thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Back in the 70′s and early 80′s publishing was protected by a complex range of typesetting and print considerations which provided a barrier to entry for writers or would be publishers.

Publishers looked after the business side with distribution, marketing and printing all needing serious investment to make the numbers work.

The birth of desktop publishing in 1985 (Pagemaker) started a long term series of changes that have ultimately led to every person and his/her dog (lots of dogs! in old school publishing terms) having a go at self publishing. The largest of these is Lulu. Their corporate profile makes a few points as included below.

“To be clear, Lulu is not a publisher. It’s a digital marketplace guided by a vision of empowerment and accessibility, and built on a business model that has proven wildly successful.

The rapid growth of Lulu, which is being driven by over 15,000 new registrations a week and more than 100, 000 unique visitors everyday, is built on its proven ability to grab hold of the long tail of user-generated content and provide an empowering outlet for creators of all types.

Lulu eliminates traditional entry barriers to publishing, and enables content creators and owners – authors and educators, videographers and musicians, businesses and nonprofits, professionals and amateurs – to bring their work directly to their audience.

First, they use Lulu’s tools to format their digital content. Then they take advantage of Lulu’s dedicated marketplace, custom storefronts and advanced listing and distribution services to make their books, videos, CDs, DVDs, calendars, reports and more available to as many, or as few, people around the world as they like, earning 80% of all creator revenue, of which millions of dollars has already been paid out.

As the creation of user-generated content has grown exponentially, Lulu has been at the forefront of this still rapidly growing curve. Traditional book publishers in the United States published roughly 120,000 books a year.

Lulu alone published 98,000 new titles globally, created by some of our almost 1.2 million registered users. In addition, Lulu has empowered creators to post, sell, and share hundreds of thousands of videos, music downloads, artistic creations and great photography.”

Ross Dawson had some very pertinent things to say about when self publishing makes sense using the example provided by David Maister.

“Many more established authors and creative people are going to start making the same choices as David. Since much of the profitability of publishers comes from their big sellers, this is going to prove a problem.

There is absolutely a lot of value that publishers can create, but it is primarily for those early or in the middle of their creative careers. After that, the power and choice shifts to the author, now that it is so easy to self-publish, and the stigma is quickly disappearing.”

You should read his full post. Here is a great diagram from Ross.

“In my book Living Networks I proposed a basic “Creative Career” trajectory, illustrated below.

Ross goes on to say:

The most basic career strategy for content creators is quite simple. In the early stages, use the free flow of the networks to distribute direct, demonstrate that you can tap an attractive market, and attract the interest of a publisher. New York reggae and ska band The Pilfers sold 10,000 CDs at its concerts and on its website, using the leverage to secure a favorable record deal with Universal Music Group.

Many others have signed contracts with record labels on the basis of the success of their freely distributed MP3s.

In the next stage, you work with the publishers for as long as it is worthwhile, getting them to take much of the risk, and commit capital to advances and promotion. Finally, hopefully with reputation well established, you can once again distribute direct, taking all the profits.

Many rock stars later in their career, like David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, or the estate of Frank Zappa, sell directly to their fans. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, chose to publish his first non-Dilbert book, God’s Debris, directly as an ebook, later also selling a hardcopy version. He had full creative control, and could reap all the profits. This generic creative career strategy is illustrated above.

David Maister’s step fits exactly into this analysis. Having used publishers to help gain credibility and a strong audience for his work, it no longer makes sense for him to sell through a publisher. He can self-publish, and take all the value for himself, instead of giving the bulk to a publisher for little value.”

I do recommend reading the full post which includes quotes from David Maister. I’m just dashing out the door for a week in NZ’s deep South so don’t have as much time to write  this week.

One of the best blogs on media and publishing is called Trends in the Living Networks. It  is written by Ross Dawson whose insights make a great deal of sense. Last week he wrote about six trends that will transform living online over the next years

Those 6 trends are (Each gets a paragraph or more.)
1. Pervasive connectivity
2. Immersive experience
3. New interfaces
4. Attention profiling
5. DIY apps
6. Social revolution)

However the one I was most interested in was:-4. Attention profiling

“We are moving to a world of infinite content. The proliferation of blogs, online publications, podcasts, and videos means we are swamped with information.

