Never underestimate Google. That should have been my 41st WWGD? rule. Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web – and argued they should buy Twitter - Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave.
In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.
Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.
Here, I speculated about the topic becoming the new atomic unit of news, supplanting the article with wikis that contained a snapshot of what we know now, blogs that treat news as the process it is, links (do what you do best, link to the rest), discussion, and media of all types, some even live (Twitter, Qik.com). Marissa Mayer also gave journalists advice on the new form of news, telling them they needed to maintain updates under a permalink for the story so it could be searched and found.
Wave takes this to the next level. It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki – a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other.
Wave isn’t just the email we’d invent if email were invented today, as was Google’s goal. Wave is what news can be if we invent it today, as we must.
Wave is the new news.
: LATER: I just got email from Jay Parkinson, who is remaking health care at Hello Health. He, too, was impressed with the opportunities in Wave.
Replace news story with “disease you suffer from” and reporter with primary care doc and editor with specialist and photos with lab results, etc, and you can see its potential.
About a week ago, I met with Tristan Harris, founder of Apture, which enables sites to create rich link boxes that display media of all sorts. As we talked, it occurred to me that he had something else in his hands, something I’d talked with the Guardian about over time: the ability to make a newspaper embeddable.
That is, imagine if any content in a paper or news site could be shared on this blog via YouTube-like players that could display not just video but also text, photos, audio, graphics, anything. Imagine if, rather than having to cut-and-paste a quote from a news story, I could quote it here in a box that also delivered the context of the entire story, along with the source’s branding, links, and even advertising.
I’ve argued that newspapers need to think distributed, that they need to go to where the readers are rather than expecting them to be attracted to news sites like magnets; this is a key lesson of What Would Google Do?.
It’s a start. Gillian Reagan in the NY Observer says that perhaps this is a way for newspapers to get distribution and branding from Google; PaidContent agrees.
But I hope for something broader, something any site (even BuzzMachine) could implement to make itself embeddable without having to go through Google’s funnel. That’s what I think Apture might be able to do.
The Guardian, NY Times, NPR, and BBC are on the right road, of course, with their APIs, which enable other sites to embed their content and enables the news organizations to, in the words of the Guardian, weave themselves into the fabric of the web. Daylife (where I’m a partner) also has an API. But the limitation of an API is that it needs developers and that means time. A toolset such as Elements (or Daylife’s new Select) enables mortals such as me to embed content or create pages.
Note well that this is the opposite of locking content behind pay walls. Becoming embeddable is a way for a site to act like Google and go with the flow of the internet, to be distributed by its readers, to take its content and branding and advertising out into the web.
At Burda’s DLD conference in Munich, talking with the Nokia Ideas Project, I first happened on the notion of advertising as failure. That is, the ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there. It’s only in the case of failing at that idea that one needs to advertise. (And by the way, I hope there’s enough failure to continue to support media!)
This, then, is about the impact on the ad agency as a middleman:
At the Brite conference at Columbia, I expanded on the idea:
After we had breakfast a week ago and talked about possible new roles for wire services in the new world, Wolfgang Büchner, who’s soon to take the top edit position at the Deutsche Presse Agentur (the German Associated Press), send me a link to this example of the agency curating and pointing to journalism at its source, which should surely be its most important job in the link economy.
America’s health care system – or lack of one – leads to a stifling of economic innovation and mobility. Consider:
* Daniel Taghioff argues that people are more likely to risk starting new enterprises – leading to economic growth – in countries that have health safety nets.
Turning to entrepreneurialism – would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks) will take care of you? . . . The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.
* I know I didn’t quit my job until I had new health care insurance lined up, for without an employer, I wouldn’t have gotten any (and in the interim had to pay $24,000 per year in COBRA). How many people are sticking with jobs, unhappily and thus probably unproductively, just because of insurance handcuffs? What if they were freed? It would be better for them and their employers.
* General Motors was brought down by more than its its health insurance obligations. Nonetheless, those obligations weighed heavily on the company as they do on many other companies with long legacies and large staffs.
