broadstuff

We predicted last year that 2007 would be the year that the Trust / Identity / Privacy issue hit the mainstream, and the last week or so has seen an interesting situation - the emergence of the "more private than thou" play as a differentiator.

Google has been resisting anonymising (or in any way limiting really) its ability to trawl the behavioural data of its user base, but was earlier this year (March) dragged to a position where it agreed that after 18 months it would do so, and earlier this month agreed to limiting cookie lifespan to 2 years after usage of Google stopped. That this is unimpressive is best expressed today in an FT article asking Google to please consider doing no evil, as it says on the tin.

However. this has also opened up the very interesting opportunity for Google to be sideswiped by less evil competition. Ask.com and Yahoo now have a mere 13 months stored individual data

Last week Ask.com went for the ability to erase the trace of a search, and now Microsoft is allowing people to toggle the privacy of their searches (see the New York Times Article)

(Update - A similar view has been put up here on Search Engine Journal)

However, we expect the pressure to continue, as people become increasingly aware (i) how intrusive these systems can be and (ii) they are creating value that others are taking off the table.

So where will it all end?

We suspect that the more the players try to vertically integrate the value chain, the more that legislative bodies will take an interest. Google by its sheer size is already exciting interest

But if you asked the average person to toggle for:

(i) erase vs record a Search
(ii) anonymise v personalise your Search results

...then we would hypothesize that a rapidly growing majority would go for these, and to offer (more intrusive) others one would need to "incentivise" the user. In other words, we suspect that the arms race to "do the least evil" will continue for quite a while.

Where this leaves a player that makes all its money from targeted Ads is an interesting question, so one can expect players like Microsoft or Yahoo to push this quite a bit harder yet.

Postscript...noted that both the WSJ and FT picked up this story...a meme of the times !

Was mulling over something I read in a piece Nic Brisbourne wrote earlier this week , about marketing people paying Linden avatars to hang around their clients' sites to make them look populated / popular, virtual world spam, and an aside about a little script that can make the avatar move.

I was nostalgically taken back to some stuff I first looked at some 10 years ago, ie Evolutionary Algorithms and the wider virtual science of Artificial Life.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, in a nutshell Artificial Life (A-Life) is the creation of self organising artificial systems that behave in life like ways. The underlying rules of quite complex behaviour can be very simple, for example "Boids" was an early very simple simulation of the way that flocks of birds fly - see an explanation here, and this YouTube video below



Anyway, seemed to me that those advertising wonks doing this are total amateurs at this game....if you are going to have false punters anyway ( sockpunters? ) why not have a whole swarm of 'em rather than a paltry few, and why not stick some A-Life routines in so that all those fake avatars can go do lots more that just twitch to the vibe. Send em touring in swarms, let em breed with each other.....

In fact, take it one step farther.........add some more complex A-Life routines and your Avatar can just go touring Second Life on its own, you need never bother to go there, Linden gets its visitor numbers up (hey, why not spawn a few million of its own using Genetic Algorithms while you are at it.), then the PR agencies that flog SL presence continue to make money and the poor old client is none the wiser

Unless they read this of course....

And why stop there...program those artificial avatars with some Messages From Your Client, so next time some sucker tries to chat up some gorgeous creature in SL, he/she gets a whole reel of real time Spam.

With realistic facial gestures and manners to boot.

Yes, you have just met a Spavatar .............. Turing would be proud of us

3D Spam - hah! - you haven't even seen the start of it yet......

Hmmm..I wonder if those nice chaps at IBM are building one of these

So, here is the traffic curve on Alexa for Second Life, the darling of the Web 3.D world. As you can see. the traffic is going down. Now, this clearly cannot be from Second Life usage declining, surely

So we can come to only one conclusion - that for some Strange Reason, Alexa toolbar owners are going elsewhere.

So its not just me who is on more than one social network......Nielsen's survey of UK netpeople (see here) suggests strong overlaps in user bases. Don't you just love the Facebook / MySpace commonality.

Implication.....that the market for social networks is becoming like that for fizzy drinks or fast food...most of us use most of them, there is little of unique value except the buddy list - but it is clear that we do move 'em over, its no real barrier to exit.

