Michael was working at an Australian law firm when he got a call from Barack Obama’s team to take a job as a political campaigner.

He was thrown in to the thick of the campaign; speaking at university rallies, giving stump speeches at conventions, lecturing on policies and organising outreach programs as he was promoted through the ranks of the Obama political machine.

The DE Talk featured some fascinating insights into the campaign that changed America. The Q&A was particularly interesting as we brought the insights back home to the Australian context. Michael is returning to the US to join the administration and continue his work for President Obama .

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(From the artistic interpretation of Chris Anderson’s talk with Guy Kawasaki.)

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail (and a recent article about giving things away for free) talks to some Linux people and tech bloggers about open source, free software and free things in general. (The official title is Rebuilding the World with Free Everything.)

It’s a topic of particular interest to me right now because I’ve been working on an article about Brett Gaylor, a filmmaker whose documentary is all about copyleft, open source and intellectual property.

They’re having a sort of rambling conversation that keeps dipping into the problems facing content media. Anderson says the reason the publishing industry is struggling is not because people don’t want the product, but because online revenues are about one-fifth what they used to be pre-internet. Same with newspapers, TV, radio. He says their production costs are about 50 percent of total, and the other half is distribution.

Anderson pimps the “Premium” model — all content media should consider it. Can be lucrative once you’ve segmented audience and focused on what the 10 percent of your audience who is very engaged wants. Requires a strong, devoted community, which should be your goal anyway.

They dump on “tip jars”: The patronage model hasn’t worked very well, says Dave Taylor, because most people won’t bother if they have the option to not pay. Fairly obvious, wouldn’t you think? Sure, except many newspapers continue to propose pay sites as their potential saviour.

Then again, notes Doc Searls, we’re figuring a lot of these models out. We don’t know exactly how the media evolution is going to look. We can only guess.

Taylor says attempts to monetize everything are a mistake: Not everything has to be a profit centre in your business.

A guy in the audience asks whether making things free is going to cause a lot of people to lose their jobs. People like who?, Anderson asks. “Printers, for one,” the guy says.

“Screw printers!” Anderson cries like a crazy man. Awesome. “We have re-democratized the tools of production. By distributing the access to factory to everybody, we have the capacity to work in any domain in any place in any time.”

Everyone who has laptops open in the room is working — or could be if they weren’t Twittering incessantly, Anderson says. This is the new reality.

This blog post is brought to you by that new reality.

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Building Online Audiences
2. SXSW: Old Media, New Ideas

Related posts:

1. A quick SXSW primer
2. SXSW: Friends and Acquaintances
3. SXSW: Open Source and Free

The panelists were: Jon Lebkowksy of Social Web Strategies; Rob Reed, who blogs on Max Gladwell; John McElhenney of Clear Green Technologies; and Emily Gertz, the journalist who maintains the global warming blog at Change.org.

A slow start with too many definitions (although, an interesting definition of sustainability: “Applying knowledge, rather than labour, to materials”) turned the audience sour — which they indicated on Twitter, which the panelists were watching.

One highlight was Gertz’s introduction, in which she covered some of the problems and mistakes we make in communicating about sustainability:

• preach only to the converted
• failing to inspire the converted; we need to mobilize people on our side to act further, to engage others and to believe in the cause
• failure to think big enough (the point is transformation of underlying political/social/economic system, not small steps)
• failure to conduct tactical moderation (filtering out disinformation and propoaganda)
• humourlessness: we’re often a sombre, grim community

Gertz also cited some examples. Check these out: usanpn.org, greatsunflower.org and the tweetawatt.

What I got from the audience – and the panelists — is that there’s still a lack of knowledge about how to apply social media expertise to audiences inside and outside the sustainability sphere. The so-called experts at the front of the room could only point us to a few sites. There are plenty of projects, but almost all with sparse audiences (and a lot of audience crossover); no shortage of great ideas for sustainability, in other words, but still a shortage of great ideas to build and rally those communities.

The opportunity, therefore, is still huge.

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Old Media, New Ideas
2. SXSW: Building Online Audiences
3. Social sustainability online

This morning’s chat about privacy and personalisation, led by Loomia’s David Marks, was one such event. Lots of very interesting thoughts, but no strong narrative to weave them together.

… Which enables me to list the thoughts in point form. Read on!

