VRM

VRM is starting to pick up steam just in time for IIW this week. For details, follow the links from Mine! and A nice unpacking of VRM. And thanks to Adriana Lukas, Eve Maler, Alec Muffett, Ben Laurie and Joe Andrieu (along with currently uncredited others) for getting many conversational as well as developmental box cars packed and rolling.

It’s great to see what I saw coming in 2003 finally start to take off.

PaidContent.org reviews the announcement by CBS of “a new media player desktop app that brings together song personalization and recommendation for users, with a broad, contexual canvas for marketers to reach listeners.”

It goes on,

Imagine a car radio that only played one owner’s stations and nobody else’s. (Oh, we already have those. They’re called Sirius and XM.)

Then there’s this:

Fred Wilson unpacks this a bit. A sample:

He also tweets “These guys have nailed it”.

No, they haven’t. It’s a closed system from a closed-minded company. As of today WNEW doesn’t have an open live stream, via .mp3 or anything else. They have their own live player you can only use on their site. WINS has no live stream at all, near as I can tell (correction: it has one just like WNEW, that’s a player that runs only in a browser window), though it does have podcasts.

Here’s an exercise. If you have iTunes (which most of you probably do), click on Radio under Library. Count how many live streams they have there. “Alternative” has 146. “Public” has 94. “College radio” has 37. And you can add whatever you like with the “open stream” command. Go to a station like KRCL and you’ll find a bunch of choices that in many browsers will automatically open iTunes or the player of your choice. Chances are most or all of them don’t bother you with ads.

All the stations in the iTunes directory, and countless more, already comprise a wide-open radio dial controlled by no one company.

I don’t care how pretty CBS/AOL make the UI, or how big the back-end deals are. If it’s just another silo’d sluice for advertising and mass-appeal “content” from a single source and its partners, it’s not radio. And it’s not fulfilling the promise of the Web, which is direct interaction between any two parties, where anybody can produce, consume or both.

A real open market supports transaction, conversation and relationship between anybody and everybody, on terms any party can assert and any party can accept or reject. It’s not “your choice of silo” alone. It has business models other than just advertising. And at is base are open standards for interaction.

There will be far more business in an open world with many kinds of radios, from many sources, playing anything by anybody for anybody, than there will be in yet another closed system by yet another bunch of big boys trying to turn the Web into a 1980s-style online service with a Web 2.0 paint job and all the advertising you can stand.

This CBS thing is a silo. Sez Fred,

We can do better.

In fact, we will do exactly that. Stay tuned.

Connie Bensen: As a Community Manager the Cluetrain Manifesto provides the foundation for my philosophies & underlines the relevance of my work…

So John Cass started this thing, asking five questions about the Cluetrain Manifesto. The latest answers come from Jason Falls. In addition to his own, Jason points to Valeria Maltoni, Richard Binhammer, Michael Walsh, Phil Gomes, Mack Collier — and John Cass.

I’ll save my own answers for the next There’s a New Conversation event, in Palo Alto, on 29 May. Here’s a video of my talk at the last one. The next will be different, though. Times change.

Here’s the link, and here’s the text:

Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.

And here’s Bart Stevens’ blog post with photographic proof as well.

Big thanks to Joerg, Martin and all the folks at Kuppinger Cole for hosting VRM 2008 and for welcoming all the participants from the VRM crew to EIC2008.

We have many more events coming up. In addition to regularly (and irregularly) scheduled ones in the U.K and elsewhere in Europe (need to get everything on the wiki), we have the VRM sessions at the next IIW, plus the first VRMW (VRM Workshop, unless we come up with a better name for it) at Harvard on 9-10 July. Mark your calendars.

I missed Munich last week, at least physically. But I did get there virtually. There’s a video here of the keynote I gave (complete with slides — nice editing job there by Mike Deehan of the Berkman Center, who also stayed up all night with me as we got this done in the wee hours of East Coast Time). Most of that was not shown at the conference, due to technical glitches. But at least it got captured at the source end.

Here is a nice report by Phil Whitehouse on VRM2008 and the relbutton idea (first vetted publicly at Media Re:public earlier this month), in addition to his own talk there, together with Paul Downey, whose sketchnotes are here.

In Linux Journal, Is government open source code we can patch? And in the ProjectVRM blog, VRM is user-driven.

