Web Social Architecture

The Kathy Sierra Incident

If you don't know about the Kathy Sierra death threats incident, read about it. Everyone with a personal presence online should stand up and pay attention.

There has been a huge amount of commentary online about this, and while I feel, because I care about issues of social accountability online, that I should chime in, I don't actually have a lot to add. I do think there's an interesting nuts-and-bolts discussion to be had around building accountability into online social systems, and I'll get to that, but in the meantime I just want to add my 2 cents of support for Ms. Sierra to the other thousands of supportive voices.

However, I will point to one especially thoughtful and thorough post by my colleague Nancy White. Her analysis and summary of the issues and conversation surrounding this incident is friggin' deep. Check it out.

Moo: Portable Media as Artifact

Lee Lefever posted a rave review of Moo the other day, and as a Flickr fan I was immediately interested. I love Flickr. I had noticed Moo in the past, and frankly, I tuned it out, because its promo on Flickr just felt like advertising for yet another printing service. I don't need my vacation photo on a coffee mug, thank you anyway.

Lee's post makes a great point about the actual genius of the Moo idea: Moo cards are a great conversation starter, and they're a great way to tell a story. Yep, photos and business cards actually do extend each others' value, unlike Rocky Mountain National Park and Starbuck's breakfast blend.

Jay Feinberg adds his typically insightful take:

It’s become more common for websites to strive towards a user experience in itself, rather than being merely an advertisement for some other experience offline. And, given the social basis of the success of the web, it’s becoming common that our experience of products, etc., is itself web-ified across many websites created by many individuals.

So, the conversation surrounding brands is distributed, partly because anyone can publish something about the brand. But what about portable content, like Flickr photos? On the one hand, portable media related to a product can be attached to an artifact like a business card, where it makes sense. On the other hand, the artifact itself is productized.

One of our clients recently hired us to develop a web site using Flash videos to showcase new features in an upcoming product release. The client wants to engage influential bloggers, so we recommended making the videos portable, so bloggers could embed them in their posts. That's a value offering in and of itself for bloggers, who often prefer embedding video rather than linking to it, but I now wonder what else we can add. How can we remix the portable media offering, or enable others to remix it, so it can become more interesting? Perhaps something like the Colbert light saber challenge? Oops, it's gone...

The Basics of Web 2.0 Personalization

I gave a short talk internally the other day on personalization, which is one of the important concepts many of our clients ask about. It was very basic, essentially roughing out a framework for thinking about personalization from an information architecture perspective, and pointing out where some of the Web 2.0 twists are. Here's the cliff notes version:

 

Web 2.0 is made of two important things: people, and content objects. People are represented by identities. Most of us have many. Identities have information attached to them. This picture is of a person. The person has attributes.

 

When a person comes to your web site, you often know a few things about them, like their referring URL, their browser, etc. This isn't much. An early goal for conversion on Web 2.0 sites is account creation. This picture is of a person with a brand-new account. You know their account information, but not much else. The person has many attributes, but you don't know what they are.

 

This is your web site. It's made of content objects, and the content objects have attributes. In Web 2.0, you know what some of the attributes are. Other attributes, like user-generated tags, might not yet be knowable.

 

One of the most basic kinds of personalization is access control. Based on the person's account information, they can access some content objects and not others.

 

As a person uses your web site, you learn more about their attributes. Sometimes they tell you ("subscribe to newsletter") and other times you learn about people by knowing what they do ("I bought Scoble's book about blogging").

 

Different content objects have different attributes. Some, like content type (photo, video, downloadable document, product info) are structured, and others, like title, are unstructured. Some, like tags on a Flickr photo, are added by users.

 

Basic content personalization is a matter of matching up the attributes of a person with the attributes of a content object. You know the person likes basketball because they bought a Duke basketball jersey, so you show them a content object that has to do with March Madness.

 

There is some complexity in the details, I have to say, including reconciling attributes that don't have 1:1 relationships, such as when a person's location is "northwest" and your content is tagged by state.

Anil Batra has taught me a lot recently about using complex behavioral targeting mechanisms to personalize content--for example, if a person on a newspaper site looks at the financial section and the automotive section, you can target them with an ad for a Lexus. New services are emerging that enable you to track behavior across multiple web sites and use that data for personalization. Combine that with advances in identity management, and you're in the brave new world.

And some of the details are fundamentally different on Web 2.0. Content objects are created and assigned attributes by users of your site. User-generated content and folksonomy change the game for personalization. I believe many, many corporate web sites are going to learn these challenges quick--and the folks who get it right first are going to stand to gain a lot.

Zima Viral: Mom My Ride

Zima steps up to the YouTube funny-video viral campaign plate with Mom My Ride.

All I can say is, this one hits a little close to home. My wife commented, "Mom My Ride? My whole LIFE has been mommed."