The first phase of the response has been user filtered content or collaborative filtering on sites such as Last.FM and scouta.com, giving us personalized recommendations.

The next phase will be to develop detailed profiles of our interests and behaviors across different categories of content, so that we can access or be presented with content in a way that matches our available attention relative to the relevance and interest of the content.

The two most promising initiatives in this space – Particls and illumio - have both been launched in the last couple of months.

We can expect it to become a completely seamless process to find or be given what we want from an infinite landscape of content.”

In the life-cycle and growth of any community we see the same phases and variations. For people to make sense of something so large expect them to use filter and tools so that the signal is stronger than than the noise coming from the massed group.

In many ways online behavior is not so different to offline – it is just more exaggerated, mobile and volatile because it can be and because of amplification of the core messages and other content.

I have a very large home library of books that I use like diving boards to explore ideas with. One of the things I like to do is to revisit older books and reread them to see what differences are years or even decades later.

Also I love the idea of being able to re read information from multiple disciplines together in some kind of giant fractal pattern and see what drops out. But that is very time consuming.

Some books like McLuhans Understanding Media are quite readable still and others aren’t so good, but the point is many writers have been speculating on the effects of socialisation and community for a very long time. 

In essence what we see now are the same patterns on fast forward with feedback loops and much more dynamic interactions but similar cycles of change. Now it is possible to speed read 100 or more RSS feeds and get a much better idea where groups of people and ideas might be heading.  However,  there is still a need to decipher these clues and this is where attention profiling or some variation of it comes in.

What is different now is the impact of multiple trends and technologies working together. For example people using DIY apps to do their own attention profiling such as giant tag clouds for filtering and sorting.

I was reminded of the work of Jonathan Harris – who makes some kind of sense from this an anthropological display of clues writ large. There is a 20 min video on TED called The Web’s Secret Stories. There is even an API for the We Feel Fine project.

His computer programs scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.

His projects are both intensely personal (the “We Feel Fine” project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world’s blogs to collect snapshots of the writers’ feelings) and entirely global (the new “Universe,” which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same — to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.

A few weeks back we noticed some unusual host visits from a product called Conversation Miner which is another way that people can use clever tools and filters to keep tabs on what is happening in their “patch. Aubrey Turner had a similar experience and was able to ask the “miner” what was going on. The response is below.

“We pull results a variety of ways, often starting with one of several different search engines and then using our own technology to screen those results. Once they have been pre-screened, one of our employees will actually visit the blog post and read it to determine if it is of interest to our client; the hit you saw was via that system.”

The reality is that networks amplify relationships and so the concept and practise of attention profiling will be one of the key trends as we look for ways to deal with the growth of online communities. 

I was at an recent event where (in passing) a presenter recounted her experiences at various TV conferences along these lines. She told us that many of the industry attendees were still asking variations of “Help the Internet is coming…what do we do?”

The question isn’t new and neither are the answers, but in 2007 the shape of both might look a bit different. Here are some ideas and observations on how content providers and publishers might answer that question and address current and future opportunities.

This has been happening for more than a decade now at various music, film, TV, media and publishing conferences.

The various incumbents are still struggling to transition their business models into a time where distribution is much less of a controlling factor due to the ubiquity of the internet. Even now it seems some media (music, TV and film) businesses are still scared of the future. Even book publishing is also facing big challenges despite the long tail theory.

This fear of the change and the new reminded me of various conferences I attended back in the early 90′s when multi-media CD, CD-i, and DVD formats were just starting to break ahead of the internet wave.

Some Conclusions on the Way Forward

The conclusions back in ’92 and ’93 were that anyone involved in publishing should have some kind of “digital soup” of original content that they could roll out as the public caught up with all the new format choices. Broadcasters now appear to be revisiting the idea of multi format content and platforms but to me 14 years seems a very long time for the penny to drop.

Back in the 30′s sheet music publishers controlled the music business. They were mostly displaced by recorded music and recording industry companies. Those companies kept getting confused on the strategic intent of their industry and we all know what happened to them, just like now.

In a world where everyone can be a content producer and a consumer at the same time – publishers need to learn from history, rethink their business models and adapt. Follow the money, Andrew Dubber is brilliant at deciphering the business side of this. See also the future of music.

