Last night I proclaimed we're in a Content Renaissance and this morning, what do I stumble across but a bunch of articles saying the very same thing! It's either a case of 'great minds think alike', or there really is a content renaissance happening. :-) For example, Robert Scoble wrote a rah-rah article about "the content-creation trend that's going on" - his readers made lots of interesting comments on it too. And I read a piece of Marketing hype today from trendwatching.com, raving about something called "Generation C" - C for Content, geddit? Actually it's a good read and I especially liked this extract:
"Don't get us wrong: superior tools and no talent still equals useless content. GENERATION C is and will continue to create heaps and heaps of crap which, at best, will be appreciated only by inner-circle friends and family.
However, when Canon (see above) tells consumers that its products 'leave one difference between you and a professional. They get paid', they're kind of behind already: talented members of GENERATION C actually DO get paid, as their stories, their observations, their articles, their pictures, their songs, and their books are noticed and bought by niche audiences, as well as (increasingly) by mass-media moguls eager for real-time, original content. Think thousands of 'My News' citizen reporters in South Korea, or tens of thousands of bloggers building personal brands (and thus warranting professional fees, and reaping advertising revenues)..."
Strong resonance with my post yesterday. Among other things (go read it - it's better than this post I'm writing now!) I wrote about my Big Idea to write a biography of Web 2.0. This is my idea to write a book about the current Web As Platform and social software bubble. It'll be a non-fiction book, where I travel and interview bloggers and developers - particularly on the West Coast of the USA.
I really want some feedback on that btw - is there something wrong with my comments system or something? Two-Way Web, my ass... ;-)
Is it just me, or is CONTENT making a comeback on the Web? I've been reading a lot of the Web 2.0 blogging and I sense, even from across the other side of the world, that the Web is entering another bubble of optimism. Frankly, I wish I was over in America soaking it up. I've been thinking of a plan to bring that to fruition... I want to write a biography of Web 2.0. I want to travel around the States and visit all the people and places where the action is. I'll chronicle it all and immortalize the people and places and products that make up Web 2.0. The future of fiction is non-fiction (and vice versa). I'll explain that in a minute... Or do I even need to be in the States? I read Marc Canter's Weekend rustlings post just now, in which he wrote:
"So the possibility of running a completely virtual business - structured entirely virtual - enables me to dream about living in Vancouver, Trieste or Amsterdam - while working with world-class experts around the world."
Hmmm, he wants to get out of USA - and I want to get IN! The grass is always greener, eh ;-)
I liked the way his post finished:
"I wonder since the VCs now appear to accepting open source, social networking and personal publishing - that they'd consider funding a completely virtual company - which lives off of it's own dogfood."
It's a good time to push the boundaries and ask questions like that. The VCs are interested in the blogosphere (at last!), people on my blogroll have started start-ups, bloggers I read are earning more than $5,500 in a month off their blog content (US dollars!!), Wired ran an article about how The Long Tail is where it's at (I'm part of The Long Tail!)... it's all very promising.
Remember the days when portals were The Big Thing? It was only a few years ago. Portals were all about aggregating content from different sources onto one website - the idea being that all the content providers would make money and the portal owner would live off the commissions. Well when the bubble burst, suddenly we were all told that you can't make money off CONTENT on the Web. If you're a content provider wanting to publish on the Web, just don't expect users to pay for it buster - it's gotta be FREE on the Web. And so that's been the situation for the past few years... until Google Adsense showed up in 2003 and suddenly the A-List bloggers and a few other topic-focused types started to earn some dosh on the side.
When I found out that Paul Scrivens earned "over $5500" in the month of September 2004, from his network of blogs, I nearly fell off my chair. $5500!? That's 'Quit The Day Job' levels, in my book (especially since it's US dollars and the NZ dollar is only worth about US$0.65). Scrivs did say that September was an out-of-the-ordinary month in terms of money earned... but then he also sounded quite positive about keeping up that level in the coming months. Scrivs is relatively popular in his blogging community (the design crowd), certainly more popular than I am in my communities. But he's gotten popular due to a lot of effort on his network - and it's paid off already.
So in this World of Niches, the land of The Long Tail, can normal people actually start to earn money on the Web? From their (gasp!) CONTENT? Jeff Jarvis seems to think so:
"...the mass is out; the mass of niches is in. That's what media is about now, in this world of ultimate choice. The audience is adjusting to it and advertisers will next and they will see that though it's difficult to put together a mass of niches, it's more efficient and effective. So ad dollars will leave broadcast for not only cable and now satellite but also the Internet."