• Privacy settings on social networks have become increasingly granular (e.g., Facebook’s multiple checkbox settings and different levels of friends). But more detailed privacy options require more user involvement, and anecdotal evidence from the room suggests most users don’t bother.
• The conflict that arises from this is, if we can call it a conflict, is around obligation: is a site obliged to make privacy transparent and obvious to the user, or is the onus on the user? So, for example, if few people use Facebook’s checkbox privacy settings, should Facebook develop a more intuitive method, or do we just assume that people don’t care enough to bother and leave it at that?
• One UI designer suggested a strategy in which the site harvests a bare minimum of personal info upon initial registration, and then periodically requests more on subsequent logins, with explanations of the reason for the request and the potential use of the information.
• A point that turned a lot of heads was around technology: is the average user provided with adequate tools to manage and understand their privacy online? And, what are the implications of storing personal info on remote servers? Could personal info be stored on a desktop and used to authenticate online sessions, with none actually held elsewhere?
• Furthermore, how aware are people and companies of the legal obligations of companies vs. individuals with respect to personal information? “If you’re running a web service of some kind, having more than the minimum necessary personal info could be a liability”, somebody observes.
• Concern about privacy online is often passive. We only worry when something specific comes up, e.g., when a security breach occurs and we read about people’s information being stolen from a bank database. And if we have the opportunity to save money, we’ll often happily part with information, e.g., “to save $5 on shipping, please provide the following data”.
• Concepts of privacy are generational; 1985 is often cited as a crucial year: those born after that year tend to be much more comfortable with sharing their personal information online, and also distinguish between their “online self” and their “real-world self”.
• Crucially, the post-1985 generation also tends to expect that the online-vs-real-world distinction will be made by employers, educators and others who may search for information about people online. And that expectation may not be reasonable, of course.

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1. SXSW: Friends and Acquaintances

Again, I’m from the school that says the specific medium is unimportant, so the lessons here will be broadly applicable. Other panelists: John Fagan and Ivan Held from Penguin, Peter Miller from Bloomsbury Books and Deborah Schultz, a new media marketing consultant.

There’s a lot of Penguin types here, so they’re surely using this event to make a splash with some big interactive plans. Oops, nope, they’re apparently here to learn, one of them just said. (Update: The audience later yells at them for the misleading title: New Think for Old Publishers, and on Twitter someone calls it “audience-funded brainstorming”)

Update 2: Great exchange between disgruntled author in the audience (“publishers are like record labels — they’re no longer relevant”) and Shirky, who says “publishers are just a filter. And the internet means we’re not going from Filter A to Filter B, but from Filter A to Filters A through Z. So if the publisher filter doesn’t create good signal, it doesn’t deserve to exist”.

Schultz begins with an overview of how knowledge and storytelling has changed over time, and how technology is changing it now. Storytelling used to be interactive, when communication was oral (and the Talmud, with content in the middle and comments in the margins, might be the first blog!). The internet’s interactivity may help recouple what has been decoupled.

What are new and interesting ways to discuss literature?

They put up a slide, important enough that I’m putting it here in bold and italics: The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history.

Shirky says what we’re dealing with is the lateral transfer from what people are thinking and writing to what people are reading and saying about it.

He reframes the question: What do we do in the online medium to make long-form writing resonate?

Search vs. serendipity: Finding stuff you didn’t know you were looking for is still lacking with search engines, Shirky says. There have to be serendipitous methods of making people aware of this. What can we do to bridge the gap between what the people in the publishing houses know about what’s coming and what the people in the world want to know? How do we duplicate the moment of the serendipitous bookshop book find in the online medium?

Most of the good advice comes from the audience:

• Cater to affinity groups
• Encourage audiences to cheer about the stuff they like; music and film do it well, book publishers do it poorly;
• Pair music with books with movies and other cultural products and don’t deny the convergence of media and the public’s affection for multiple media
• “Shortcovers”, a scheme by Canadian book publishers: first e-chapter is free, and subsequent chapters are $1

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Social Media & Sustainability
2. A quick SXSW primer
3. SXSW: Friends and Acquaintances

Here we are at an afternoon panel moderated by Scott Kirsner, who runs the Cinematech blog. The basic question it aims to answer is: how do filmmakers, musicians and artists successfully create audiences online?

Someone in the audience called it an anti-marketing panel as all the panelists have taken grassroots approaches: They are Markos Moulitsas, aka Kos of the massive US politics blog Daily Kos (he’s also third in Forbes’ top 25 web celebs); artist Natasha Wescoat; musician Johnathan Coulton; Burnie Burns, creator of game-culture comedy video site Red vs. Blue; and Brett Gaylor, a filmmaker friend of mine from Montreal, whose film Rip: A Remix Manifesto is premiering here.

• Coulton says he gave his audience variety and let them choose what they liked; he also encouraged mashups, and videos of his songs using World of Warcraft footage, made by fans, have had millions of views; he also notes that “coming soon” appeals are useless online — if you can’t give them something right now, you’re wasting their time
• Moulitsas sought out a niche (political statistics and foreign policy) and made sure to brand his site so it would be remembered; he
• Burns, like Moulitsas, started in an underdeveloped niche; they also had a good audience (Halo players) and then made sure to update regularly and consistently
• Gaylor gave audiences simple calls to action and emphasised transparency; he notes you have to work to engage with the community that his audience comes from

Daily Kos gets 95 percent of its revenue from advertising and 5 percent from subscribers (who pay to not see advertising). It’s a seven-figure operation, he says, with a paid staff of nine. He hasn’t spent anything on traditional marketing. Instead, he uses tools that relate to his context, e.g., he pays to have polling done, which allows him to create news and generate more traffic.