So I decided to cave in and say yes to patients waiting in the accumulating pile of friend requests at my Facebook account. Haven’t been to Facebook in awhile, so I was also curious to see if “friending” has improved since the last time I slogged my way through the process.

First, l lost count of how many seconds passed during login. As usual, I clicked “remember me”, but I have no faith that it will next time. It never has before.

Second, I now have 190 friend requests. I know a few dozen of these folks. I would like to say yes to them as a group. While this would be handy and useful, and must be something that users have wanted for a long time, it’s still not there — though it’s nice to see that the silly intermediate checkbox thing (about how you know this person) is gone. Still, it takes another 10 18 25 seconds or so between clicking “confirm” and actual confirmation. With nothing happening in the browser’s status bar. So you have no idea if clicking even worked.

Makes me wonder if there is a cure for silos that isn’t yet another silo.

There has to be. Eventually. Somehow.

[Later…] I just “friended” a few people. They took, 30, 15, 8, 14, 33, 5, 34, 15, 5 and 5 seconds. I won’t bother to average those, because they don’t include the last two I tried. Both took more than a minute before I gave up because nothing happened. Awful.

At ROFLCON, this time for more than a few minutes. Observations…

I can’t post a question using the question tool.

I’m at a panel on fame, and I don’t know any of the panelists. (They are, in fact, moot of 4chan, Randall Munroe, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. They are arranged according to size: moot, Randall, Ryan.)

I am >2x the age of 90% of the people here. I may be 2x the age of ANY of the people here. (Not true, but it seems that way.) Worse, I’m dressed to “go out” to some place nice later, so it’s like I’m in costume.

A sport here: being first finding the too-few power outlets. (That’s the headline reference, btw. Figger it out.)

Neo-Cantabrigian observation: MIT does wi-fi right, while Harvard does power outlets right. At MIT, it’s a snap to get out on the Net through the wi-fi cloud, but there are too few power outlets, and some of them have no power. At Harvard, there are power outlets for everybody in all the classrooms (at least at the Law School, to which most of my experience is so far confined), and getting out on the Net requires a blood sample. From your computer.)

Great question from the floor… “At what time have you been most afraid of what you’ve created?” Answer: “Right now.” At which point Anonymous Thinker — a guy dressed in a suit and a fedora with a black stocking pulled over his head — just made a bunch of noise from the back of the room. Near as I can tell. I’m in the mid-front, and can’t turn my head that far. Still, funny.

Best question on the Question Tool: “SUDO MAKE NEW QUESTION.” Top vote-getter: “What is your zombie defence plan?”

Unrelated but depressing: The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

I don’t have the whole fotoset up yet, but it’ll be here.

Randall just called blogs a “four letter word”. Blogs are very outre here.

The best conferences aren’t conferences at all. They’re workshops. Meaning, work gets done there. Things move forward. Barns get raised. Or razed to make way for better barns. And all those things are subjects chosen by the participants, which for conferences would be called “attendees” or “the audience”. At workshops, everybody contributes.

This is the basic format of the Bloggercons, of BarCamps, and of the IIWs: Internet Identity Workshops.

The next IIW is on May 12-14 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. When you look down the list of organizations, technologies, standards and other entities represented at the IIW, you’ll see plenty that were either born or improved there.

Look up iiw at Flickr and you’ll get a visual sense of what goes on there.

More things are overlapping with digital identity all the time.

For example, data portability. For that the Data Sharing Summit is coming up. There’s a workshop on April 18-19, and the Summit itself on May 15 at the Computer History Museum. That’s the day after the IIW.

In addition to detailing both the IIW and the Data Sharing Summit, Kaliya Hamlin also notes Interop sessions at RSA next week. There’s also a dinner.

Since I still lack clones, I can’t make any of these, which is a huge bummer because IIW is in some ways my baby, and I’ve never missed any of its birthdays. Instead I’ll be at other things for which I have superceding obligations, including Berkman@10, VRM2008 and the European Identity Conference (aka eic2008). The latter two are both in Munich.

In any case, check them all out.

So I have this new laptop that won’t take my old EvDO card, which I long been using to get on the Net over Verizon’s system. It has it’s own phone number and account, but it treats the cell system as a big wi-fi network, effectively. I use it anywhere in I can’t get on by wire or ‘fi here in the U.S. Which is a lot of places. Not cheap: $60 per month. But worth it.