It must've been something in the Web 2.0 conference coffee (maybe it had bubbles?). PC World ended one of their Web 2.0 articles with this quote from a Web survey company executive, Gian Fulgoni:
"The upshot, according to Fulgoni? "Online advertising should be getting a greater share of total ad dollars," he told the delighted conference attendees."
Google AdSense was the first mover in this vision of advertising bucks for the "mass of niches" on the Internet. And now that people like Scrivs have proven (to me at least) that it's possible to actually earn a living from blogs, well it's time for me to wake up and smell that coffee!
So where do I fit in in this new advertising-fueled content renaissance on the Web (if that's what it is - and not just another bubble that will pop)? I mentioned at the start of this post that the future of fiction is Non-Fiction. What I meant by that is that (IMHO) the most interesting writing coming out of the literary world these days is non-fiction. Michael Lewis is perhaps the best example - he's one of my favourite writers and his most recent book Moneyball was very insightful, not just about baseball but about PEOPLE and LIFE. That's what the best literature does. Tom Wolfe is another of my faves and he really started the ball rolling in regards to using literary techniques in non-fiction. He termed it New Journalism and it has been one of the key influences on my life.
So my Big Idea? Well I'm ruminating on a few of them actually... also on KM, eBooks, and some other stuff. But my Big Idea in regards to writing and CONTENT is this: I want to write a book about the people and places - and social life - of Web 2.0. I want to visit all the bloggers and developers who are Making It Happen - and write a narrative of it all. If I manage to attain the level of Michael Lewis or Tom Wolfe or Po Bronson, then this will be a seminal book for the industry. Allow me to be arrogant for one moment - I believe I have the Talent to pull this off.
To do this, I'd need to take a couple of months off The Day Job and travel over to the US of A, maybe even parts of Europe too. I have a wife and child, so they would come with me of course. And that's what the biggest hurdle is for me. I'd need to take my family across to the other side of the world, which is a Big Deal. The other hurdle is (what else) money. If I could get a publishing contract, or even be sponsored by a blog-friendly VC? I don't think it's a silly idea... I tell you now - anybody who invests in my content won't regret it. Actually, that's what I should be telling *myself*!
Postscript: This post is an exploratory one on a Sunday night... I'm exploring my own motivations and dreams. I'm not losing my marbles ;-) Because I know my CONTENT is worth something. Maybe not yet, but it will be... Maybe the valuable CONTENT is still stuck inside me - it will burst out of my chest one day like in Alien.
So: a book chronicling Web 2.0, written by Richard MacManus and featuring a cast of familiar blog characters - would you buy it?
This post could be sub-titled "Grokking Dave Snowden", because that's how I felt after reading this PDF file from AOK (Association of Knowledgework). The PDF features extracts from a proposed AOK book entitled Stars Of The New Order: What They're Telling Business Leaders. The chapter that got my attention was chapter 13: Third Generation Knowledge Management. I think it's based on a series of conversations with Dave Snowden back in January 2002, but the content is just as relevant now.
Snowden is like the Jakob Nielsen of Knowledge Management - he's a very influential figure in the community. In these conversations, he held sway with other KM practitioners like Jack Vinson and James Robertson. This discussion format brought out the best in Snowden I believe. Here are some of the highlights I picked out and my thoughts based on them.
In recent years, it's been difficult to pin down a definition of what Knowledge Management is. What it appeared to be in the 90's was Information Management in wolf's clothing. Or is that: mutton dressed as lamb? :-) Either way, what was being 'managed' in the 90's by so-called Knowledge Management Systems was not in fact knowledge - but information. There was, as T.D. Wilson put it:
"A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know)."
In the conversations, Dave Snowden put it like this:
"As we move into the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in which we focus not on the management of knowledge as a 'thing' which can be identified and cataloged, but on the management of the ecology of knowledge." (pg 21)
I love that term: ecology of knowledge. It emphasizes that knowledge is a fluid, almost living, thing; and that it's closely related to its environment - or put another way, its context (a word which Snowden uses a lot).
Snowden went on to explain a basic principle of KM in this 'ecology' view of it:
"The process of moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably involves some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss of context." (pg 21)
Which is to say: during the act of speaking and then writing what is in your head, you will probably lose some content and a lot of context.