And therein lies the seeds of their destruction....its a pain to port my buddylist from say Linked In to Facebook, the easiest is just to get everyone's email and...wait a minute...if I have everyone's email why bother with a SocNet, as its far easier to communicate from an email client than the multiple skips and clicks in the average SocNet.

Also, its seems that they are not such great cop as Ad servers, and that ultimately will determine their fates as people by and large have not been prepared to pay for SocNets in Web 0 or Web 1.0...and the newest darling, Facebook, seems worse than others

Maybe Microsoft Outlook is the ultimate Social Network....

Digg is setting up a service for the iPhone....because its worth it. No doubt many others will follow suit.

We have been doing quite a lot of client work on the emergence of mobile multimedia recently, and one of the things that comes out strongly is the predictable refusal of the operator-handset complex to adopt new stuff...they lost email to Blackberry, music to Apple, and will likely lose video multimedia as well.

Ah well....sounds the death knell for the current crop of "web browsing" mobile handsets anyway....and not a minute too soon.

Hint - lose those buttons that launch a webservice whenever your finger slips guys, its cheesy and just makes us know you're out to rook us....

We contributed some of our work to Tony Fish & Ajit Jaokars "Mobile Web 2.0" book, and have been following the scene closely ever since. Readers of this blog will know that in our view the Mobile Web 2.0 cannot happen until:

- There is some form common operating "system" (in its broadest sense) to make it economics to write interoperable apps, and that makers allow access to devices
- The operators allow access outside their walled gardens;
- At a price that is low enough to foster rather than stifle takeup

Up till now, all the evidence has been that these will happen over the dead bodies of Planet Mobile, and probably only because of the arrival of rival networks and handset makers.

A new announcement in the US may shake all this up however: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will propose sweeping new rules for wireless airwaves the government is auctioning early next year. Under Martin's proposal mobile services in the new spectrum being auctioned would have to allow consumer choice. To quote the article

The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services. The Apple iPhone is a prime example: Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone is, in industry parlance, "locked." It allows only features and applications that Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) provide and works only with an AT&T contract

The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices "hamper innovations" dreamed up by outside developers. One example: Mobile devices that also can use Wi-Fi, such as a home network or airport "hot spot," for Internet access. "Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time," Martin noted. "But they are just beginning to roll out here."

No doubt the operators will point out that a licence is worth less to them under this regime, but I suggest he goes ahead as this would - ultimately - be a bluff, since any owner (like, maybe Google, or Microsoft, or Apple - just the sort of new guys on the block you want) of these new licences would take business hand over fist away from the current operators.

As an aside this bit shook me...the article was talking about Europe:

In Europe, for example, consumers for years have had access to an array of "unlocked" devices they can pack with applications from a variety of developers.

Because the devices aren't tethered to any one carrier, wireless consumers in other countries can take devices with them when they switch carriers. In the USA, with cellphones typically "locked," customers who switch have to throw their old phones away.

Blimey......and we thought our lot were restrictive.

It will be very interesting to see what happens, because if this goes ahead it will open the way for a Mobile Web 2.0 environment far more than elsewhere (except Japan and Korea, but that will evolve in a very different way)

And again if this happens we would expect the self satisfied superiority Europeans feel about their mobile services to disappear near-overnight - already the level of innovation in US mobile is far more than in Europe (admittedly funded by VCs with a higher risk appetite), but if that is added to a real open platform, it will leave Europeans lagging the Mobile Web 2.0 world quite badly.

There's no spectrum we could licence here like that I wonder

Neilson is going to de-emphasize the Web 1.0 staple, the page view and look at other - woollier in our view - measures of Ad effectiveness going foward.

"Based on everything that's going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. "We're changing our stance on how the data should be" used.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them. Ross said page view remains a valid gauge of a site's ad inventory, but time spent is better for capturing the level of engagement users have with a site.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.'s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo's 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

"It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement," Ross said. "Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, 'How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?'"

For example, he said, MySpace may have 10 to 11 times more page views than YouTube, but myspace.com users spend only three times more minutes on the site, Ross added. Therefore, measuring total time spent on a site will make it easier for advertisers to mold their ads to how users are actually accessing content, he said.

I'm not sure this is the right way to go.......as Read/Write notes:

On balance I think it will be a step forward if Nielsen does indeed drop page views for 'time spent on site' in its rankings.