So I need a new card.

To get one, I went to a Verizon store yesterday afternoon here in Loma Linda, CA. A new card, they told me, was $280. Too much, I said. So, after several calls to somebody over the phone, the young man behind the counter said he could “help me out” by discounting the price of a new card if I agreed to extend my cell phone contract another two years. (It’s due to run out in July.)

I didn’t want to do that. So I asked what it cost to cancel the account. The answer was $170. It runs to September.

So the choice is to pay $170 to cancel or pay $300 until the contract runs out. Pretty sucky.

Never mind that I’ve been a Verizon customer for many years, with a FiOS connection in Boston and a landline connection in Santa Barbara, in addition to the cell phone and the EvDO accounts.

I’m really looking forward to fixing this lopsided system.

I’m at Logan, moments from take-off for Los Angeles, so I won’t elaborate on Leveraging Free, my latest post at Linux Journal. Read and follow the links there for much more.

See ya on the far coast…

I’ve been trying lately to look up stuff online that happened before the Web. It’s like looking for fossils in atmosphere. And the paleowebic tools are pretty sucky. Take for example the San Jose Mercury News archive search. I happen to know there was a story in the business section of the paper in June 1986, about Hodskins Simone & Searls, the advertising agency in which I was a partner for many years. If I look up hodskins, nothing comes up. If I search from 1985 to 2008, three items come up, none relevant. (Well, one might be, but to find out I have to create an “archive account”, specifying a payment method, before proceeding. Kind of a high-friction system.)

It’s not that I want to pay nothing for putting the Mercury to the trouble of providing a service that costs their servers more than nothing. But the complete absence of a widespread and easy to use system for perusing archival material from multiple sources is one that I’d like to help the market solve.

I do have ideas. Stay tuned.

Surprised I hadn’t seen this movie, which is right out of Cluetrain and comes from Microsoft, of all peoples. Thanks to Keith Hopper for turning me on to it.

The question at AlwaysOn: Is Facebook Growing Up? I dunno. And mostly I don’t care. I hope so, anyway. Meanwhile, much of the text under that question is some quoted stuff I said elsewhere that somehow relates. A sample:

Alan Mitchell has nicely surfaced some of the conversation that’s been going on amidst the VRM development community. Not conclusive, but good stuff.

So I came up with this noun: clueship. Meaning the ability to give or get clues. It’s one name for two conversational assets: having something new to say, and having a willingness to listen to new things other people are saying.

Although conversation is a purely human activity, what we meant by “markets are conversations” in The Cluetrain Manifesto was broader than that. We wanted to recall markets as what they were to begin with: places where people gathered to do business and make culture. There conversation was anchored in people talking to each other, but was also something larger than that. It was demand and supply speaking to, and hearing, each other.

Now let’s move forward to the present, now almost ten years since Chris Locke, David Weinberger and I began the conversation that became Cluetrain. To start, check out Josh Bernoff’s long and thoughtful post, Corporate social technology strategy, Purists, and Corporatists — why companies CAN participate. As two poles (one purist, one corporatist), Josh points to Shel Israel’s Can Brands be Social? Jeremiah Owyang, who poses The 3 “Impossible” Conversations for Corporations. Shel later chafes at Josh’s characterization. To get ahead of ourselves a bit, Shel says,

I’m mostly in agreement with Shel here, but I would rather not be credited with much that has led to “social media”. Not my topic, basically.

Anyway, Josh and I both spoke at There’s a New Conversation, in New York a few weeks ago. Josh’s talk isn’t up yet. Hope it will be, because it was good, and is chock full of data as well as insights. Mine is — though it’s missing the best part (as I recall, anyway), which is the Q&A at the end. (Another talk there — and an especially good one — is Jake McKee’s “How LEGO caught the Cluetrain” — watch TheConversationGroup for more stuff along these lines.)

I’d like to respond to all this stuff, but I don’t have the time. Meanwhile, I’d like to qualify what I’m a “purist” about. In a word, individuals. Customers. My point of view, and my interest, are primarily anchored there. As I said in that talk, the main reason Cluetrain succeeded was that it stood foursquare on the side of customers, and not of companies. As I said in that talk, Jakob Nielsen observed that the Cluetrain authors had defected from marketing and taken sides with markets against marketing-as-usual.