Of note here, aside from the irony all you parents will sense about the fact that minivans really ARE awesome, is Zima's overt approach to branding the video. No false pretenses here.

 

More on Wannabe Presidents

David Silver posted today on wannabepresidents.com, which I also posted about earlier this week, without knowing David was behind the site. I'm not one bit surprised, though.

David Silver is a friend of David de Ugarte, the creator of Feevy. I was intrigued when the second David commented on one of my earlier posts that Feevy is "-a piece of cyberactivism trying to change the focus in blogosphere-." Now I'm starting to see how that intent will be manifested on real sites.

It's great to see inspired minds mixing it up on important issues.

Show Us Your Wow: Getting It Wrong

I'm not a Microsoft basher, not at all. And, I'm not one to charge around the Web looking for stuff to criticize. However, their Show Us Your Wow campaign strikes me as getting a fundamental thing instructively wrong about corporate-sponsored community.

The basic idea is a photo contest, and the photos are displayed via an interaction that simulates the Windows Flip 3D feature in Vista. The site seems to have been a mild success, with about 50,000 submissions (less then half, interestingly, from the US). However, browsing the site is slow and clunky. You can rate photos, but there seems to have been low participation in the ratings mechanism. You can't comment on photos. My guess is that most participants simply submitted a photo and disappeared.

Now, I do think the relative silence of the "community community" about this site is telling. Nobody got excited about this site, so it was ignored. However, there's a key lesson in Show Us Your Wow that is so perfectly exemplified that I think it's worth talking about. Web 2.0 aspiring corporations take note:

 

IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU

 

Show Us Your Wow has a concept that's good-sorta. It wants to be about "When you experience the amazing, the incredible, the exhilarating. And when you do, there's only one way to express it: 'Wow.'"

Who can't get behind that? It's not a stretch to feel like the Wow concept can be expressed in pictures, and pictures are easy to upload, so there's a low threshold of entry. The concept is brand-aligned, which is a key attribute of successful corporate community initiatives. (See the Converse user-generated film gallery. Navigate to Features > Made By You.)

But there's a problem:

Microsoft is asking you to show them your Wow. Aside from sounding a little off-color (especially in translation), do you really care about showing your amazing, incredible, exhilarating moment... to faceless Microsoft employees somewhere in cramped Redmond offices? Probably not.

Now, you might want to show your Wow to family and friends. You might want to show your Wow, even, to other people out there in the world. But the site is neither messaged or built that way. It's an archetypal example of the corporation wanting to do something community-enabled and just not getting it: "Hey customers! Send your most special memories to our corporate PR department!"

And just in case you aren't into just showing us your Wow because you love us, we'll make sure you want to... by bribing you with a prize offering.

Stay tuned for my next installment, where I'll break down another community site that does something similar and nails it.

Feevy: Aggregating Distributed Conversations

More interesting stuff from Feevy: http://wannabepresidents.com

This site is an aggregation of excerpts from the blogs of America's presidential candidates. Here you can see the distributed conversation (and debate) about America's near future all in one place, so instead of navigating across many blogs, finding links, or using a feed reader, you can quickly scan the most recent activity on the candidate's blogs--and unlike any of those other options, on wannabepresidents.com you might also discover voices and ideas you didn't know you needed to hear and that you might never hear otherwise.

This is an especially good example of the value of blog aggregation, because the conversation is discrete, the participants are from a defined group. There are lots of topics in common--and the participants, let's just say, aren't as good about linking to each other as you might hope.

This site is also an example of how the person creating the aggregation influences the conversation. And here's where this gets interesting. By including the voices of obscure and third-party candidates alongside those of the big-party main contenders, the site is decidedly a political statement in and of itself. This is powerful stuff: "Outsider" voices are presented side-by-side with "mainstream" voices. Dare I say this is a kind of democratization? Brought about technologically? On the Internet?

Any site with an XML feed can be aggregated. An interesting example of a non-blog aggregation is at www.popurls.com, which aggregates social bookmarking and media sharing sites to produce a picture of web buzz from across many sites. You could call popurls a meta-aggregator, if you couldn't stop yourself from saying "meta."

John Goad does something similar on his Internet marketing "re-blog," but with an editorial selection process rather than dynamic feeds.

Blog aggregations are nothing new. What's new is the greater ease of assembling one. Feevy represents another step toward a time when it'll be as easy to aggregate blogs as it is to start a blog. And that has the potential to add a new kind of conversation to the mix: the blog as dinner party, the blog as wedding table, the blog as trapped-in-the-elevator, the blog as discussion panel, the blog as debate.

You could aggregate the blogs of people who might not even be on speaking terms. Think of the fun!