The music industry refused to recognise a legal digital music format for some years until iTunes partially rescued them. Now a generation has got used to not paying because they couldn’t – even if they wanted to.

Multimedia History

However, back in ’93 no one really had an idea of how big and how much the internet would change things as modems at the time were running at 1200/2400bd and only used by geeks on bulletin boards for help desk style services. Even then, some people could see the ability to deliver 600Mb + of content on a CD of some kind would be mean industry transformation would be needed.

Perhaps the difference with those multimedia conferences, was that for the most part we were outsiders to the publishing world. I had the pleasure of presenting at a conference in Melbourne where I talked about exploding value chains and other “MBA speak” with growing excitement..little did we know the full implications.

During a coffee break I also showed a music video clip of the Emma Paki song – “System Virtue” by arrangement with her record company as an example of future media content. If you’ve seen the video it has various staunch East coast references which to a middle class white audience was quite a shock.

My thesis was, that given access to a new distribution format which could hold video we would see the music industry trying out new things including new artists. I was only going on instinct and guess work but I believed better access to a suitable medium / or media might allow us to hear different voices, and different politics – such as Emma Paki.

Fast forward to the future again.

A few weeks ago I was listening to this radio interview between Pat Pattison* who was described as the songwriting teacher of Gillian Welch and John Mayer at Berklee College of Music, Boston. He started the course as an Analysis of Song Lyrics.

Berklee offers one of the few songwriting as a major courses in the music world. He was talking with Kim Hill who asked this question. (* now a local podcast copy) in case you tried it and the archive copy didn’t work. The Radio NZ Saturday Kim Hill programme reference is here. Podcast is here http://www.dialogcrm.com/audio/sat-20070818-1005-Playing_Favourites_Pat_Pattison-064.mp3″> (duration: 35’41sec)

Key question: Do you think that we’ve run out of songs that sound new?

She added these song references to her question from one of Pat’s former students.

“There’s gotta be a song left to sing
Cause everybody can’t of thought of everything
One little song that ain’t been sung
One little rag that ain’t been wrung out completely yet
Gotta a little left

One little drop of fallin rain
One little chance to try again
One little bird that makes it every now and then
One little piece of endless sky
One little taste of cherry pie
One little week in paradise and I start thinkin’ “

The verses come from “one Little Song by Gillian Welch.
(See 2 verses above) I really liked Pattinson’s answers.

Especially since there are now about 103.5 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. The same reasoning now applies to other published content such as blogs.

Here are some of Pats answers (from about 15minutes into the audio) as transcribed by me.

“Even if every song has been written’ – every song hasn’t been written by me. And in the journey of writing a song, one discovers things on a deeper level.

No matter whether that idea has been written a thousand times before.

And so songwriting is certainly a process of self discovery and in terms of it being something has never been done before,

I really loved Bob Dylan in the ‘No Direction Home” Scorsese DVD; who says – There I was in the ’60′s, ….I was doing something that nobody had ever done before. He paused and said -”I think I was wrong about that.”

New question by Kim on – The use of the senses in songwriting?

Pattinson’s answer:

You need to stimulate your listener to get / make the listener involved in your song.

There is a difference between saying “Somethings changed between us” which is sort kind of telling and abstract and..

“You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips” (Number 23 in a list of top 25 recognised song lyrics. )

One shows and the other one tells.

When you can stimulate your listeners senses
They put their stuff into your words and the song becomes theirs.

Ain’t that the truth; and best of all his insights are valuable to all content communicators including marketing contact.

Great songwriting is distilled experience with a personal flavour. The connection is that like a great song our insights can help our customers if we are open to that possibility.

(Prof Pat Pattinsons full profile. More from Pat on songwriting.)

Every new generation appears to collectively relearn things some of us have forgotten and that is why reflecting on the history of everything is so important.

Incredibly one of Gillian Welch’s other great songs is on topic and is called Everything is Free off album Time (The Revelator) or over here and is about the music industry and some of these ideas.

Next week: Part 2 on what we can and should do about the great opportunities in content creation and publishing.

“Gillian Welch”, “publishing futures”, “music formats”