But now marketers are looking at markets as conversations, and as places where they can relate to customers, on terms, and in ways, that work for both. Seems to me that Josh, Jeremiah and Charlene (all of whom work for Forrester) are helping with that: to build clueship on both sides.

Or am I wrong there?

Life in the Vast Lane — What lives past the Web 2.0 bubble is my EOF essay in the February Linux Journal. One sample:

The challenge, of course, is to build out the latter.

So here’s the concept: the end-to-end nature of the Internet is not about “access for consumers”. It’s about creating a World of Ends in which all of us are at zero functional distance from each other — or close enough. That’s why I can listen in on the hearing right now from London, and IM and IRC with people all over the world. Right now, in real-enough time.

The Internet is the universal communications utility that connects us all. As a utility it will, in the long run, come to resemble roads and water systems — in the sense that all of us can connect to it, and to each other over it. The questions that matter most are the ones with answers that get us to this end state.

Right now they’re talking about competition. Two years ago at F2C, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell said that, as a former antitrust lawyer, he favored the “rule of threes” — that is, you tend to get productive compeitition when there are at least three competitors in a marketplace.

We have that at our home near Cambridge. We have Verizon FiOS, RCN and Comcast, all on the poles. The first two bring fiber to the home, and the third has a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) system, that brings coax to the home. Near as I can tell, the only one of those three bothering to compete for the Internet customer is Verizon, although its offering is hardly optimized. No “20 up, 20 down”, as I just heard somebody brag about in the ‘cast. (Was that Tom Tauke from Verizon? Think so.) We get 20 down, 5 up. Right now, if I want non-crippled service (one where I can run a server, for example, with my own IP addresses), I have to pay “business” rates, which are, in the phone company tradition, and without respect to whatever the actual costs are, a multiple of what I pay as a household — a consumer.

All three are going after TV customers primarily — trying to horn into each other’s cable TV business — and treating Internet as gravy on TV and phone service. That makes sense for providers of all three services, on a national basis, but not at the local level, where there is enormous room for innovation and real competition.

Message to Verizon and the rest: the Internet is not about “consumer choice”. We produce as well as consume. We need to be able to run our own servers. We need to be able to exercize supply as well as demand. We need symmetricality, not just neutrality.

It is essential not to frame the Net in FCC terms, or even in communications policy and law terms, which date back to the 1934 act, and beyond that to railroads. Or at least not those alone. The Net is a place, not just a shipping system for “content”, to which “the consumer” should have “access”.

Lot of back and forth about whether or not Comcast blocked BitTorrent. FWIW, I think that::: a) Comcast is still mostly right about the best efforts it makes, but is still weaseling a little bit; b) Comcast’s opponents are looking to paint its kettle black; and c) Talking about it soaks up too much time that would be better spent debating other subjects.

Tag: fccboston08.

I really really really wish I was back in Cambridge right now, where for sure I’d be in the Ames Courtroom, taking part in the hearing where all five FCC commisioners are participating.

I could do the same, to some degree, from here in my stuffy London hotel room, if the FCC’s #@$%& Real audio stream wasn’t hosed. “The server has reached its capacity and can serve no more streams”, it says. Try later.

[Later…] Amazingly, at the Nth try, it now works. More in the next post.

People ask why I don’t blog as much as I used to. One answer is that I write as much, but I just don’t do as much of it here. I’ve been blogging more at Linux Journal, in addition to writing for the magazine. (The March issue just arrived. In it are eight pieces of mine: five with a byline and three without.) I write much more in comments here than I did at the blog’s old site, mostly because the design here is a bit more comment-friendly. And there are other places I’m writing, such as the ProjectVRM blog (which we need to fix so that others can write there too… that’s a ball that’s still in my court). Another answer is that I’m on the phone a lot more. Not sure why that is, aside from the need to keep up with the ProjectVRM community (which is growing in several directions at once). But it’s hard to write and talk at the same time.

In any case, It’s All Good. It’s jut not all here. Not that it ever was, actually.

So now I’m home in Santa Barbara for the last full day before I’m back on the road (actually, in the air and various subways), first to London for this next week, and then back at my other home in Boston for at least two weeks that should be blessedly free of travel.

Meanwhile, here’s a linkpile, most of which I’ll insult by commenting on them insufficiently.

