Digital Earth

This summer, there will be a conference on the Digital Earth in Australia. I am uncertain how to raise the funds to go, but the concept is very nicely put. Last year, it was held in San Fransisco, CA. My friend attended, and told me that it was one of the most innovative and invigorating experience of his life. When I speak of ubiquitous technology and light modernity, I mean that technology will become smaller, lighter, and more transparent. When this happens, technology and reality will meld into one. The picture below shows an application of RFID/GPS to blend together real locations with digital ones.

Reprint List of New Advertising

Make Money Around Free Content

From Wired How-To Wiki

What does the “Media Business Model” mean?

Fred Wilson says:

Most web apps will be monetized with some kind of media model. Don’t think banner ads when I say that. Think of all the various ways that an audience that is paying attention to your service can be paid for by companies and people who want some of that attention.

This is the core of FREE, at least as it exists online. Both media and most online businesses are based on “software economics”, where the cost of creating something of value is relatively high but the marginal cost of distributing it to each consumer is very low. So you can look at the web as the ultimate extension of the media business model to a wide range of other industries.

But when people think of the “media business model”, they usually just think of advertising. That’s a big part of it, to be sure, but as those of us in the media business know, it goes far beyond that.

Here’s my start at a list all the revenue models you can find in the media industry, all based around a core of free or almost-free content:

• CPM ads (“cost per thousand views”; banner ads online and regular ads in print, TV and radio)
• CPC ads (“cost per click”; think Google ads)
• CPT ads (“cost per transaction”; you pay only if the customer brought to you from a media sites becomes a paying customer. Here’s an example.)
• Lead generation (you pay for qualified names of potential customers)
• Autoresponder Memberships (people pay for email; watch this free video)
• Subscription revenues
• Affiliate revenues (e.g., Amazon Associates, Products + Clickbank)
• Rental of subscriber lists
• Sale of information (selling data about users–aggregate/statistical or individual–to third parties)
• Licensing of brand (people pay to use a media brand as implied endorsement)
• Licensing of content (syndication)
• Getting the users to create something of value for free and applying any of the above to monetize it. (Like Digg or our own Reddit)
• Upgraded service/content (ed: aka “freemium”)
• Alternate output (pdf; print/print-on-demand; customized Shared Book style; etc.)
• Custom services/feeds
• Live events
• “Souvenirs”/”Merchandise”
• Co-branded spinoff
• Cost Per Install (popular with top Facebook apps who can help others get installs)
• E-commerce (selling stuff directly on your website)
• Sponsorships (ads of some sort that are sold based on time, not on the number of impressions)
• Listings (paying a time based amount to list something like a job or real estate on your website)
• Paid Inclusion (a form of CPC advertising where an advertiser pays to be included in a search result)
• Streaming Audio Advertising (like radio advertising delivered in the audio stream after a certain amount of audio content has been delivered)
• Streaming Video Advertising (like streaming audio but in video)
• API Fees (charging third parties to access your API)

What other revenue models are we missing? Add any other suggestions directly to this wiki page, please, and we’ll help keep the list up to date.

Generation C – Ramping up the Experience Economy

“Trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated consumer trends firm, relying on a global network of 8,000 spotters, working hard to deliver inspiration and pangs of anxiety to business professionals in 120+ countries worldwide.”

Generation C (from TrendWatching.com) is what trendwatchers refer to a generation obsessed with content. Whose content? Their own. It is forced creativity. Hoarding memories. This is the beginning of an economy based on experience.

Examples?

It’s Canon telling aspiring directors and photographers that “professional digital photography is no longer just for the professionals”, while Sony speaks directly to Home Movie Directors and DVD Producers.”

The whole point of this is the reduction of liability for The difference here is that “media moguls snapping up original media” sustain less liability than if they were hiring talent within their own companies. This is the outsourcing of talent; the mostly unpaid outsourcing of talent.

And then there’s the niche market market:

“First published: March 2005 | BusinessWeek called it ‘The Vanishing Mass Market’, Wired Magazine spoke of the Lost Boys and the Long Tail. Others talk about Niche Mania, Stuck in the Middle, or Commoditization Chaos. We at TRENDWATCHING.COM dubbed it NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches!”

