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Content 2.0: Meshing Content & People

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By: NMK Created on: July 25th, 2006
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Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics explored the distributed, decentralized online world of today at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006. He outlined the next generation of social networks whereby people control their content and can interconnect between online services, aka 'The Mesh'...

KEYNOTE – Mesh Up: Connecting Content To People

Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics explored the distributed, decentralized online world of today at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006. He outlined the next generation of social networks whereby people control their content and can interconnect between online services, aka 'The Mesh'...

Report by Deirdre Molloy

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

Download this session from the Content 2.0 Podcasts!

Marc Canter opened conference proceedings with the anecdote that close by to our venue of the RSA was the Savoy Hotel – the first hotel in Britain to have electric lights.

We’d know that if we’d seen the movie Topsy Turvy, he explained (as it was built by Gilbert & Sullivan's impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte), and that’s content. And the mesh – the interconnected, distributed, decentralized world is the world we’re in today. By way of analogy he defined his objective as that of finding lots of ways to connect content together.

No-one ever tried to patent the idea of an aggregator, Marc noted, but the blogosphere (with blogrolls and RSS subscriptions) was the first clearly-apparent mesh. The “eventosphere” will be the next big mesh, he said, hence Yahoo’s acquisition of Upcoming. Reviews are another area ready to be meshed – and it’s going to get more local.

This is all tied into and involved with the world of micro-content and micro-formats, he explained, which will create multiple dimensions that will interact together because they will be based on open standards. Having been around for a while, Marc’s seen the notion of communities evolve and grow. Communities started with message boards, then blogrolls, and now there are other connections – as demonstrated by social networking sites and mobile social software that are the next generation of communities. These will grow, evolve and change.

He dedicated the “evening” (Marc was still on WST) to the D’oyly Carte Theatre Company. Belting out a refrain from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado opera, he explained that that was content, it’s in the public domain because its over 90 years old, and we don’t pay G&S [or their descendants – Ed] performance royalties. But all the other copyright and trademark laws are still relevant. Now we have Content 2.0 and it’s just as well NMK called it that and not Web 2.0 as Tim O’Reilly – who has tried to copyright Web 2.0 – might have come after them. But there are no new ideas, just the same ideas being regurgitated over and over.

Content’s different nowadays but how is it different but how do we monetise it? Web 2.0 comes down to attitude, how you charge for it, how you treat customers and how you empower people, he stressed, and companies and people trying to monetize this content have to build trust. That’s the most important thing, and that’s what the new brand is. We can do this by focusing on the user experience, but also by operating a moral, ethical and transparent capitalism. We want to be honest about how we treat our customers.

“Web 2.0 comes down to attitude and companies have to build trust.”
There used to be the saying “content is king”. In the old days the notion was you invented the razor and made the money by selling razor blades. Marc said he managed to do that [with Macro Mind] but Macromedia never figured out what the razor blades were. He feels like he’s paying penance for having created a great lock-in strategy – and bad people took over that standard and turned it into Flash. [he was an original founder of Macromedia].

The grey area is that place where content and technology come together. California is the world’s 5th largest economy, and has Silicon Valley and Hollywood. As the technology / content thing started to evolve in the late eighties, it became apparent that things didn’t have to be linear, they could be interactive and this was a whole new art form. But there’s a place halfway between Silicon Valley and Hollywood called San Luis Ibispo – and that’s the grey area because Hollywood still today doesn’t understand technology and technologists still don’t understand content. How do things change when you combine them together?

So we think of content differently now. All sorts of things are content, he insisted: spam is content; a user’s profile data is content, people’s creativity and expression are content, the people in a community are its content. Marketing blabber and positioning statements are content. As Marc goes through the community and clicks on his web pages and interacts with others and the systems collect information about him – that itself if content.

What will happen is that users like us are going to wake up to the fact of the power of our own data, and the fact that capitalists are making money off that data, and there will be the new effort called the Attention Trust that will demand that we the end users get paid for that data. Over and again we will see these technologies locking us or tricking us into putting all our data into these websites. How come they can monetise our data but we can’t? Like MySpace offers you this service for free, then you come in and bring all this value, and they think that they own that data because they gave you this service for free? But it’s a two-way street.
“Users like us are going to wake up to the fact of the power of our own data”
All the social networks should realise that just as much as the data is leaving, new data will be coming in. And we need open standards to create these two-way highways to let the data move freely and so that the end user decides what to do with their data. If Cory Doctorow wants to put his novel online for free it doesn’t mean people wont also go into Borders and buy books.

So you got all this content and data. Who owns it? The people who created it. When I create relationships and make all you my friends, we call that social capital because I’ve invested in you and vice versa. When I fill up my profile data, what my interests are, what my links are, and plug-in my RSS feeds, or my photos, that’s all content I should own, Marc said. If it gets locked into a social network and they don’t let me move it around, he considers that theft.

So we’re in this distributed world with all these brands trying to get our loyalty, but Marc forecast that instead of these giant centralised social networks what we’ll have is millions of decentralised networks. The business models of the future are all about alliances, ad networks, sponsorships, loosely coupled relationships.

