and challenge morality we’ll go back to paying for content.

    This is confusing newspapers with content. We used to pay for newspapers because they had a monopoly of the means of production, and to get the content we had to pay for paper, printworkers, printing machines and trucks. The internet reduces the cost of material production and distribution to virtually nil and reveals that whatever we used to pay for content was a fraction of the total newstand price, and we paid for that because we couldn’t get it elsewhere, which brings us to…

    Fallacy Number Two: that a newspaper’s competition is other newspapers.

    Panel member Doublas McCabe suggested that if every newspaper went behind a paywall we might start to pay again. This misses the point that we can now get the news from a myriad sources, not just ‘newspapers’: specialist blogs, tv websites, Google, twitter, etc. ad infinitum. The monopoly no longer exists and everybody can be a media owner (picture me waving my iphone in the air) and for this reason alone content is worth much less than it used to be – sometimes actually nothing – unless it occupies a privileged niche, as does the Financial Times (represented last night by product manager Marybeth Christie with a lively account of experimentation and research in different ways of paying and consuming).

    Fallacy Number Three is that nothing else changes, content is still just the end product of the publishing process.

    Steve Hewlett made the point that, even when we paid for newspapers, our secondary consumption (eg. in a library archive) and conversation was free. It was, and its a good point, but the network in which that conversation occured was comparatively stunted – just people we knew. Now the network of secondary consumption and conversation is gigantic and accounts for much of the value created by content in terms of comment, correction, re-use and aggregation. The relationship between journalist and audience has changed from one that’s indirect and mediated by truck and newsagent to one that’s direct and continuous, a service relationship with two-way interactions where publication is often the beginning rather than the end of content production.

    The internet creates the potential to make a fundamental change in journalistic practice and enables publishers to shift from product to service, whereby content is the means of introducing other sources of value such as real world products, information or services. This means, simply, that advertising and subscription are no longer the only revenue sources and might become secondary. This is Murdoch’s error, not realising that a newspaper isn’t a newspaper any more.

    When asked why the New York Times tried a paywall and went back to free, Gurtej Sandhu said they blinked. We wonder if The Times will be blinking, sometime in the next six months or so, when it sees the light.

    Stop press: you can watch/read about the full debate here:

    http://frontlineclub.com/blogs/theforum/2010/05/apple-and-paywalls.html

    8 Comments

    8
    William Owen By William Owen

    20th May 10

    8 comments

     content

    publishing

  • The iPad: one step forward, two steps back?

    The commonplace view within magazine publishing is that the iPad is going to save the industry. Will it? And in the process, will the iPad become a force of reaction, enclosing a free, open and infinitely connected internet within a landscape of small fences and high walls – the tallest being the ones around the iTunes store?

    I had a short talk to give last week at ‘What’s on your iPad”, a well-attended event organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and the Editorial Design Organisation. I adopted the role of sceptic and these were my questions.

    What sparked them off was a couple of conversations with @bobbyc and @malbonster against the background of a loud hum of optimistic speculation buzzing up from the magazine industry on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see it here, at Conde Nast, busy iPadding up with Wired and GQ; here, with Sports Illustrated (you’re not allowed to watch the swimwear section**); and here’s Interview on iPad, a magazine of pages on a screen (see four below from the iPhone app), with a little video thrown in.

    Just when we thought the page had gone away....Interview on iPhone app.

    It’s like going back to 1990 in the days of the CD ROM and the ‘electronic magazine’.  So what is it about the iPad that sets editorial lips aquiver?

    I think there’s five key things:

    Read full post

    6 Comments

    6
    William Owen By William Owen

    12th March 10

    6 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

    design

    publishing

  • Cloudculture, the internet wars and the sublimation of self

    The launch event for Charles Leadbetter’s Cloudculture pamphlet at the ICA last night let loose a rain shower of thoughts about individuality and ownership.
    Charlie’s theme was that we’re moving to a different kind of internet, that its shape would be determined by the “civil war” now raging between old and new media (Murdoch vs Google, Jobs versus the music industry) and between government (security, protection) and citizens (freedom of speech). His gist was that – and I’m paraphrasing wildly now – the outcome would be imprinted in the structure of intellectual property rights that emerges from the fight. The threat is that the battle ensnares the possibilities of creative collaboration, or that cloud capitalists are organising the future landscape to suit corporate and state purposes (I know some, and they are).
    ICA director Ekow Eshun then joined in with a thesis on individuality and the self and ‘who owns the version of ourselves’ that exists in the cloud? “I say”, said Eshun, “it is not ourselves, instead we merge with others”. Hold that thought.
    “So what’s the difference between the network and the cloud?” This was the first question from the audience and it was a good one because it helped pin down the dodgy metaphor of cloud (I could never think of the web as being ‘up there’). Leadbetter’s ironic references to the information superhighway aside: I said, the network connects isolated personal computers and some of the information they hold to each other; the cloud is a set of tools that we can use, collectively, to manipulate the layer upon layer of information and data it holds.
    This raises problems (not really problems, but changes in nature) of authorship, ownership and self. We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves, attach our name to, and the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).
    In response to some #cloudculture tweeting about utopian and distopian visions of cloud computing futures I offer McLuhan’s tetrad, or resonating interval. The tetrad plots the points of change on a continuum of past, present and future, by giving a balanced framework for analysing the effects of technical change in terms of what is enhanced, what does it flip into (reverse) when pushed to an extreme, what does it obsolesce and what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced.
    Here’s my take on a tetrad for cloud computing. Please add to, change or takeaway:

    The launch event for Charles Leadbetter’s Cloudculture pamphlet at the ICA last night let loose a rain-shower of thoughts about individuality and ownership (disclosure: I haven’t read it yet).

    Charlie’s theme was that we’re moving to a different kind of internet, that its shape would be determined by the “civil war” now raging between old and new media (Murdoch vs Google, Jobs versus the music industry) and between government (security, protection) and citizens (freedom of speech). His gist was that – and I’m paraphrasing wildly now – the outcome would be imprinted in the structure of intellectual property rights that emerges from the fight. The threat is that the battle ensnares the possibilities of creative collaboration, or that cloud capitalists are organising the future landscape to suit corporate and state purposes (I know some, and they are).

    ICA director Ekow Eshun then joined in with a thesis on individuality and the self and ‘who owns the version of ourselves’ that exists in the cloud? “I say”, said Eshun, “it is not ourselves, instead we merge with others”. Hold that thought.

    “So what’s the difference between the network and the cloud?” This was the first question from the audience and it was a good one because it helped pin down the dodgy metaphor of cloud (I could never think of the web as being ‘up there’). Leadbetter’s ironic references to the Information Superhighway aside: I said, the network connects together isolated personal computers and (some of) the information they store; the cloud is a set of tools that we can use, collectively, to manipulate and transport layer upon layer of information and data that it holds.

    This raises problems (not really problems, but changes in nature) of authorship, ownership and self. We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

    In response to some #cloudculture tweeting about utopian and distopian visions of cloud computing futures I offer McLuhan’s tetrad, or resonating interval. The tetrad plots the points of change on a continuum of past, present and future, by giving a balanced framework for analysing the effects of technical change in terms of what is enhanced, what does it flip into (reverse) when pushed to an extreme, what does it obsolesce and what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced.

    Here’s my first take on a tetrad for cloud computing. Please consider, add to, change or takeaway:

    Tetrad for cloud computing:

    Tetrad for cloud computing

    5 Comments

    5
    William Owen By William Owen

    9th February 10

    5 comments

     Uncategorized

  • Plotting a critical path

    I’ve enjoyed following the debate around Manuel Lima’s information visualisation manifesto, published after he spoke here at Kingly Street last month (see Justin’s post below). The manifesto was sparked by a call from a part of the audience for a critical discourse on data visualisation, so that we could stop just going “Ooohhh” and begin to answer the question ‘What makes a good diagram?’.

    Manuel’s response was the succinct and simple yardstick: “form follows revelation”.

    He elaborates: “Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualization, Form follows Revelation…. Independently of the subject, the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight.”

    This is an essential truth but there’s a lot of filling in to do before being able to apply the maxim in the world, and Manuel begins with these sub-clauses: start with a question; interactivity is key (discuss); cite your source; [use] the power of narrative; do not glorify aesthetics; look for relevancy; embrace time [cf. interactivity]; aspire for knowledge; avoid gratuitous visualizations.

    I have others of my own, but I’ll start by referring back to the origin of the debate which is (I can say with authority, as one of Ian Douglas’ naysayers) that, in half a decade of observing dynamic and interactive data visualisation emerge, there’s a frustration that the critique hasn’t moved beyond cataloging new typologies (of which an excellent job has been done by Manuel’s visualcomplexity.com, the infosthetics blog, and by books such as Data Flow and Else/Where.

    I wrote a review of Else/Where in Eye in 2006 (you can read it here) which took up the theme:

    “Else/where reveals that, whereas the abstractions we use to represent relationships, dimensions and properties in the physical world are universally understood and ingrained in our consciousness, the visual language of intangible landscapes is immature”.

