Feeds, and Frequency over Relevance

Dumb feeds are rewriting Sturgeon’s Law, and not in a good way.

Let’s go back a step. Feeds generally fall into two categories: smart and dumb.

The most well known smart feed is the Facebook Wall. Using their data about your interests, behaviour, and the social relevance of the content generator to you, Facebook presents a selection of the overall content pipe to you.

Dumb feeds are much more common, and give you everything created from every subscribed channel. This includes blog RSS feeds, Podcasts (yes, I know this is just another RSS feed), Twitter and the Tumblr Dashboard.

Smart feeds offer the potential downside of content blindness - only seeing what your past behaviour dictates you like, which is inherently a slippery slope - future behaviour will be limited by the past actions, making it more likely that you narrow down on a specific subset of your actual interests.

Dumb feeds have two major issues, beyond narrowness of feed selection.

A dumb feed turns into a flood, very quickly. As the only settings are on and off, things get either skimmed over, or ignored. There are many blogs that I adore, but cannot keep tracking in my RSS reader, due only to volume (an example would be the excellent BoingBoing.net).

What worries me more, however, is that dumb feeds encourage a specifically negative behaviour in content creators - cherishing frequency over relevance. If every piece of content is being pushed out to every subscriber, more = increased impressions. Functionally, in a world of “if you build it, they may not notice due to how much else is being built every second”, pumping out 30 blog posts a day is a semi-logical response.

But relevance, and beyond that meaning, is often a matter of remaining selective. And I’ve realized that having one meaningful piece of content a day, or even one a week, is more valuable than 5 daily pieces of ‘good but not great’. Not everyone will agree with me, and I can understand why; I’m speaking of intangible value, rather than pegging it to a quantitative measurement.

But my issue with dumb feeds is that they shift Sturgeon’s axiom (90% of everything is crap) to an even more depressing number, by emphasizing frequency over relevance in terms of reach and audience building.

In a world of constant creation, making 95% of everything crap has a much greater than 5% impact in the value of content consumption and monitoring.

Why you don’t really read this blog.

The number one reason people don’t spend time reading attention industry is pretty straight forward: it’s 90%+ text.

The comment I most hear regarding the site, the theme, and the content is that it’s ‘very text heavy’, which I can see is disconcerting for some people.  I also tend to be more than slightly verbose, and prefer paragraphs to bullet points.  There are a few reasons for this:

1. I think while writing - a paragraph helps me shape an idea, a bullet point is only good for expressing it.
2. I’m dealing with fairly complex ideas and concepts - simplifying them too much would defeat the point.
3. I’m working in the theory of a fairly specific niche - my assumption is that people who care will be interested in reading, those that don’t aren’t my audience.

There are a few more reasons, but those are the most justifiable ones.

Beyond that, I legitimately like writing.  And I assume that the majority of people who will connect with what I’m saying will also like writing.

In the end, I’m making a conscious decision not to let a desire for an audience dictate the type of content I create.  This is not something I’d be likely to advise anyone trying to build a following or a business to do.  Luckily, I’m only interested in exploring and sharing ideas.

No, I haven’t seen your video. Here’s why:

I hear a lot about the value of video online, and I generally agree.  Video can be hugely engaging, eye catching, and is fantastic for explaining complex concepts.  But everyone knows that by now - so here are my top 5 reasons video is the wrong way to reach me.

1. I work all day, generally without headphones on.  As such, I can read an article during the day without bothering a co-worker - I can’t do this with video.
2. An article can be opened, read, stopped, re-read, stopped, re-read, shared, and then finished without disrupting the reading experience any more than I need to.  Video doesn’t play well with multitasking, in my experience.
3. I spend most of my non-work time on a mobile device. Even though my iPhone 4 (sorta) has multi-tasking, video requires dedicating all of my screen, and the entire audio output, to the video.  Massively disruptive from an information intake standpoint.
4. Video has trouble selling itself to me before I start watching.  An article headline is often descriptive of a problem or idea that will be explored.  It’s either harder to express why a video is worth watching in a headline, or people don’t take the time.
5. There’s no good video-only aggregator that I’ve found.  When I find an article or blog I want to read, it goes into google reader or instapaper.  When I find a video, it might end up favourited for later on YouTube, but more likely it will go unwatched.

No disrespect intended to web video, as I consider it hugely influential and powerful, especially in relation to branded content, and real-world experiences.  But at the same time, I’m a member of a demographic that’s targeted by a large number of brands, and web video that doesn’t end up going viral generally doesn’t hit my radar, despite the absurd amount of content I consume.

Print Deathwatch: Closing the design gap.

Using the Reeder for iPad application this morning (it’s brilliant) I started thinking about the value and profit chain surrounding the free content I read from blogs. The short version is, Reeder filled the final gap in that chain, and combined with the iPad, upgraded the content consumption experience with reference to blogging.

Let me expand on that.

A blogger writes to gain a voice, gain an audience, create a store of ideas, or to establish credibility or expertise. Some of these pursuits are motivated by personal needs, but others directly feed to business or monetary needs. “Establishing credibility or expertise” has an unmistakable ROI - and if you told coworkers you were spending an hour a day doing that, no one would question you. At this top level, the value (monetary and otherwise) should be clear.

Direct income from blogging usually comes down to advertising or sponsored content. The options range from Google AdWords, or networks like Federated Media (who I am quite intrigued by), to full on branded content, where posts are created in the “publication voice” to draw attention to an upcoming product. This isn’t “save the content industry” money, but it’s another economy within the chain, supporting the urge and inclination to create free content.