Gaylor says it’s still important to spend on a publicist if you want coverage, especially given the contraction of big media budgets. Maybe, says Coulton, but if your audience is internet savvy, they can smell (and avoid) marketing from miles away.

There’s a consensus that “non-marketing marketing” is synonymous with a lot of work. Every panelist notes that their efforts to stay engaged with their audiences often keep them from their work.

Best quote, from Burns, who just started using Twitter two days ago: “I can’t learn to use this stuff as fast as other people are learning how to hate it.”

Image from Red vs. Blue.

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Open Source and Free
2. SXSW: Social Media & Sustainability

Sunday morning’s panel selection was a bit of mixed bag, and so I’ve randomly walked into one about content partnerships between brands and filmmakers. Some of us (like me) cringe at content-brand synergy, but let’s be courageous.

The more general topic might be something like “brands and content producers” — I always argue that the specific media is unimportant. And, really, the significance of this to anyone whose site involves content is high — advertising revenue and content models are both changing whether you like it or not.

(Also, there must be 500 people in this room, which is so full they’re sitting on all available floor space.)

The conflicts between content and advertising are ancient and well-documented, but they come up here. The moderator, Jess Search from the Channel 4 Britdoc Foundation, just asked XXXX (from Vice Magazine’s VBS online TV station) whether their series about high school surfing teams, made for Red Bull, happened because VBS wanted to make it or because Red Bull offered them the money.

“It’s probably the latter,” XXX admitted.

“I hate the term ‘branded entertainment’,” said Karol Martesko-Fenster of Babel Networks. “I prefer branded affinity”. Martesko-Fenster objects to what he says are effectively ads disguised as content, when the brand dictates too many terms. “There’s room for filmmakers to make fiction and documentary film that will be of interest to the brand”

Further reading (recommended by panellist Sara Pollack from YouTube): Emily Nussbaum in New Yorker magazine.

Photo of Jess Search and Karol Martesko-Fenster by me.

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Building Online Audiences

The obvious answer is “of course”: people have hundreds of friends on Facebook, hundreds of followers on Twitter, and therefore share information with a much larger pool of people.

But it’s more complicated than that. We think about Facebook “friends” differently than, say, our “best friends”. Or do we?

A woman suggested that perhaps our goal is to consider whether intimacy is being redefined. Certainly we divulge more personal information to a greater number of people.

In response, a guy in a hoodie with a beard and an iPhone (which could be about 75 percent of the people here) said that meaningful friendships are defined through some form of real commitment, and then noted that many of us have different online social behaviour online than in the real world.

There probably won’t be a definitive conclusion at this session, I’m guessing.

Have social networks changed you?

Update: Minutes after I suggested there wouldn’t be a definitive conclusion, a woman said something to the effect of “We need to understand that relationships are complex and that the internet creates opportunities for an even richer, more complex set of relationships with people”. Which actually seems conclusive and definitive. I met the woman after — she’s Christina Wodtke, who wrote the information architecture book Blueprints for the Web and writes for Boxes and Arrows.

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Privacy and Personalisation
2. Friends we’ve never met ….
3. SXSW: Old Media, New Ideas

My DE colleagues and clients alike know that I love the New York Times website. It sets the standard for journalism on the web, and continues to push for better ways to use design to share information with the public.

This afternoon’s panel with Tom Bodkin, the NYT’s design director and assistant managing editor, and Khoi Vinh, design director of the website, was a must-see, therefore.

Bodkin and Vinh don’t quite see eye-to-eye. Bodkin’s clearly more invested in print; I liked his insistence that the print medium has attributes that can endure even as information moves online — that we shouldn’t always try to make print versions more like the web.

Vinh defined the design mission:

1. Deliver news in as readable and usable a form as possible
2. Deliver news with maximum elegance and minimum ornamentation

And then he described some principles central to the Times’ design philosophy that I think are especially of value:

• the need for high quality journalism is greater than ever
• the future news landscape will have thousands of micropublishers and a few global news platforms (this is a pretty huge one)
• traditional approaches to journalism have to be reconsidered
• the content on NYTimes.com needs to be “platform agnostic” — it must be able to go wherever readers want to read it: browser, iPhone, printout, RSS reader, etc.

Web and print, Vinh said, will never be in synch again. The objective is “to be true to the medium and the context.”

Awesome.

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