To extrapolate from what Snowden said, this is how I think his body metaphor works out:
Head = Context
Mouth = Narrative
Hands = Content Management
Snowden uses narrative (storytelling) to add context to information. He said:
"...as for strategy, I use narrative techniques to contextualize the model for a company so the heuristics and boundary conditions are defined not in some abstract language, but are rooted in the defining stories of that organization." (pg 24)
This is of great interest to me. As a writer, narrative is one of my skillsets. So I'm thinking this could be a way for me to leverage my skills as a writer in the world of KM (see, I'm even using the word 'leverage' with gay abandon now - I'm drinking the KM Kool-Aid!).
You know what it also reminds me of? My two favourite contemporary literary writers, Michael Lewis and Tom Wolfe. They are both pioneers of writing non-fiction using literary techniques. I was thinking about this the other day (in another context!) and wrote down this as a note to myself: The future of fiction is non-fiction.
To relate this to KM, I think there's room for a literary sensibility in business too.
Snowden talked about rejecting "generic models" of knowledge management - typified by KM Consultants who speak in buzz words and cliches. He explained:
"If a model is rooted in the stories of an organization’s histories and its possible futures (narrative techniques) then the model has meaning to that group. My approach is to get the organization to tell stories and then to populate a framework with those stories, draw boundaries between spaces and then move forward to action." (pg 26)
He hates "consultants who just roll out their model regardless of context".
The approach Snowden prefers is what he labels a "heuristic" one - heuristic meaning to discover or find out. He has a lovely metaphor to explain this:
"Here we have the chef, not the recipe book user, with all the differences in quality that metaphor implies." (pg 27)
The best chefs are artists, so this view of KM plays to my artsy-fartsy nature :-)
So after all that, what is KM? Well Snowden defined it as "the creation of shared context". He said knowledge must be volunteered (not conscripted), which is where the narrative techniques come in. When people tell their own stories, they naturally put information into the context of their lives.
Not coincidentally that is also the pattern of blogging, which encourages people to tell their stories on the Web and "share context" with their particular community. The blogging communities for Web Design and Knowledge Management itself best illustrate this to me - they both have strong communities where bloggers constantly comment on each others sites or trackback one another.
Snowden's own KM model is called Cynefin and he described it like this:
"...the contextualization takes the form of gathering anecdotes (naturally told stories, around the water cooler etc.) from that organization’s own history, and using those stories to create the [KM] model." (pg 29)
He later referred to this as mapping what people know, using narrative techniques (pg 33).
As yet, I'm not sure what role literary techniques might play in this. I'll read some more on Snowden's theories, plus other peoples, and see what I can come up with.
I'd like to think that a skilled writer has a lot to offer in the KM process of transcribing peoples stories into a compelling narrative. Just as Michael Lewis wrote an amazing narrative based on the stories of the Oakland A's baseball team in his book Moneyball (which I've just finished reading). The stories came from the Oakland A's people, particularly Billy Beane. But it was Lewis' skill that stitched it all together to produce a very insightful book - chock full of knowledge, in fact.
Lastly, Snowden defined the generations of Knowledge Management as he sees them:
"In Generation 3, we acknowledge Gen 2 (content management) but also see knowledge is simultaneously a flow and a thing—so for the flows we manage channels." (pg 37)
A flow and a thing... I love that definition, because I've blogged about 'flow' before.
To wrap up the chef metaphor, Snowden said:
"We are chefs using prior knowledge, experience and natural talent to create original solutions, not recipe book users." (pg 37/38)
I like to think that describes the art of writing too. And originality is something I place a high premium on, so I have a feeling Dave Snowden's theories on Knowledge Management are going to serve me very well.
I love this extract from a Web 2.0 workshop about Enterprise social software, as blogged by Denise Howell:
Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and Michael Pusateri (Disney) are discussing using SocialText (and blogs and wikis in general) in business. Michael works for the television/ABC arm of Disney, and they're using SocialText. He has a great point: how do you get users to accept the new methodologies? Simple. Don't tell them. Don't make a big deal about trying some revolutionary new tool. Just train them and let them discover things like why email doesn't make a great file system, but a weblog is another story. They're also using Newsgator with Outlook to help people aggregate and survey what's going on on all the Disney weblogs. Told the users: "We're going to put some stuff into Outlook so you don't have to go check the Web pages anymore." Response: cool! No discussion needed about the joys/promise of RSS, etc.
(emphasis mine)
It's the same kind of approach that Yahoo! is taking with their new RSS services.