There are lots of aggregations that would be just plain cool:

• Has-been boy band blogs (would it be possible to graphically display their despair, their nostalgia?)
• Flamboyant government official blogs from around the world (Feevy's already done one for Spanish representatives at http://www.parlamentarios.info/)
• Self-professed online community expert blogs (sign me up!)
• Family and friend blogs

Similarly, there are applications for business:

• Blogs from individuals on a product team that wants to provide a consolidated customer-facing voice
• Internal-facing blogs of company leaders
• Companies wanting to put forward a thought-leadership marketing presence
• Tracking of influencer blogs across the business space

We're working on something along the thought-leadership lines at ZAAZ (my employer), and we've done some interesting client work recently that pulls together a number of individual employee blogs into a sort of hybrid meta-blog (there I go again) / blog aggregation.

So, soon we'll see, if not an explosion, then a flowering, of aggregators as the technological barriers of entry come down. Remixing and assembling bits and pieces of the distributed conversion will provide new views into issues and trends, new ways of seeing individual voices as part of something larger, and new ways to customize your own view of the Web.

Competing for Attention

I returned from vacation and was greeted by the BSOD on my home desktop. My two-month-old, K-buck HP desktop! Fortunately I also have a beater laptop at home and was able to retrieve email.

I had to spend an hour on email prior to returning to the office this morning because so much information is distributed through that channel, and returning from vacation is a prime time to miss something important or to be ambushed with the dreaded "What do you mean you don't have an opinion? I forwarded you the email...."

Email is broken! Hardly news. The channel is saturated by trivial data, among which are hidden the few pieces of mission-critical information I had to have before arriving this morning. An hour of my life, vacation time no less, consumed by the information-superabundance of the modern work environment--not reading, consuming, or digesting, let alone thinking, but sifting, sorting, and above all filtering!

Among all that trivial data I found the following quotation:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.  Herb Simon, Nobel Prize Winner

Apropos. And a very interesting way to think about one of the challenges of community design, where not only is there typically a lot of content, but where organization and presentation of content is especially tricky.

Content added by participants (my Web 2.0 replacement word for "users") is all over the map, in terms of quality but also in terms of the way the content is shaped by the author's assumptions about structure and presentation.

A simple way of restating Simon's quotation is: Every bit of data competes with every other bit of data for the attention of the reader. In a community context, it's easy for the volume and variety of data to get overwhelming, lose context, and generally drown out the interesting stuff. There are a number of ways to manage that, some of which are standard for all kinds of web sites:

• Limit the number of kinds of information that can appear in one place.
• Present information in context.
• Offer options for sorting and filtering.

And some of which are especially valuable on community sites:

• Separate the wheat from the chaff. Use smart algorithms to identify the best content, and provide ways for it to show up. User ratings are one way to do this, but participation is always limited and polarized. There are better ways--see Flickr's Explore page, where photos deemed interesting are featured. They are, in fact, always interesting.
• Use transparent personalization. Combinations of explicit choices and behavioral metadata can effectively filter out the noise for frequent users--but be careful to be explicit about what information is being hidden and why.
• Support "self-organization" of community content via tagging and other kinds of folksonomy.

I'm pretty excited to see a successor to email emerge, not only because I hate email, but because I think combinations of collaborative web spaces and syndication are going to offer much more powerful ways of communicating, and of managing communications, than we have today. As far as I can tell, there's nothing missing technologically--we just need the right design.

Socializing Transactions for Richer Experiences

I had a great conversation a couple nights ago with a guy who was cutting up a fish.

I liked that sentence so much I left it all alone in its own paragraph! I'll explain, though. I was at the Pike Place Market, which has inspired design concepts for me in the past, buying some salmon to put in the freezer. I always like to befriend the fish guys so they'll hook me up with a great fish, as I am a big time enjoyer of top-quality salmon. So I made sure the guy knew I'm not a tourist and that I know the difference between good salmon and salmon you can get at the grocery store any old place.

It takes a while to steak and wrap for freezing a 15-pound fish, so I stood there and chatted with the fish-cutter-upper while he did his job. We shared a laugh as he fielded an appalling call from someone wanting to know how to boil a king crab (you steam them), and he shared a story about a woman wanting to know how long to microwave a lobster tail. I told him about my secret technique for preparing salmon (don't even ask), and he seemed to appreciate it.

I'm really seeing that a lot of the value of personal and interpersonal processes shows up along the periphery of purely transactional activities. In fact, I actually am enjoying the salmon more, having connected in a small way with the cutter-upper guy!

The Web world tends to equate good design with efficient transaction, but there are other kinds of value that enhance user experience in meaningful, and business-focused, ways. Social interactions and non-text media content operating around the periphery of input / response transactions greatly increase users' perceptions of the quality of the exchange, and make them more likely to return.

Be Back Later, thanks for stopping by

This blog will go dark for the next week or so while I go skiing. Have a good week!

Going up!