It's not yet a totally satisfying change, because with the likes of Google you want to somehow measure relevancy and with blogs you want to measure engagement. But it's at least a step away from page views, which have become too easily exploited - not just by some blogs, but also by the likes of Facebook and MySpace (which both make the user go through extra clicks to get to what they want). What do you think of this change by Nielsen?

The question we have is - how long do you need to "clock" an Ad. For eg, mean user time on Broadstuff is about 5.5 minutes - assuming we had Advertising, any extra time spent on site is probably irrelevant once a particular Ad has been "clocked", so volume must still be a part of the measure. Also, looking at Broadstuff for example, a huge amount of the "pageviews" are hoovered off via RSS and email - do we attach an estimated "average time", or do we just assume its been read and clocked.

The way we would think about it is to:

(i) Work out the minimum "human clocking time" for the type of Ads served
(ii) Calculate all impressions of all types above this level, discard all below - and do research on real usage % of RSS and email feeds
(iii) Ignore time above that cycle per Ad....just because I look at a page for 5 minutes doesn't mean the Ad got any more attention than 1 minute.

This should kill the MySpace et al 6 clicks to freedom play...each of them will be over in a second (or will we now see huge arguments for the subliminal value of Ads?)

Just using time is as open to abuse (or over-favours rich form media) as just measuring impressions.

(This applies to display Ads only, clearly click through Ads are measurable via activity levels)

(Postscript - A further thought - the problem with metrics is people optimise towards them, so the question is which set of metrics will give the least unpleasant user experience? We suspect a combination has to be used or else either one is sent on to interminable click-throughs, or else inteminably long "stickitricks")

Post - Postscript...this post got picked up on Techmeme so I've been following the discussion with growing frustartion - loads of people criticisizing Neilsen, but no one putting up an alternative - this post is typical - and until that happens we will be stuck with the imperfect metrics we have. If one cannot suggest a better system (as we have tried above), how about not posting?

Unless of course the point is not to solve, but to pontificate for points

There is a very interesting article here by Jakob Nielsen on the type of article a "Professional" information working blogger should write - and coming down in favour of longer, more in depth posts. His argument is essentially that:

It's almost impossible to fight the Internet: you're up against millions of people who are willing to work for free. But you have to do so, because if you work within the prevailing Web paradigm you're letting the search engines take 98% of your content's value. That's okay if you're not in the content business. Our pistachio site doesn't mind that it's not making money off its recipe for delicious pistachio ice cream. Just as long as it sells nuts.

If you're an expert who wants to live from adding to the world's knowledge, you must go beyond the mainstream Web model of single page visits driven by search traffic. It's easy enough to build a website that freeloaders will use, but that shouldn't be your approach. You must change the game and create content that's so valuable that business users are willing to pay for it.

You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can't easily create in their spare time.

Both of these needs are met when you produce in-depth content.

This is an interesting thought, ie the blog should produce the sort of content a user will pay for. The question for us is, if you do that, why put it in a blog for free? The key here is to understand what the role of the blog is - to be a marketing tool for the nuts you sell, or a direct revenue earning tool. Anyway, he goes on to note:

In-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn't add up to Shakespeare. They'll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren't integrated and that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic -- even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.

Thorough content's added value can rise above the threshold where customers become willing to be separated from their money. This is the true measure of a sustainable business.

You have to identify opportunities with a non-linear utility function: where paying customers assign more than 10 times higher value to something that costs 10 times as much to produce.

It's a debate we have with ourselves and with other "Consulting" bloggers in the UK in our space - what is the best approach to demonstrating your capability - longer thoughtpieces, or bite size chunks. To be fair, he is clear about his purpose:

I recently served as a "consultant's consultant," advising a world leader in his field on what to do about his website. In particular, this expert asked me whether he should start a weblog. I said no.

You probably already know my own Internet strategy, so it might not surprise you that I recommended that he should instead invest his time in writing thorough articles that he published on a regular schedule. Given limited time, this means not spending the effort to post numerous short comments on ongoing blogosphere discussions.

