I resonate with the concept and the philosophy, but I still don’t see where VRM ‘bites’? Where are its teeth? It’s going to need vendor buy-in to actually work? You can’t shame them into action, or count on enlightening them. Vendors are not going to volunteer to be ‘managed’… the name of the meme itself, almost jinxes it, for non-adoption by traditional product/service suppliers in the value-chain.

How is VRM going to be enacted? By what mechanism? If you are counting on a mass movement, you should also count on it splintering into numerous factions who will each see the movement through their own human-network scale lenses. (i.e. thousands of people can’t sustain such a collegiate approach without it breaking up into geographic, ethnographic, sociological or psychographic sub-groups, and there’s evidence of such disparity and clustering already among VRM advocates)

This discussion: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2008/04/28/vrm-is-user-driven/
is all about ’semantics’…. “user-centric” or “user-driven” ???
with phrases like: “…I don’t know if it’s too late to get the identity community to adopt it”. This battle is not going to won by which exact words you agree on to describe the theoretical forces… This is such navel-gazing… and what’s the take-out prize? An agreement on terminology?

…and everyone’s getting excited about ‘mobile’… Mobile is a distraction. The extent to which it threatens to become a real force is tied to its direct appropriation of the web’s systems and power-structure… Solve the web first, mobile will follow.

In no case that I know, however, is VRM “federated” in vendor-to-vendor sense, or dependent on “having people’s ‘Interest-Data’ moving around the web between vendors”. But then, I don’t know what you mean by “a kind of ‘federated solution’ rather than a granular one, and one that depends on a presumption of voluntary exogenous cooperation in the commercial exchange process”. Maybe you could unpack that, or show us where something like that is proposed as a VRM approach.

As for APML, it’s never come up.

VRM is intended from the start as a new commercial paradigm — one in which customer relationshps with vendors are under customer and not just vendor control. It is exactly the kind of “break from orthodoxy” you’ve been calling for.

From the start — which I’ll date roughly from the publication of The Intention Economy, which was months before the term VRM came into use — I have been highly insistent that we keep “attention” and “attention data” out of VRM discussions, and to focus instead on actual customer intentions, and on equipping customers to be fully independent and autonomous in respect to their dealings with vendors. As Joe Andrieu said here, the individual needs to be the “point of integration. And as Adriana Lukas said here, the user needs to be the driver and not merely the locus of external concern.

As for blind men and elephants, VRM is a new species that we’re creating pretty much from scratch. It has never beeen intended (certainly not by me) to operate inside what you correctly call “the client/server paradigm of the World Wide Web”, and correctly (IMHO) identify as its “negative externalities”. While we obviously have to deal in some (perhaps many) cases with the commercial Web as it exists today, we wish to confine those dealings to ones in which the individual is in control, in which the individual can assert the terms of interaction and service.

Finally, it is largely because of the vendor-controlled nature of the server-client paradigm that I have also been insistent from the start that we look to the mobile world, and mobile devices, and live interactions, as the best greenfield environment for working out the best of what VRM should become. We have to get away from both the Facebooks of the world, and their mentalities of contained and controlled customer dependence.

This won’t be easy. Mobile systems vendors (phone companies chief among them) have customer-control mentalities that date back to the dawn of the Industrial Age. But I still think the live & mobile world where we’ll be able to make the best VRM stuff happen.

Although the market supports commission, it’s voluntary.

Thanks for the link to your post- I’ll have a read.

I take it VODO’s voluntary payments are like ‘donations’, if that’s true, then the model is weak. The model for the system we propose (above) is the closest manifestation to ‘Coase’s Theorem’ put into action that I have seen/conceived. (payments would be automatic and based on the providers ability to supply, but lock a % of payments back to content originators) But that system requires a third party dependency on a Bank or (analogue) and that is a show-stopper, for the moment.

As to ‘voluntary’… I guess its just that so much of the web implies or presumes/necessitates an obligation to adhere to the prevailing orthodoxies that people think of ‘voluntary’ action as a logical alternative to the ‘foundation-dependence’ lock-in of the great client-server web con. (see my post)
http://edgepolitics.blogspot.com/2008/02/medium-is-mess.html

I was criticising the fact that the word was necessary.

I was not attempting to address or respond to your comment as a whole. Indeed, I may well entirely agree with you and have no criticism of your comment.

I’m simply interested in why it seems so necessary these days to qualify everything with ‘voluntary’.

See my recent comment here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2008/05/24/whats-the-overlap-between-vodo-and-vrm/

I’m also amused by the deceptive use of ‘voluntary’ as in ‘voluntary collective licensing’ which is actually quite compulsory (for everyone except the licensor).