    And In reference to one particular diagram:

    “No matter how much well-researched data the Map of World Government contains within its frame, the message is unclear, the scale wrong, the detail obscured by arcane pictograms and its visual intensity diminished by over-reliance on text. This ‘map’ leaves its reader powerless. Like… Read full post

    1 Comment

    1
    William Owen By William Owen

    19th October 09

    1 comment

     Made by Many

    opinion

  • Climate Squad: from social media to social movement

    Made by Many is pleased as punch to announce the launch of climatesquad.org.uk, a platform for joining and organising actions to halt climate change that’s also the first of a series of initiatives by V to change the way youth volunteering works in the UK.

    climatesquadhome1

    V is an organisation funded by the Office of the Third Sector to promote and fund volunteering for 16-25 year olds. V came to Made by Many 8 months ago, asking us to create a vision for future volunteering with the expectation that digital engagement would reduce barriers to young people joining in voluntary action. In May we started working on Climate Squad, joint funded by V and Bank of America, as the first implementation of the strategy we defined with V.

    Read full post

    No Comments

    0
    William Owen By William Owen

    11th September 09

    0 comments

     Clients

    Climate Squad

    Great Stuff

    Social Web

    Uncategorized

  • Who you gonna call?

    img_0928-crop1

    You’ve left the station, you need a cab, who are you going to call? This lottery of eight choices, seen yesterday in Dinard, north west France, is a poetic demonstration of how lousy customer experience arises out of poor service design.

    So (here’s one to ponder for the weekend) what’s the chances of the person needing a taxi getting a driver who’s free with their first call? At busy times – when, by definition, more people want fewer available taxis -they can’t be much better than winning at roulette in the Dinard casino over the road. It could be eight calls and there’s still no guarantee of a car.

    Dinard taxi drivers are obviously an independent lot. Some chasm in their thinking or idiosyncrasy of behaviour has created a painful and potentially time-consuming dilemma for potential clients. What’s stopping the drivers clubbing together to have one number, a single base and a rota system?

    Is it mutual mistrust? Cost? Lack of demand making it not worthwhile? Or is it just a “sod the customers and make them pay” attitude? And by what stroke of chance or seniority did Michel Loquen come to be at the top of the list? Poor old Luc Tacher, stuck there at the bottom, must be having a hard time of things, or do more people call him on the sensible grounds that he’s most likely to be free?

    There’s got to be a better way, so here’s a challenge everybody: best use of creative technology and design to create the ideal low cost, customer-friendly, fair-to-all-drivers contact system for Dinard taxis. Rest assured all helpful suggestions will be passed on to Michel, Didier, Joseph, Philippe, Laurence, Jean-Michel, Allo (?) and Luc. After all, we have their numbers.

    3 Comments

    3
    William Owen By William Owen

    29th May 09

    3 comments

     Made by Many

  • Why we don’t subscribe to Rupert Murdoch, and why we need a new kind of money

    New Media Age reports that ‘Times Online and theSun.co.uk are likely to start charging for content after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch ‘indicated such a model could be in place within a year’.

    And The Guardian is considering charging users to access specialist areas of its site to counter falling ad revenues.

    (I’ll give you a link to the stories, here and here, but with sweet irony N.M.A. has a subscription-only model so you may not be able to read them.)

    No surprises here. Their backs to the wall, display advertising collapsing under the weight of social media, traditional news organisations are retreating to a familiar industrial-era mechanism. Copyright, subscription, advertising: they’ve worked for 200 years or more, why won’t they work now?

    Well subscription won’t work because newspapers are not niche, not strictly professional (like N.M.A) and definitely not exclusive. Hell, the competition’s free and these days it’s as good if not better than organised, editorialised, branded journalism. I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth? You can’t buy my loyalty Mr Murdoch, there’s no value in it for me.

    There’s a massive failure of imagination here. We’ve said (again and again) that newspapers and magazine publishers have to make the shift from product to service and until they do that they’ll have nothing to charge for. The web isn’t a walled garden either (with a pay booth) and journalism no longer has to be collected into a proprietorial framework. Spot.us is just one interesting example of an alternative and imaginative approach to making a living out of journalism without the need for Rupert Murdoch’s capital or his distribution network. Spot.us works by popular commissioning. It might fill a gap left by dying newspapers using a business model invented for the social media age. Here’s the elevator pitch:

    Spot.us is a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us journalists can pitch ideas or the public can commission investigations that they then fund with tax deductible donations. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.

    Spot.us aside, it’s not just a question of imagination. There’s also a failure of money. Everyone’s complaining that they can’t monetise social media and one reason is that incremental value is very small. Money’s magic is wearing thin when it doesn’t work as a medium of exchange in a massively fragmented world. How do I buy little bits of things with very marginal value (even bits of Guardian, bits of Times).

    If a credit/debit card is the only option then it’s simple: I don’t. The social web requires something different to ordinary money, it needs a new currency measured in 100ths or 10ths of cents or pennies that allows us to make simple choices with an ambient mechanism, so that people can choose to acquire tidbits with real value at a fair price, with ease and security.

    The debit card, just as it starts to replace cash money on the street, isn’t working on the net. Interestingly, there’s one system that’s already geared up to micropayments (except we need nanopayments) and that’s the billing mechanism for mobile phones. We need Mcash on the net please. Rupert needs it too (truck loads, probably).

