Posts tagged as:

sharing

The Social Media to Sharing is what Porn is to Love

by Ben Atlas on Feb 13, 2010 - 10:59

We like to share, it’s in our DNA code, alas the Internet culture, especially the so-called Social Media interchangeably described as the “Web 2.0 religion”, takes this indispensable urge, hollows it out and displays it back to our species as a caricature of ourselves. As I wrote, we evolved due to our capacity to belong to a group as much as we did through the ruthless individual selection. We are the sharing animals, as in “my friend, I killed an elk today, let’s find some wood together so we can roast it” or “my friend, I saw a dream today, do you know how it explains the mythology of our tribe?” The key is not a “link” to the dream, but the shared interpretation. We are predisposed to sharing because that is how we construct the world or even survive physically. Fast forward to the dawn of the Internet when the idea of friendship is superseded with the “following” and the idea of sharing means spamming your “friends” with the links to the vapid Onion skits. The natural act of sharing is just a foreplay to a conversation. The sharing is unfulfilling and unfilled when it becomes a destination instead of a road.

And yes I am aware that in theory Web 2.0 is a conversational medium with the explicit feedback loop. But I am not talking theories here, I am talking the broadcast reality of how the tools are used. I am talking about the viral crap of the lowest common denominator, that literally spreads like a disease. Remember the warped phenomenon of the “dancing baby”? Well, it still endures in the literally and figuratively puke inducing Etrade commercials. Speaking of which,  this distortion burrows its way into the essence of the American consumerist ethos, even a cursory scan of this year’s Superbowl commercials will show a trend towards the cheap and the vulgar laughs at the expense of the creative and the imaginative. Turns out that that the millions of dollars invested in the production would rather buy a quickie, viral ready giggle than an emotional (let alone intellectual) response. Welcome to the “LOL generation” gone mainstream. Share alike and like!

Free for All Permission Sharing

by Ben Atlas on Jul 6, 2009 - 20:25 · 17 comments

I am jumping into the fray of the “free for all” debate. Seth Godin linked the most pertinent articles on Squidoo.

It seems that everyone takes the side and the virtual direction of his own shingle. Seth Godin in Malcolm is wrong speaks like a marketer, the internet allowed focused marketing (permission) campaigns and lubricated the display of a product, free samples and branding.

Fred Wilson speaks like a VC in Freemium and Freeconomics. As a banker Fred’s goal is to maximize the investment and while the cost of the delivery of the content is near zero, it would be most useful if the content itself is also zero. After all Google, Facebook and Twitter are not in the content creation business, they collate, sort, annotate and store what people give them for free. In Fred’s recent post about his vision for a newspaper he speaks more directly about the subject of the debate – Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media:

“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.”

Notice that nowhere in the business plan is there even a concern about how the creators of the original content get paid. The idiots just post it on Flickr and YouTube so the “editors” can start curating… It’s all deposited for free and distributed almost for free so that the bankers can scale, kill the remaining competition and maximize the return on the investment in the aggregator. This is when the “freemium” thingy kicks in. After all competition is demolished, the writers will come and beg to be published for free. And the mighty curators will rescue the lowly content creators from the abyss of obscurity. The “editors” will set fees for the writers on par with the sneaker makers in Bangladesh to make sure the adverse conditions spur the creative juices. I mean who needs Christiane Amanpour when CNN does such a good job live narrating YouTube videos during the Iran revolution? That makeup the announcers use on air has to be the most expensive part of the report. Literally no skin in that game, somebody gets bloody and you just run it on CNN freely with the ads in-between.

There is a post by Mark Cuban – Free vs Freely Distributed. Amongst his numerous business achievements Mark is an investor in Television. So I wasn’t surprised when Mark essentially articulated a TV business model. The content is distributed for free but where and how the content is displayed and monetized is tightly controlled by the content creators. Again, this is your TV model, Mark Cuban writes:

“They should distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.”

And now the idea that has been circling in my head. Permission Marketing means that you need my permission to send me an email about a product. Why don’t you need my explicit permission to use my content? You can use my photos, my text, etc, but you have to ask and agree on the terms, even if it’s free.

Ban all “embeds” and “cut & pastes”. I mean it! Redefine the internet share culture. An example, suppose Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is using a Flickr photo to illustrate his post with a credit to the photographer, naturally. Next this photo will get indexed and tagged with Guy’s text. The photo will be archived in the Google image library with Guy’s URL and will bring traffic to his blog, but rarely anything back to the original photographer. This doesn’t seem right? If you let the bird out of the cage there has to be some compensation for the person who fed and raised that bird. I remember circa 1998? Jim Cramer couldn’t get over the fact that financial Reuters feeds that previously cost thousands of dollars on the Bloomberg Terminals suddenly became free on Yahoo! This is where the trouble started!

Solution as I said is straightforward – no republishing of content without the explicit permission from a creator. No “cut & paste” and no “embeds” (brief quotes to make a point are OK). If there is one thing we did learn from Twitter is that you don’t need to republish to share. Links are perfectly fine for sharing and links should be encouraged. But free “share alike” reposts (or the widespread outright content theft) without permission are at the root of this malice.

There is already a model in the newspaper industry, the traditional opinion syndication. You want to publish editorials by Charles Krauthammer, go to Washington Post and negotiated the weekly fee (I did just that when I run a news web site). The copyright law never caught up with the internet reality and the Creative Commons license is unresponsive to the changing reality. RSS culture created the impression that content is permanently detached from the source. The remedy is to to banish the “embed” mentality! The internet sharing culture must be tweaked and reconsidered to allow people to get paid for their creative efforts.