What I’m interested in this morning is the monetization of the design gap, between content published and aggregated online, and a fully designed print publication. I was floored by the beauty and interface of the Wired ipad application, because it felt like a digital magazine. I’m having the same reaction to the Reeder application, which interests me - this is a design solution for my personal collection of RSS feeds, a curated list of blogs which represent my interests. Constantly updating, and now designed in a consistent and fluid manner.

What I’m saying is: Reeder for iPad is the first piece of software that made my blog / RSS reading seem a direct competitor for my magazine reading.

A paid piece of software, adding another micro economy to the blogging process. And it has me thinking that maybe the “print is dead” crowd has a point. Maybe the era of the content creation leading directly to the pay cheque is over. As glossed over above, direct pay for content creation is probably going to be supplemental in a lot of cases. The money comes from leveraging what you and others have created, whether it be reputation you’ve built via your writing, filling the design gap, or creating the best device to consume that content from.

We’ve watched the music industry collapse due to the same disconnect - creating content does not flow directly into making money. Selling words is like selling music, it’s based on a fundamental failure to understand what digital means.

Put another way: I’m reading free content through a $5 application that runs on my tablet. And it’s hitting a point where the advantage in targeting, plus the closing gap in experience, is trumping the thin lead in quality that some print outlets still have.

Leveraging ‘Slacktivism’: Turn Content into Object.

Whether right or wrong, the physical still dominates the ephemeral in terms of creating impact.  One of the most interesting features of the rising voice that digital media is giving the average citizen is that the influential value of something physical seems to remain constant, whereas every additional voice seems to only reduce the impact of an individual thought online.

The internet is fantastic for spreading thought, but not great at spreading action, until things are maniftested physically.

An area where this is supremely evident is politics.  While there is a vibrant and informed conversation online about nearly any political issue, actual phone calls and letters still hold more sway, even in much smaller amounts, than emails, blog posts, facebook groups or retweets.  The easier it is for someone to share an opinion, the less valued that opinion becomes - our society considers sacrifice and suffering key contributing factors to the validity of a request for change, even if the ‘sacrifice’ is printing something, putting it in an envelope, and mailing it to your Member of Parliament.

Luckily, bringing dissent from the digital to the physical is an automation problem.  Aggregation, printing, addressing, and mass mail deliveries.  Postage to elected officials is free in Canada.  If someone was so inclined, they could collect and screencap every tweet with a politically minded hashtag, print, fold, address and package.  If someone was so inclined, they could pick a topic, and then flood the office of the minister responsible with physical evidence of online opinion.

If a company was smart, connected, and inclined, they could sponsor the operating costs of this, and put together a little video explaining the project, the rationale behind it, and the potential impact.

This isn’t limited to companies that work in a field related to printing / reproduction, although a copier company sponsoring something like this, targeted at public opinion on copyright issues would be fantastic.  It would work for any company that has a brand and an audience that is aligned with a political issue.

This isn’t just taking advantage of a psychological failing that ranks things we can touch over things we can’t.  This is enabling activism without the friction that keeps people from changing things.

People like the guy who takes their talk, and turns it into action.

The Digital Content Paradox

Please explain the following contradiction:

Copyright / Free Culture advocates / activists (myself included) often decry the absurdity of assuming the logic and rules of physical goods and objects apply to digital goods and objects.  At the same time, the same activist / advocate groups often insist than rights and concepts of physical ownership on the consumer end, should apply to digital ownership.

If it’s insane for companies to apply pre-digital concepts to their digital products, it’s insane for us to apply pre-digital concepts of ownership to the same products.

Content in a Networked Era

almostcool:

“Making content work in a networked era is going to be about living in the streams, consuming and producing alongside “customers.” Consuming to understand, producing to be relevant. Content creators are not going to get to dictate the cultural norms just because they can make their content available; they are still accountable to those who are trafficking content.”

—

“Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media”

The future of content is light through a prism - different presentation of the same information, depending on the angle / channel.

Personalization and targeting is your new bicycle.

Kitty Hawk and Post-Digital Copyright

Letting the current generation of lawmakers decide what is and isn’t permissible online is like letting the pre-flight lawmakers decide that land ownership extends infinitely up into the air.

Which, if I’m not mistaken, is exactly what some people thought should happen, in the post-Kitty Hawk USA.

This is the level of absurdity we’re talking about, when we talk about demanding that bits be treated as the legal equivalent of atoms.  We’re talking about banning air travel because a spot ten thousand feet above Jim-Bob’s cabin is somehow a key element of Jim-Bob’s day to day life, and flying over unnoticed infringes on his rights.

There’s a collapsing content business because people are still trying to legislate bits into atoms, and spending countless millions on lawsuits, lobbying and hackneyed technologies to make this happen.

It won’t work.  The invention of the plane made it necessary for Jim-Bob to let go of the imaginary right he had to the space above his head, the same way content industries need to let go of the imaginary value of text and images that can be instantly copied at no cost, and transmitted at no price.

I don’t care if the world worked one way for your entire career.  It doesn’t work that way anymore.  Making it illegal for the world to have changed just ruins any chance of developing sustainable businesses.

Put another way, prohibition created organized crime.  Endless rivers of money went to criminals because, well, people were gonna drink anyway.  A law that does not change behaviour isn’t a law, it’s failed governance.

Let the planes fly, because the second we realized they could, the world changed.

[Edit: apparently I am accidentally stealing this comparison from Lawrence Lessig.  This isn’t shocking, because I make a point of reading as much of his work as possible.  Still, apologies.]