I believe I wrote earlier about forced creativity. That everyone is given these tools in which to create and organize content, so that they end up with material upon material. I’d like to say something about my own life that relates to this.

When I was little, I was obsessed with gathering data and journals in my room. They took the form of analog at first, but when I was six years old my dad let me have his microcasette recorder, and I happily begain to record my own advertisements, radio shows, and NPR-style adventure stores. I read books to be listened to by my future self, and praised myself for being able to cut out the middleman (my parents) from having to read me books before bedtime.

I think I was 6 or 7 when I began to really use my father’s computer. We were also using little Apple computer in school, but my father’s computer had this great graphics program on it called Splash, a predecessor to Macromedia Flash, the application that is to blame for the rapid spread of dynamic web advertising.

After a while, I began to accumulate microcasette tapes, creative documents, text files, as well as analog artwork. I was starting to accumulate media, and my mother worried about this. She pointed out that I didn’t want to grow up to be like the artist friend of hers, whose house was in complete creative disarray. She told me that my geological self history collection was creating a fire hazard in my room, and that I should stop, or throw things away.

I didn’t. I still don’t. I’ve just consolidated now. I have a few boxes of the stuff I’ve made. 5 boxes, neatly packed, of the written or auditory journals that encompass probably one in every three days of my life since the age of six. I don’t know why I’ve done this, and I don’t know what it means, but I read that the great artist Louise Bourgeois (really, Bourgeois) did the same thing. As time progresses, I’ve tried to really blog my life (in analog, in video). It could simply be because I was an early adopter of technology. The Information society revved it up for me.

The Experience Economy – Importing Experience

When customers purchase upgrades, they purchase a substitute for experience. It is time that gives experience, not upgrades. But the upgrades give a feeling of experience to the viewer. They are impressive. An example of an experience style is the stonewashed acid-worn ripped jean. It is the golddigger jean because it gives the impression of years of experience panning for gold. In fact, to afford the jeans, a person could spend the same amount of time in the murk of the gold-digging experience. Instead, the experience is outsourced and brought to the consumer.

The authentic manifests in vintage replicas too. The experience of having a relative hand down clothing to the teenager (consumer) can be purchased. The heirloom experience. The historical experience. These are experiences that actually exist in many upper middle class families. The vintage Chanel and grandmother’s necklaces and earrings are passed down and worn. Now, these histories can be bought and sold to substitute for that traditional material relation. The difference is that the history is invented and decentered from the individual, so that the clothing only has trend symbolism and is abstracted from history.

Today many consumers receive more encouragement from a website’s text (be creative! contribute to the community!) than they do from those in everyday life (if they are decentered and isolated, which is becoming more and more common). Thus, to make up for that old social relation, they are beginning to provide material for the most encouraging ‘parents’, or ‘peers’…as they could be considered. For free. (Or as in istockphoto.com, a royalty).

Architectural Interfaces 1968-2008

I would’ve enjoyed calling this post A History of the Future, but that name was already taken by a much more exhaustive account of ideas that I used to read as a child.

It was a big coffee-table book, and thus it sat on my family’s coffee-table for six years or so before it succumbed to a number of popular science and Wired magazines that forced it to a retirement on the bookshelf. What made the book extraordinary is that it contained within its pages a vast tome of images of what people in the 19th century conceived the year 2000 to be like. Among the premonitions was an image of a woman in a dark factory that sat on a sort of throne with a metal device on the top of her head. At her feet lay a long conveyor-belt of newborns stretching into infinity, as factory workers packaged them and sent them off in trucks.

Other, less radical images were much closer to the reality we have today. One showcased a man sitting in a comfortable chair looking up at a projection of some dancers on his living room wall. The caption went something like, “with the help of phono-vision, you can finally enjoy the pleasures of the can-can from the comfort of your own home”. This was a prediction made in 1888, or something like that, so I’ll call it impressive. Others had moon villages, and dystopic robots lacerating poor human victims.
I was eight years old when the book was shelved out of my memory, when the year 2000 arrived, I was older. Fourteen! To celebrate, I dusted off The History of the Future again and was able to read it this time instead of merely looking at the pictures. It inspired me to take all sorts of other books from different time periods and compare their contents to today’s technological results. If The History of the Future compared the 19th century to the 20th, then I wanted to compare the 60’s to the 00’s, or even the 80’s. What patterns might I find? What forgotten utopic visions, or dyspeptic nihilisms might I run into?