* I was at a WEF event yesterday at which one of the wise counsels pointed to the exacerbation of the health-care crisis that is coming with so many Americans unemployed. This, I think, will force the political issue.
Rather than spending billions to bail out and now even buy crumbling legacy industries and crooked banks, how much more value would universal health insurance give to the economy?
What if, instead of bailing out the past and filling potholes, the government assured universal broadband access? What would that do to spur innovation and entrepreneurship and begin to reform education, which, in turn, would spur innovation? What if education were reformed to emphasis innovation over test-taking? What if investment in new companies were a high priority of the tax code?
We are not thinking strategically enough about these issues in the political debate. We complain about companies thinking short-term but so does the nation.
Drivers at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are threatening a strike.
I could see a few interesting unintended consequences for the drivers: (A) This forces the paper out of business. They lose their jobs. (B) This forces the paper to go online only and the company takes advantage of bankruptcy to kill contracts with not only drivers but also pressmen and everyone except journalists needed for online (not just fewer of the print staff but new jobs: blogging reporters and community organizers) and sales (not just the sales people you used to have, but people who can support networks of community sales). I’d also try to get out of my leases and every other cost burden and come out of the strike and bankruptcy as a newer and smaller but now profitable new kind of news organization.
If I were a manager at the Strib and had Plan B ready, I’d darned near hope the Teamsters go out on strike. Buh-bye now. Hello future.
: LATER: I just spoke with a media attorney to make sure I wasn’t nuts. It also occurs to me that The New York Times Company should force the Boston Globe – assuming they were smart enough to set it up as a separate entity – into bankruptcy. It’s losing $85 million a year. They saved only $20 with recent concessions. It could bring The New York Times down. Time for radical surgery.
Almost every day, I find another newspaper publishing another editorial or letterclaimingthat everything’s OK with papers or that society is not OK without them.
Now The Financial Times offers an editorial on the future of newspapers that starts off sensibly and unemotionally. But then it ends up, as I read it, nya-nyaing other papers essentially saying that we can charge and if you were any good you could, too.
….One potential suitor has decided against entering the print fray – Google, whose Google News aggregation service is sometimes unfairly blamed for causing papers’ problems. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told the FT that Google will help papers to adapt to the internet rather than buy them.
The degree to which the travails of papers are a threat to an informed democracy can be exaggerated, particularly by journalists. The internet has made print less profitable but has also made new forms of information-gathering and commentary possible. Bloggers get a bad press but low-cost publishing helps new sources to emerge.
The profitability of papers in the late 20th century, when they had a monopoly of classified advertising, was an anomaly. Before that, newspaper barons owned them more to wield power than nurture democracy, while the 18th-century press was as partisan and rambunctious as any bunch of bloggers.
That’s great: sensible talk at last from a newspaper about the newspaper business. You’d expect that from a financial paper. But then things shift as the FT acknowledges that “Business papers, including the FT, have had more success in charging online readers than general-interest publications. … Perhaps some of the reporting done up to now by for-profit papers will in future be funded by foundations or trusts. But the industry should not lose faith in the free market.”
Still, bravo. But then the kicker: “When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.”
Sigh. You’d think that the FT of all papers would see that there are many models for supporting journalism, not just payment from readers or foundations. The FT itself also makes money from advertising, of course, and from merchandise sales and from holding events. Rather than sticking a twig in the eye of papers that aren’t as lucky as the FT to be able to charge, it would have been more helpful if it had called for more innovation in more business and revenue models.
I need your help, dear readers, with the title of what I hope will be my next book. I won’t summarize the whole thing but the essence of it is this:
There are three responses to change: (1) Resist it, which is futile. (2) Complain about it, which is unproductive. (3) Find the opportunity in it. That is the only sane response. I’ll be writing about the fundamental and permanent change brought on by our shift from the mass, industrial economy to what follows, a new economy based on knowledge and abundance. Entire industries are collapsing — automotive, newspapers, banking, huge swaths of retail, and others will follow — and they will not rise again after a mere financial crisis. So I’m looking after the destruction to the opportunity to see what can be built and on what principles it will be built. I want a title that imparts the imperative and inevitability of change but the opportunity and optimism I see in it. (UPDATE: Since I see confusion in one comment and one blog post elsewhere, let me make clear that I’m not talking about all change, of course; I’m talking about this specific change from the industrial, mass economy to what is emerging now; there’s no stopping that.)