We've also had similar conversations in the past with various people such as Stowe Boyd on this very subject - our Internet Strategy. The conclusion - it depends on where you are coming from, and when. We are not Gurus, we don't get a stream of people knocking on our door giving us work will-he nill-he (yet...we live in hope ;), so we still need marketing capability. Part of that is good old face to face networking, but we envisioned the blog as being primarily on the marketing / PR side (insofar as we envisaged it had a "business" role at all - initially it was an experiment that seemed interesting and fun to do) , that indirectly (hopefully) brought work to us, rather than a direct revenue earner. We also thought it would be a great way to have a conversation with people in our space and learn new things.

Here's why - lets look at the consulting output we do for example to look at economic return on time invested

- At the highest return, maybe several tens of thousands of pounds, is the crafted study, sometimes with a report, specific to the client's circumstances. This is a one off piece of work typically, and confidentiality means much of it cannot be re-used.

- Next is the topic report, typically a few thousand pounds at most, on a specific area of expertise based on our work (we tend to write about what we actually have done - online advertising for example). Sure, one sells a number of copies of the report, but (as yet) it doesn't hit the consulting numbers...though over time, with enough report out there, we hope to see a recurring revenue stream of sorts

- After that comes the "essay", or thoughtpiece - typically for a seminar or somesuch, and we will charge several hundred pounds for that.

All these are basically limited access...we make the money by not giving it out for free. This is what puts bread on table, roof over head etc etc....

(We also build technology, like this, but that's another story for another time)

After that there are the papers, typically we like these to be published in respected journals with good access, and payment is nominal...a few hundred pounds tops. Then there are the occasional papers we do....for example the one on Podcasting that is now a chapter in the Mobile Web 2.0 book. That got us a very nice Indian meal

But it takes several days to write a good paper, and as can be seen above, the economic return is sub-marginal - unless you see it as a marketing exercise.

And then there is this blog - Broadstuff.

Now, there is a debate - and we have had it in spades - about whether the role of the blog is to get clients, get exposure, or get profitable.

Ideally all three of course....

But the key question is about time put in. To make any decent money from a blog you have to work full time, and the probability of great success is quite low.

However, from the above you will realise we make more money from our other work. We write this blog on our marginal time...eating breakfast at the desk, last thing at night, over a cup of tea in the day. If we are unloaded on client work, the economics say it is better to write a report and sell it for several thousand pounds, rather than write another blog post.

And its also to do with lifecycle......Read/Write web took 3 years to get to current size, its only in the last 9 months that its been full time. We are only 9 months old, so still some way to go. Clearly, if 18 months down the line we have a blog running at 20,000 visitors a day then we will make different decisions.

But, the other big, big thing we decided though, is that it had to be fun to blog - fun means passion and quality for free, and makes you look at it as a pleasure, not a chore - and that means (for us anyway) that the blog is about the quick take, the wider licence, a dash of irreverence, i.e. its about writing sketches. Pen pictures rather than a full work of art. Besides, our view is that if you write about stuff you know about you should be able to add value, even in bite sized chunks.

A blog is therefore a sketchpad, not an easel....and Twitter - microblogging - is just doodling therefore

Have we won any work from it - yes, indirectly - the main thing the blog has done so far is allowed us to meet and have conversations with interesting people all over the world, increasing our understanding, and that in turn has led to recommendations.

Nonetheless, Jakob does make 2 good points to ponder:

(i) What are you doing to add 10x value on your blog
(ii) For a niche blog, its not quantity of readers, its quality you need.

These are good points to ponder 9 months into starting Broadstuff.

So, it probably is worth putting a bit more meat into the blog every so often, move it up from a sketch to a bit more of a sketchpad - a linked set of sketches, plus the occasional killer slide from our work, and longer post taking things to another level of depth - maybe work in progress from our articles or summaries of our shorter presentations.

However, we are often bound by NDA agreements etc about our work...its very rare we can shout about it, so it is a fine line to tread between adding serious value and giving away client confidentiality. Still, the McKinsey Quarterly has walked the line very successfully for years, so it should be possible

And there is a sound business reason for that, so we can even justify it - as Stowe pointed out, it is a totally different conversation when the client is selecting you because of work they have read and already internalised.

But...it still has to be fun!

Right....and thats thoughts enough for one night....

(postscript...I did a bit of tidying up over morning coffee too)

Now this is fascinating, it picks up on something we've blogged about a number of times (here for eg) - ie that the subtlety in social network personae is too low at present, and more nuance is required to manage the complex web of our friendships. This article thinks about what may be required to do this, and what may occur if it were so....