Searching for the right books wasn’t difficult. I’d watched the library public move more and more to the computer, and thus as time went on, the bookstacks began to collect dust. I began to recognize a 60’s book from a 70’s or 80’s and so on.

Books from the 60’s were the best. They were so optimistic and projectionary. They were always set Arial font with bolded Arial for titles, as if the world were simple, and so was solving problems. Pictures were generally black and while, but every once in a while, you’d run across a book with a greyscale streaked with a monotone yellow or pink or shocking blue. Books with more somber subjects resembled green computer screens.

Comments and Excerpts from Urban Structure, 1968. Paul Elek. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

The Interfaces (Page 76-77).

“An interface may be described as a common boundary between two systems. The interface between transportation systems is the most neglected element that the passenger is force to tolerate. The attitude of transportation system operators seems to be, ‘leave the driving to us but how you get aboard and where you go when you get off is your problem’. Improvement in the attraction and holding of riders is needed more than anything else except frequent service.”

“The one ability that ninety-nine out of a hundred of the human race has that makes mass transit possible is that ability to walk. Why do we attempt to eliminate it as if it were unnatural? We seen to accept the walking required to use vertical transportation in buildings. We walk from our car or bus into the building, walk to the escalator, something even walk on it as it moves up, walk to the elevator, walk in, walk out, and walk to our desk. Why do we accept this? Because we are always moving towards our destination. The only wait is for the elevator and this is very short, and the interfaces are convenient, comfortable and pleasant, as much so as the building itself. Similar qualities of environment can be had in horizontal transportation.”

“Let us assume you live in suburbia, 25 miles from the centre of the town. You own two cars. Five minutes in one direction is the entrance to the freeway. Five minutes in another direction is the station for the suburban rapid transit. The freeway is belted around the town centre, requiring you to use the streets to reach the parking garage a block from your office building. The suburban rapid transit station is 12 minutes’ walk from your office building but connects directly with the CBD distributor which has a station in your parking garage. Let us compare the trip:

by auto

time lapse

-drive to freeway
5 minutes

-25 miles on freeway

15 miles at 60 mph 15

6 miles at 45 mph 8

4 miles at 15 mph 16 (on good morning – no bad weather –
no accidents or breakdowns –
no Christmas season rush, ect.)

-0.5 miles downtown at 9 mph 3.5

-parking, elevator trip and walk to office building 3.5

:Total 51 minutes:

by auto and mass transit

-drive to station 5 minutes

-park and walk to platform 1

-average wait time (5 minute headway) 2.5
-25 miles on train at average speed of 50 mph 30
(all weather – all seasons)

-transfer to distributor 1.5
(1 minute headway and change level)

-distributor trip time at average 3

speed of 12 mph

-change level and walk to office building

:Total 45 minutes:

If you use the building described above your drive-in trip requires the following interface changes and walking:

walk to garage
change into car
change out of car
walk to parking garage elevator
change into elevator
change out of elevator
walk to office building
change on to escalator
change off of escalator
walk to elevator
change on to elevator
change out of elevator
walk to office
Total 5 walks and 8 interface changes.

If you take the transit:

walk to garage
change into car
change out of car
walk to train platform
change into train
change out of train
walk to escalator
change on to escalator
change off escalator
walk to distributor system
change into distributor
change out of distributor
walk to escalator
change on to escalator
change off escalator
walk to office building
change on to escalator
change off escalator
walk to elevator
change into elevator
change out of elevator
walk to office

Total 8 walks and 14 interface changes.

“The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.

-Several things must be done. Transit service must be improved to eliminate waiting times for all practical purposes at all hours.

-Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.