We’re stymied. That’s in part, I think, because What Would Google Do? was a bell-ringer. It’s also hard to get across that dual notion of destruction and optimism. And we don’t want to be tied to the current “crisis”; this is about something more, something bigger and more forward-looking.
I hesitate to list ideas for titles, because I don’t want to prejudice you and cut off any grand inspiration. So you may want to stop reading this post now. In any case, if we end up using a title you suggest, you’ll have (1) my eternal gratitude and admiration, (2) full credit in the book, and (3) a great lunch. I mean it, so please identify yourself with your name so I can thank you.
UPDATE: Here is a list of some of the titles I like so far from the comments and also Twitter and email (though comments are the best way to leave suggestions):
Damned if You Don’t – Alison Black (a favorite)
Doomed to Succeed – Karl Pearson-Cater (another favorite)
The Phoenix Paradox – John C Abell
Next – Steve Baker
Atlantis 2.0 – Joy Fulton
Ch-ch-ch-changes – Joy Fulton
Change is Good – Joy Fulton
The Future is Now (inspired by hers: Future Now) – Joy Fulton
The Leapfrog Economy – dlawless
Return on Innovation, the new ROI – Allan Hoving
CTRL-ALT-DELETE – Rob Holland
Shift Happens – Cem Basman
Shit Happens – id withheld
What Will You Do – Heather Staines
Yes You Can – Philipp
Bring It On – Howard Poon
From Grave to Cradle – Adam Eland
Clean Slate – Dean
The Dawn is Inevitable – Nikos Anagnostou
Renaissance 2.0 – Dan Brian
World 2.0 – Morten Langkjaer
Another Day, Another Way – Aalia
Apocalypse Yesterday – Laura O
Embrace! – Microkultur
Colbert – Kevin (pretty funny way to get publicity)
When Everything Changes, Change Everything – Wendell Wittler
From Ashes to Action – Steve Gorelick
Mind the Gap – Weltenweiser (pity it’d work only in the UK)
Break on Through to the Other Wise – John Grimes
Profit of Doom – (inspired by John Grimes)
Year Zero – Javier Z
Earlier…..
My working title was Reboot, but that feels inaccurate (rebooting only restarts what was before). I suggested Grave Dancer but, gee, my editor and agent didn’t like it. Wonder why. Other, more serious candidates — and if you like any of these, please come to their defense:
* Resistance is Futile (this is probably the leader at the moment)
* The Great Restructuring (title of my posts, where the book has been germinating)
* The Upheaval (thanks, Ben)
* The Day After (Will that mean as much to people too young to remember the movie?)
* The Phoenix
* Rise Like a Phoenix
* The Leap
* The Wrecking Ball
* The Link Economy
* What Follows the Fall
* The Rise of the Next Economy
* Stop Whining, Start Building
* Prophet of Bloom
* The Dawn After the Destruction
* The Day after the Destruction
* Build, Don’t Bail (Catchy, but probably too short-term)
* Building the New Economy
* Optimist Amid the Rubble
* Cause for Optimism
I love it when people speculate in public about taking the tenants of What Would Google Do?, to a greater or lesser degree, into their worlds. A few recent examples:
* With nonprofits, Marc Sirkin does some incredible brainstorming (he laments that I didn’t cover nonprofits; so do I; it was because I didn’t have the experience and good ideas he has):
In any case, those same traits and behaviors that Google uses are polar opposite of how many traditional non-profits operate. Like most traditional business models, many non-profits have are caught in an odd spot – it’s clear that something big is happening, but there hasn’t been a forcing function like Napster demolishing the music business for example that has created a need for massive, fundamental change. Unfortunately for many large non-profits, I believe it’s about to happen and is going to really surprise and destroy a lot of well known and traditional institutions.