First, the background, a paper by Judith Donath of MiIT MediaLab that we can't see but is blogged on Ars Technica:

Donath notes that even seemingly simple human behaviors are accompanied by collections of body language and expressions that can reinforce or undercut the messages we intend to send. For instance, she suggests that we signal our intention to engage someone in conversation by a complex suite of gestures, mostly nonverbal: "You carry out this goal not only by walking across the room but also by making eye contact, smiling, raising your brows, adjusting your clothes—a complex set of communicative behaviors that indicate your intention to start a conversation, allow you to gauge his willingness to do so, and show your level of determination."

Right now, even the most sophisticated avatars accomplish only a small subset of these behavioral collections. But that's beginning to change, at least within the research community. Although putting all of the components of these behaviors under user control is viewed as too complex, Donath cites work in which entire suites of behavior could be controlled by a single command. For example, an avatar commanded to end a conversation can nod its head, wave, and break eye contact. Users of such systems found them natural and more engaging, and they found their conversation partners to be more expressive.

Looking at many computer games there is no doubt that this technology is not only in the research world but in the market, it just hasn't been applied to Social Nets yet> I've been quite intrigued by the number of people on facebook using "lookalike avatar" representations of themself already, a la Second Life.

Although these sorts of advances may make for a more appealing virtual experience, Donath suggests that they have some disturbing implications for issues of trust and credibility when future avatars are used for communication. She notes that we interpret many behavioral collections in light of what they tell us about the person who is doing the talking. For example, we tend to view someone who doesn't make eye contact as more likely to be lying, providing uncertain information, or simply uninterested in talking with us. A well-programmed avatar can be commanded to engage in behaviors that simulate honesty, regardless of whether the speaker is trustworthy.

Research is also revealing that other factors play into an avatar's trustworthiness and credibility. For example, simply making an avatar appear more human (including providing it with a clear gender) caused them to be rated more trustworthy. Other research has shown that trust can also be manipulated via more subtle techniques. Teams of people paid greater attention to an avatar that was created with a "team face," one that combined features from the members of the team. Individuals found political messages more persuasive when they were delivered by an avatar with a subtle resemblance to the listener's own face.

And this is the killer thought I was really intrigued by...

Donath specifically raises the disturbing possibility of, "a world in which you are bombarded with oddly compelling ad campaigns presented by people just like you." But she also suggests that current trends, if they continue, may leave us with avatars tailored to the contexts where they're used. After all, we demand detailed and elaborate avatars for our online fantasy games but will happily accept far less for what's billed as our "Second Life." It's possible that we'll actually wind up demanding less sophisticated avatars to deliver the most critical information in order to avoid the potential for manipulation. But only, of course, if we're aware of the danger.

We did an analysis of the popularity of our posts since Broadstuff started with Karma points. What was interesting was not so much the most popular, but the least:

Here they are, in order of declining infamy:

-39% About Open Coffee spam on their discussion board
-29% Winding up Twitternuts re Twitterporn shock horror
-27% That Olympic Logo - clearly their PR were out on a trashfest
-25% Microsoft buying up Ad Co's in desperate attempt to keep up with You-Know-Who
-24% Questioning Joost et al's reliance on Ad funding and closed services
-23% Last .fm exiting just before life gets far tougher for them
-22% Pointing out that IPTV will be a webservice and all the current plays are mere stepping stones
-21% Digg Gaming makes Digg crap
-17% London's crap and overpriced WiFi initiatives
-16% Putting Broadstuff on Twitter

Now, we don't think the quality of writing differs hugely from the worst to best (its all incredibly erudite and witty of course...), the difference is in the subject. In general these posts have tended to prick a sacred cow early on (if you read most of them now, its fairly uncontentious stuff).

On the last one....poking fun at Twitter is still akin to heresy far worse than teasing the GreenPriests, which says a lot about priorities of the Twits - but we were very early onto Twitter as a blog - which also seemed to cause consternation - damned either way eh

What is more irritating is that the drive by fanboys who hit the -ve karma never bother to comment and give us a refutation of our point of view (so we can hold it up to the ridicule it deserves - sorry, have a conversation - of course.)

So, to each of them, a sacred cowpat on the head