The interface between two systems is a meter of performance to the passenger. And its performance depends on the expertness of the plan and its execution as well as the performance of the two systems which share it.

Other pages:

(127) -“The car as an extension of the foot instead of the car as a satellite part of the home: or the tendency for appliances to impose their presence as against the psychological need for ‘cosy’ or ‘friendly’ objects”.

(A Note here: that I’ve seen online in development of objects, and that is the tendency for objects in the lower class to be not be benign companions, and those for creative culturals to be designed to be companions; to be benign. The same is with vehicles. As a vehicle ages, it becomes less of a friend to it’s driver, and more of a liability. It needs to be replaced, because it turns against its owner.

In this way, technology is not man’s best friend, but man’s worst double-edged pet. It is a beautiful toy one minute, and next year is a shameful disgrace that no longer works. How easily this happens to the machine and the product! How more and more quickly these things turn on us!

Map like Campion’s instructions onto a shaped, gridded blob:
“Social Zone”
“Interchange Zone”
“Quiet Zone”
“Bed Capsule”

(131) – A whole entirety of architectural plans that include electric vehicle tracks and future projections for robot implementation within the household. Text in overlays on the grid-work and planning of the new buildings.

….1988 – “Car expands to become place”, “floor can be re-formed instantly”, “private enclosures by now are also tunable”

Likelihoods….1990+ “Enclosures free-up”, “environment can be simulated – seen but not really there”, “demarcation between one persons domain and another becomes more pliable”.

So I feel like modular living is a very interesting concept to imagine.

Page 133 hosts an essay called Drive-In Housing – A Proposition by David Greene and Michael Webb. In the first paragraph, the house is described in such a way, that “it can also be a mobile room which can plug itself into a drive-in bank and become extra floor area of that bank”.

This is back in 1968, before the widespread adoption of the Internet, of course, but that was my immediate thought when I read the above sentence. just this morning I accessed my bank account from the comfort of my room. The interface I used was the computer, and my transaction went as such:

digitally

walk to desk
remove chair
sit down
pull out laptop from drawer
turn on laptop
wait for laptop to load
click on ‘firefox’ internet client
enter username and password for college student network
enter bank address online
type in username and password for banking website
check account balances
click on transfer balances
enter in the account to transfer money from
enter the amount
transfer the amount
confirmation screen
log out of the website
close internet browser window
close laptop
remove self from chair

non-digitally
walk to bus stop
enter bus
leave bus
walk one block to bank
open bank door
wait in line for teller
greet teller
slide bank card to verify identity
ask teller to transfer money
wait
take receipt
walk one block to bus stop
enter bus
leave bus
walk back to dorm

In the first one, my computer did act as a modular interface that allowed my location to meld with the bank’s location. The act of drive-in housing that Greene and Webb talk about has been achieved by the Internet, and whose actual mechanical rumblings probably would look very similar to a mechanized real-life version of drive-in housing, were they to be mapped out.

Greene and Webb then go on to point out two intrinsic parts of architectural space. The inner space would be that of the “service unit, where space is at a premium, stuffed to the lid with the mechanics of the kitchen, the chancel, office or cinema serving Hamburgers, God, money or films to a lavishly planned and styled up consumer space; a restaurant, name, banking hall or auditorium. But this consumer space is, of course, made up of a series of mobile human containers – cars” (Elek, 133).

“In a drive-in home, the volume at any moment is directly proportional to the number of people in it; when the family is away at the seaside the house consists only of folded-up storage units; during a party as many as 30 mobile containers might gather around a unit to form a big space.”

Now, coming from the side of the intellectual, this is a very innovative and surprising view. But coming from the side of the common man, this is a very Arkansas model – the mobile home and mobile lifestyle. I am not suggesting that the entire state functions in this way, but I was told by a friend who lived there for a while that the lowest strata of Arkansas residents would move their mobile homes around in this way; not for parties, but for marriage. The trailer of the son or daughter’s partner would join the housing collective and form one big unit.