    12 Comments

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    William Owen By William Owen

    12th May 09

    12 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • Temporary Autonomous Zone revisited

    THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life… I called the settlements “Pirate Utopias.”

    I’ve been re-reading T.A.Z, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism) by Hakim Bey.

    A.k.a Peter Lamborn Wilson, the author is an American anarchist/sufi/mystic with a lunatic perspicacity and I’ve been dumbfounded by the clarity with which T.A.Z reveals the landscape of possibility opened up by the web in the two decades since he wrote his essay in 1990. I saw Wilson speak at the second Doors of Perception conference in 1994 and must have been impressed enough to buy the book. Re-reading 15 years later it becomes immediately comprehensible as an analysis of transient freedoms (eg. Twitter as a T.A.Z, now being reeled in and controlled by Wilson’s seething megacorporate state) and ‘islands in the net’, where the shackles of redundant social and economic typologies are torn off. There’s a perfect parallel between his opening historical review of pirate utopias and the downfall of Pirate Bay last month – these guys set up their T.A.Z and stayed in one place too long, forgetting the central tenet of T.A.Z., which is:

    The T.A.Z is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.

    You can get the full text of T.A.Z. online at http://bit.ly/YB36r), but here’s an essential flavour:

    Recently Bruce Sterling, one of the leading exponents of Cyberpunk science fiction, published a near-future romance based on the assumption that the decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living: giant worker-owned corporations, independent enclaves devoted to “data piracy,” Green-Social-Democrat enclaves, Zerowork enclaves, anarchist liberated zones, etc. The information economy which supports this diversity is called the Net; the enclaves (and the book’s title) are Islands in the Net.

    I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about “islands in the net” we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of “free enclave” is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated T.A.Z).

    …The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the “strike” and the “defense” should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability”–an “occult” art within the martial arts. The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future–Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori–the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization…

    We are looking for “spaces” (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones–and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.

    I love those last two paragraphs (especially the parts in italics – mine) the penultimate one because it’s very agile, very start-up, the last because, if you replace ‘State’ with Convention/Monopoly/Incumbant/Corporation/Old Media we have an apt description of what Made by Many sets out to do – dowsing for potential TAZs.

    Re-reading T.A.Z. reminded me that we didn’t create the web because the technology was available but because we imagined it – the freedom it might create and the disruption it would cause – and wanted it. Wilson and the cyberpunks who preceded him (Gibson, Sterling, Rucker et al) were writing in the time of the bulletin board and list server, well before there was anything really web-like but when what narrow bandwidth did exist was purely social. The reason I guess that we need reminding of this is that the transformation of the web from bulletin board to Great Big Shop in the dotcom boom shattered the link between the imagined world of cyberpunk and the tawdry reality of the bust. Now the link might be worth revisiting, so I’m going to dust off my copies of Neuromancer and Mirrorshades.

    One more word: in a preface to the second edition of T.A.Z Wilson rebutted a lot of his more literal ideas about the web (meaning internet), sometimes with good reason because quite a lot of it is faintly ludicrous – but also because 2003 was a profoundly counter-revolutionary period in the history of the internet. I’ll leave you with this – and especially the bit in bold – so suspend your disbelief and read on:

    At this moment [1991] in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands for the “face-to-face” and the sensual, we must consider the Web primarily as a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it “invisible” or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. But more than that: If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and portents.

    The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth, mail, the marginal zine network, “phone trees,” and the like already suffice to construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the structure. Nevertheless, the whole concept of the Net implies the use of computers. In the SciFi imagination the Net is headed for the condition of Cyberspace (as in Tron or Neuromancer) and the pseudo-telepathy of “virtual reality.” As a Cyberpunk fan I can’t help but envision “reality hacking” playing a major role in the creation of TAZs. Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the official Net will never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net–that data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. (In fact, as I understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible).

    1 Comment

    1
    William Owen By William Owen

    9th May 09

    1 comment

     Made by Many

  • Mostly gloom for glossies

    The New York Times reports here on the fall in magazines’ ad pages (and no doubt revenues) and sugars the pill with a cute piece of interactive information design (would have been good to have the year by year between ‘05 and ‘08 though, to see how must was systemic and how much was credit crunch-induced).

    The Times says: “Another day, another closure. Magazines are becoming thinner as advertising pages fall, and publishers are grimly cutting underperforming titles. But the outlook is not dour for all — a handful of magazines are still expanding their ad lineups, some by startlingly high percentages.”

    It so happens that Elle and the Economist are notable risers, but they’re in a very small minority; Business Week, Time, The New Yorker and Fortune are big fallers.

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    0
    William Owen By William Owen

    4th February 09

    0 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

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