What is the problem I am trying to solve, Marc asked? Multiple log-ins make life difficult, but open standards can resolve this. The goal is create interconnected “portals 2.0” based upon open standards. Yahoo and AOL did portals so well in the past, he reasoned, that they totally stifled innovation and killed the competition and hence there’s been no progress for the last 10 years.

Marc outlined a scenario whereby you can mix and mash all your accounts – your personal ID, your own personae, so that you control your own content and do what you want to do – not what Yahoo wants you to do. It all starts with the personal digital ID, that’s the lynchpin - you have control of your data and can monetise who you are. You even get to represent yourself with different personae.
“The business models of the future are all about loosely coupled relationships”
Your page is symbolic because you’ll probably have 10 or 20 of these – you’ll have the public face you want to show to the world, but also a private page, and a page for your friends, etc. Here, the person is at the centre of the universe; their friends and family and relationships are in the second circle, and capitalism wants to reach through that circle into your pocket and take money from you. That’s why they call us consumers – they way they think of the world is that you were born to buy.

Capitalism’s problem is that they put the company in the centre of the world and you just wake up in the morning to make them rich, but Marc reckoned People Aggregator is going to change the world by establishing open standards that interconnect social networks together.

Structured blogging epitomises this – allowing events reviews and lists that can interconnect with other reviews and lists. All the techie stuff needs to go beneath the surface, he said, so that we can give people formats and standards that work together.
“the enemy is Apple, Microsoft, Google and MySpace – they are the people who are going to keep as closed a possible for as long as possible…”
Marc then described the universal “blog this” button. Go to an article, click and instead of that article being sent to your AOL blogging tool it will send it to your Moveable Type or Wordpress blog account. Instead of locking it into the natural firewall foundations of the portal it allows you to route that content to any tool that you the end users chooses. It will take a few years to get that working, and he’s about year into now.

We’ll have a similar notion for outputting. Marc noted that more and more people have multiple blogs. What you want is a service that allows you to keep track of all the different places that you want to send your stuff. The tool that you use, goes to that service, takes the list and sticks it underneath your blog tool, so every time you create a post you get to decide where you want to send it. And this leads to the notion of open social networking.

Yahoo and AOL are the furthest along of the bigger players in supporting this notion of open standards. To Marc the enemy is Apple, Microsoft, Google and MySpace – they are the people who are going to keep as closed a possible for as long as possible.

We’ll have a similar notion for outputting. Marc noted that more and more people have multiple blogs. What you want is a service that allows you to keep track of all the different places that you want to sends your stuff. The tool that you use, goes to that service, takes the list and sticks it underneath your blog tool, so every time you create a post you get to decide where you want to send it. And this leads to the notion of open social networking.
“The end user gets to decide what of their data is exposed. People are the capital…”
Marc then moved onto “Open ID” standards and their importance. Nobody owns the open standard, and it allows small players to come into the market and compete with the big boys. It gives us a way to jack into the mesh and we can all get a few coins as well. Open standard isn’t always about being the best but just as often about being the first, he noted. So structured blogging is about interconnecting all this micro-content together. He also mentioned the “people’s DNS” – so we’ll be able to go and find people and no telco company will own that list. And the end user gets to decide what of their data is exposed. People are the capital.

Broadband Mechanics’ soon-to-be-released People Aggregator will work thus: you have your traditional networks (your Facebook account, your IM Buddy list, your Flickr stream); but you will be able to spawn your own network from these multiple accounts [and control the levels of access and information revealed to different people - Ed]. Or you can download the source code and run it yourself if you wish, but People Aggregator is not open source as they want to charge businesses for it, so it’s a social network web service with source code available.

Marc referred to his work on ‘Friend Of A Friend’ (FOAF) three years ago. FOAFnet was going to interconnect ecademy and Tribe but because of the lack of authentication the team realised you couldn’t be sure about all the people who were coming in. With People Aggregator (PA), you can do safe secure import and export, because they’ll be using open ID to login, so for instance you’ll use your Flickr ID to login to PA.

So you can establish a relationship, send a message, find communities and / or join a group. This is the mesh, and it’s a multi-layered process. What caught Yahoo’s eye with Flickr was that the owners kept adding features, Marc observed. They built a great service by listening to what people asked for.

Content 2.0 - 2006 conference Website:
http://www.content2point0.com/2006/

About Marc Canter:
 Marc is one of the most recognized people in the sphere of social networks and blogging, and is the founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA) company based in California. Broadband Mechanics builds new kinds of tools and environments, which enable everyday people to create and maintain new kinds of online communities. Marc co-founded MacroMind in 1984, which became Macromedia in 1991. He was part of the team that created the first multimedia player, the first cross-platform authoring system and the world's leading multimedia platform. Over the years Marc has also travelled all over the world, consulting to global corporations and delivered speeches and seminars about the multimedia industry and burgeoning world of micro-content publishing and social networking. Broadband Mechanics launched People Aggregator in public Beta in July 2006.

OTHER CONTENT 2.0 SESSION REPORTS

Content 2.0: Goodbye New Media Hello Social Media

Content 2.0: Marketing 2.0 Forum

Content 2.0: Can Brands Be Trusted?

Content 2.0: The Future Of Web Search

Content 2.0: Folksonomies - What Are They Good For?

Content 2.0: Search & Enjoy Forum

Content 2.0: The Invisible Culture

Beers & Innovation (music special) @ Content 2.0

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