Besides, this model is used in order to gain entertainment from the Internet or the television. The resident does not have to move at all, and the hidden 4th dimensional magic does the shifting. Life could get confusing with all of that tetris, like having to wait in line for the bank. If you brought part of your house with you, and all of the mobile bank ports were already filled, you’d block the street with your vehicle. If not, you’d wait in the mobile unit parking lot and take up space, just like regular cars do, but if your living space was lavish you’d probably take up more space than a car would.

And, if you were away at the seaside, what would prevent some lunatic from running away with your folded up house? Could you fold up your house and put it inside the rest of your house?

What if you had a dinner party and one of your guests had a terribly messy house, or a terrible cat that snuck into your section One could write a tragically amusing story about a mobile dinner party gone wrong, especially if one of the guests decided too long, like a month, and the host house had no way of detaching them. An if a mother-in-law showed up for a weekend, not only she would arrive, but her house too! Although if you met someone at a bar you wouldn’t have to invite them over to your place, because they’d already be there.

Of course the article is somewhat of a joke, because the authors go on to dissect their opening paragraph and go on to things or a more wild character.

Architecture is fun. This was my experiment with it.

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Lifehacker and GTD

If you haven’t already, I highly suggest that you read Walter Benjamin’s १९३६ essay on “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (link takes you to a .pdf of the essay).

If you don’t have the time for it, this quote should be sufficient:

“Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our need in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign” (op. cit., p. 226).

Those images which ‘appear and disappear at a simple movement’ are the images of the Internet. We have reached far beyond the mere reproducibility and redistribution of images in the tangible sense. We literally can wave a symbol into existence with a mouse or keyword. We do not have to move to do so, especially with cell phone technology.

What are the implications of infinite reproducibility? When space is reduced to nothing, time becomes the penultimate measure of use-value, and use-value becomes time-value. This is why websites like Lifehacker and Getting Things Done are so valuable to productive people. In an era of infinite images, system that block out, sift through, and combine fragmented information together.

Defragmented machines work better than fragmented ones. The equivalence is conserved in human-computer relationships. The less fragmented the ideas, information transfers, and overall interactions, the more productive and valuable (time-value) the relationship can be. When space has collapsed into time, the amount of time one spends in positive, productive communication with a computer is the difference between happiness and depression, monetary benefit or poverty. This will only continue to be more true as time and space pull closer and closer together.

Light Modernity means that Design IS the Product.

Design becomes paramount in ultra-light modernity। When ideas and architecture float, only the lightest can rise to the top, but in contradiction, this ultimate lightness is what garners attention. Black holes of attention, in which no mental state can escape (after reaching the even horizon) are the fate of the lightest objects. I found this in Marketing Prof. He talked about Fred Water that linked to this article on another Brooklyn, NY blog: “At a time when so many products have become mere commodities and when advertising doesn’t have the effect it once did, design is the best way to differentiate yourself from the pack. And, t-shirts notwithstanding, people will pay more for good design, because good design has a halo effect and makes the product seem more valuable.” “Good design isn’t limited to products, either. Stores can have good design (Starbucks, Whole Foods) and so can airlines (Virgin, Jet Blue). The message of good design is that “we’re thinking about you, our customer. We’re designing a product that you’ll feel good about.” It’s how companies can differentiate themselves these days and it’s more valuable than any kind of advertising or 2.0 trick out there.” “In terms of stores having good design, it is more the ‘experience’ of design that makes design so successful. We are transitioning into an experience/attention economy, which makes the experience of the product (the product and the universe associated with the product) the upmost priority. Starbucks coffee would be nothing without its label, without its atmosphere, without that experience. As the architecture of experience goes online, design will be the ultimate harbinger of visitor success. It will be the ultimate, the everything. The design becomes the product.” “Design becomes paramount in ultra-light modernity. When ideas and architecture float, only the lightest can rise to the top, but in contradiction, this ultimate lightness is what garners attention. Black holes of attention, in which no mental state can escape (after reaching the even horizon) are the fate of the lightest objects.”

Ideas rise and fall like leaves from a tree.