For example, in the international aid and micro-lending space, organizations like Kiva have been literally exploding out of the woodwork, using business models that traditional aid agencies either can’t or won’t embrace create massive shifts in how donors think about, and interact with both the institution and the recipient of their donation! . . .
New Relationships: Give people control
Over and over I’ve seen it happen. Donors say to a non-profit, I’ll give you money but you need to focus on this or on that. The non-profit’s response (rightly so in the “old world”) is we’ll take your money, but we’re the experts on what we fund, not you. Sorry. . . .
In a “Googley” non-profit, the organization would open up and let folks have a say where their money is going. Non-profits could start by allowing patients, researchers, donors and more rate and rank what is being funded. As Jarvis points out, this doesn’t mean they give up total control, but it does mean that the non-profit starts listening closely. In the future, someone is going to listen, and that’s where I’ll (and everyone else) will donate. Think Yelp, but for what to fund, what programs to create, etc.
How else could non-profits give people control? How about in fundraising? It already happens organically and primarily offline, out of site of the “brand police,” but why not allow donors to create, publicize and promote events that they create, run and manage on a technology platform that supercharges these small, long tail events. . . .
New Architecture: Be a Platform
. . . [S]ay you have a great volunteer in a remote location where you do not have a chapter or an office. Why not empower that donor (with proper training of course!) to use your platform to serve the local community? . . . . Think CafePress or Blogger.. or hell, Salesforce.com for volunteers to create, manage and run their own “chapter” on your behalf. Chaos? Nope, that’s what we call trust baby!
Connect the dots like Best Buy does with their Blue-shirt nation, or like the Red Sox do with their online community to provide guidance, collaboration, support and the help they need to help you succeed. Can you imaging a site like Starbucks or Dell’s idea site that allows both internal and external folks to help redesign everything from structure, policies to fundraising campaigns? If you work in a traditional non-profit, I bet you can’t.. but you’d better.
Radical? I think necessary. . . .
New Society: Elegant Organization
Non-proftis can use community for just about everything under the sun. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head…
* Testing ads with mission affected patients
* Collaborating with donors on how to raise more money
* Collaborating with patients on how to best deliver services locally
* Talking openly with families about policies and program services
* Connecting patients to other patients in similar situations
* Connecting families to families
* Allowing patients and families to rate hospitals, doctors, treatments and more (gasp!)
One more… Get Out of the Way
This is a big one for me and is at the heart of why I think non-profits are headed for big trouble in this new world. Non-profits, like many traditional businesses and business models live for control. They love controlling messaging (you MUST breast feed!), and because they aren’t last I checked under CAN SPAM laws, love spamming and blasting out direct mail, email and more. They rely on controlling the event experience at walks, runs and dinners. They simply think that because they’ve been successful in the past, that they know best.
Those days are over. It’s time to flip things inside out and let your true fans help redesign your organization from the ground up. Have you really talked to donors, patients and families about what they think about those controversial policies? Have you asked your event participants to collaborate with you on how to make the event suit them better? Have you done anything that would indicate that you are actually listening?
Others:
* User-generated health care:”Doctors repeatedly say that patients are one of the most valueable sources of information. Yet the gathering of information from patients is typically restricted to the 15 or so minutes you get to discuss your situation.”
* Short-term social networks (like the Twitterflight) built around hospital stays: “Patients might enjoy meeting others in the same hospital for companionship or finding support from those with similar diagnoses. . . . Or those patients being treated in academic medical centers could find others with similarly rare conditions across the country. ”
There’s been a ridiculous and unproductive debate of sorts lately about who killed papers, Google or craigslist. Answer: neither. Papers will kill papers. James Fallows got a great email from someone at Google that points to where the real dangers lie:
It’s not at all about blame-casting. It’s about proper diagnosis for treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, …) but they falsely self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then they’ll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won’t hurt Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick faster, and journalism as democracy’s conscience will weaken. That will hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country.
The only blame belongs to the publishers. . . . Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again. Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the future of shopping. . . .