People have been talking recently about all the different buckets they drop their content into. Especially in this world of decentralized web services we live in today (Internet as Platform and all that...). We have a wide variety of specialist content services to choose from - e.g. Flickr and del.icio.us. It's all microcontent and so long as we have Internet access, it shouldn't worry us too much if we distribute our content in different places. Or should it? Well let me tell you about my (current) arrangement for reading and writing Web content.
1. Read/Write Web is my main publishing vehicle. During October, I'm going to try and publish more long-form analytical posts - a la Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky. I've been flirting with trying to be a "discussion board blog", like Asterisk and Whitespace are for the Web Design community. But frankly I struggle to get comments here on Read/Write Web and I think that's because my writing style is more formal than social. I've always seen Read/Write Web as being a publishing vehicle for my writing, rather than a hub for community discussions. Plus I'm not a 'post every day' type blogger - it's Quality over Quantity on this blog. Don't get me wrong, I think Asterisk and Whitespace are great and they both have interesting content and discussions. But my goal isn't to be Mr Popular, so I figure I'll play to my strengths - which is publishing original, analytical, web tech-focused content.
2. eBook Culture: this is my topic-focused blog about eBooks. It's quite informal and I try to post in an 'off-the-cuff' style - something I don't allow myself to do very often with R/WW. Ideally this means less long-form articles in eBook Culture and more how-to's and practical tips, although lately I've been prone to writing a lot of "culture" rants over there ;-)
3. I've recently started up a new del.icio.us account (I originally signed up about a year ago, but back then I ended up using Movable Type for my links). This time round, I'm using del.icio.us specifically as a bookmarking solution. Things I add to del.icio.us are things I intend to read later on my Palm PDA. So I haven't yet formed a judgement on the links I post there... nevertheless there's an element of social software to it - in that if someone whose judgement I trust recommends something then I may add it to my del.icio.us links too.
Here's how my PDA reading system works:
When I browse Bloglines or the Web, if I come across something that looks interesting I bookmark it in del.icio.us. At the end of each day (or every second day perhaps), I convert all my unread del.icio.us links into a Plucker file. [Plucker is, by its own description, "the best offline HTML and ebook reader for Palm handheld devices".] I do this via the Plucker Desktop software, which follows each link and transforms the HTML into Plucker format. Finally I synch this to my PDA, so I can read all those del.icio.us links offline - on the train, while half-watching tv, waiting for my order at the fish n' chips shop, etc.
4. My official linkblog is Read/Write Web Links (previously called 'Web of Ideas'). This is for what I like to call "refined links" - they're links that I've read and I think are worthy of storing or recommending. n.b. If you want to subscribe to one of my links feeds (del.icio.us or R/WW Links), I recommend the latter because they're things I've actually read and can vouch for the quality of content.
5. I also recently started a LiveJournal account. I am using this for low-risk private or personal writing - e.g. musings and journal-like content that isn't too sensitive. I don't have much time to devote to Live Journal, but I thought it'd be good for me to blurt out some informal writing on that platform. Not a lot will be public, but I'm willing to let email correspondents and people I know on first-name terms in the blog world read it. So let me know by email if you have a Live Journal a/c too and want to read my personal blatherings (and vice versa).
6. Private Notebooks. I don't write as much of these as I used to in my pre-blog days. I used to have paper notebooks and also an electronic non-internet journal (which I didn't update very often). It's still essential for me to have a place for medium-high risk personal writing - i.e. personal content that I simply can't risk putting on the Internet, no matter what security Live Journal has. It's nothing sensational - goals, plans and other personal stuff.
7. I have a Flickr account and an accompanying Photoblog. I don't put myself under any pressure to update this; just whenever I have a new phone pxt to publish. I recently added some pics of kiwi Bevan Docherty's Olympic silver medal, which he won in the triathlon at Athens.
So there you have it, I have at least 7 types of content buckets. It proves, to me at least, how far I've travelled in the Microcontent world. The Internet is indeed a platform for my reading and writing and there's no longer just one 'place' for it all.
So to answer my own question at the beginning of this post - no I'm not worried about distributing my content to different places. I used to be, but not any more. Andrew said that he's outsourced his memory to the Internet - and I can relate to that. The Internet is where most of my content lives now.
Update: Of course there are lots of other 'micro-buckets' on the Internet where I add content - Amazon wishlist or reviews, comments on other peoples blogs, emails, wikis, etc. I really need a Microcontent Wiki-like service to aggregate it all... or an online agent to keep track of it :-)