Information that is stale, unused, not purchased by the attention of those browsing the supermaket shelves of the attention economy superstore. We, like cats, care nothing for a dead feather–it is those ideas, trends, people that are dynamic and moving that we chase and chase. Information falls from the branches of the tree of collective participation and buries those already fallen documents with a fresh layer of compost. Once in a while, a solitary wanderer trudges the old documents as hey amble slowly through their intellectual journey. In the end, the old ideas become fertile ground for new ones.

Utilizing Collective Intellect for Market Futures

Collective Intellect is a Boulder based company that uses the collective ideas of bloggers to predict the rise and fall of stock values. I watched Don Springer, President & CEO of Collective Intellect, present at the 2006 DOW Jones Emerging Ventures Forum 2006.

Collective Intellect taps into tacit knowledge in order to reduce company risk. The Internet allows the generation of tacit knowledge because it is a lateral media instead of a central one, such as television. It has a feedback system, because it is a product and a holding contained for consumer generated media.

How does one find the spring from which a river of ideas flows? Each profession, each category of interest has its own spring, or head influence. In fashion, the top design houses determine the fashions that trickle down to lower level designers. Though the Internet allows rapid communication to occur, the spread of ideas still takes time. In computer terms this is called ‘lag’.

When the CEO presented this company to venture capitalists, he described the company structure as follows:
This company uses an algorithm to determine the highest level idea-maker or blog of highest social influence. The algorithm is applied to blogs within an interest category, and each blog is assigned points based on blog visit stats, number of comments, and certain category-specific keywords. Blogs are also analyzed for lags in category-specific keywords from site to site, so that blogs who use category-specific keywords sooner than other blogs can be assessed.

Once the points are accrued, it is easy to see which blogs have access to relevant information more quickly than others. These blogs have the power to change ideas of other ‘downstream’ blogs, and have the least lag time in accessing and reporting on relevant ideas. Financial Companies pay for access to ranked blogger data.

Consider the following:

• A simple design story. One of CollectiveIntellect’s clients designs tupperware and wants to know how to design a next generation tupperware product that is superior to its competitors.
• It can purchase top blog information tracking from CollectiveIntellect in order to see the top tupperware ergonomic problems that have occurred in the past with other tupperware products। This tacit knowledge can then be used to design a product that has a relatively sufficient chance of success — one that will satisfy investors.
• Similarly, the tupperware company can check up on its design success by puchasing blogger information collected by CI about the product, post-release. Investors in the tupperware company can purchase the same information from CI to determine whether the tupperware company’s stock will go up or down.

Business – Applied Postmodern Theory

A business should run like an athlete. It should be lean, with muscle and no unnecessary fat. It should be agile and capable of making quick changes. It should be more than just an athlete. In the new global economy, a company must be Olympian in ability, to be truly successful.

All muscle should be developed according to the type of athlete it is. A speedskater has different muscles developed than does an tennis player.

Companies must always be training; always watching their weight. A few extra pounds — a few days off without training, and the company may still be successful, but this success will be false. Under the right market conditions, even poorly managed companies can be successful. But market conditions rise and fall like emotions, and the subsidy that a good market provides to a bad company is what makes many managers lazy.

The concept of light modernity, when applied to business, is key to a successful enterprise. A successful enterprise is one that minimized effort and liability. Effort and liability can be cut off at the root by employing strategies that prevent excess mass from accumulating. success and minimized liability and effort.

Streamlining is removing anything from your business that detracts from its ultimate purpose. This does not necessarily mean downsizing. It means having your company examined and streamlined by a corporate anthropologist.

The smallest company can often move the quickest. A storefront is becoming a liability. A store that sells CD’s is now a liability to itself. CD’s are no longer light. MP3’s are. CD’s must be inserted into computers or players manually. MP3’s require less effort. Keeping music inside computers, without tangible essence, is the genius of itunes. The only hardware is a liquid device – the ipod, which is tiny, mobile, and automatically updated and changed at will. Everything that requires less human action (movements, clicks, material) will succeed.

Don’t Click It is an online user-based experiment that is an attempt to determine future usability of websihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftes and liquid devices. It is one of the most liquid websites in existence (excluding artist and experimental design firms and Macromedia Extraordinaries). The entire site can be navigated with just one click. It utilizes what I will call “zones of action” to achieve this.