AOL leaves DC. From critical mass to criticized mess:

Sorry I’ll miss Clay Shirky’s visit to Berkman on Thursday and the FCC hearing (with all five commissioners) on Monday. Bad week to be gone, but good for much VRM stuff happening in the U.K.

Jay Deragon asks, Is `The Cluetrain leaving The Station? I’d say the clues have arrived, but are unevenly distributed. Carter F. Smith gets plenty, and asks, If traditional marketing won’t work in The Relationship Economy, what will?

By the way, I’ll be live with Jay on Where is my Customer? The Impact of Social Media on Selling, on Thursday.

Already available is this LinuxWorld podcast with Don Marti. In it I cast doubt on the default assumption that advertising is going to pay for everything. It ain’t.

2008 Web Trend Map.

Mary Hodder: I’ve never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Via this NYTimes piece.

Joe Andrieu: Figure it out for the individual user first, then find ways to use technology to scale efficient solutions. Averages need not be applied. Monolithic approaches to marketing and product development need not apply. Micro-focus at a mega scale.

Higgins 1.0 is out.

I got quoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick from a NewsGang ‘logue, saying Google is vulnerable in search. Others disagreed. Read the comments. The main thing I’d add is that Google needs competition. Search services that zig where Google zags. Not enough of that yet.

I’ve been a Consumer Reports reader and subscriber since the 1960s. And things have always been good between us, until this past few months, after changing my delivery address from my home in California to my apartment near Boston.

So, a few minutes ago, I went on the ConsumerReports.org website, to check out my account info and see what’s up. Turns out the address change in September failed, and somehow got turned into an old-old Santa Barbara address. So I changed it to the Massachusetts address, and went on to try to get some back issues. Then the system told me there was a problem with my address and looped me back into the Account Setup form, where I discovered that the street address took, but the city did not, so I had a new street address and an old city address. There was no way to tell this unless I went back and looked. So, the system was a bit busted. Fortunately, they do provide a number for calling in. And, even though it’s a holiday, a human being answered the phone immediately after I punched a number on a promting menu — and just the first of those, instead of one after a long series. The human, a native speaker of English, found that indeed the system had a problem, and corrected it all, even getting me all the available back issues, and reporting the problem to the magazine’s technical folks.

Consumer reports also provides a way to report problems by email inside their site, including plenty of room to explain things. I did that too.

All this is good, and worthy of kudos. Others should take notice.

Here’s hoping they’ll be up for welcoming VRM to match their CRM. Sure hope so.

So far I’ve had mostly nice things to say about the Obama campaign. So here’s my first dig: the index page. Hey, what if you don’t want to give them your email address and zip code? What if you don’t like the suggestion that the only way to Learn More is by giving that information to them? What if you want to go straight to the website itself, which surely must include more than just this family-foto welcome page?

You can, if you click the “skip signup” button, which is in type so barely visible that I missed it the first few times I went to the site, even though I’d clicked on it before.

While we’re at it, Dave points out here that the contributions mechanism could use some improvement too.

So it’s coming up on tomorrow, when we’ll be revisiting Cluetrain at There’s a New Conversation, at SAP’s place on Morton Street in New York. Some topics I expect we’ll discuss…

• wtf did we mean, if anything, with ‘markets are conversations’?
• wtf did we mean (and who were we talking to) when we said “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it”? And how are we dealing?
• What’s better since Cluetrain went up? What’s worse?
• What’s unfinished, or unbegun?
• To what extents has cluetrain been co-opted? Or just opted?
• Is social networking part of it? For that matter, is social networking either?

I’ll add to those as The Time approaches. Feel free to add yours in the comments below.

And see some of ya there.

That’s a thought raised by The Volunteer Economy.

It’s a huge stretch to think about society, and about business, from the perspective of the independently empowered individual. In business, and even in government, we are so accustomed to thinking about people as dependents, and to seeing their abilities in terms of what we as institutions allow, that it’s difficult to switch our perspective around — and think about companies, and organizations, existing at our grace, and building their services on what we bring to the collective table.

Until I read this piece by Adriana Lukas this morning I hadn’t fully realized how the ubiquitous use of the word content, which I’ve griped about for years (and which Adriana quotes) frames our understanding of markets, and media, in ways that place presumed control in the hands of “providers” other than ourselves. Even UGC — “User Generated Content” — is not seen as ours, but as freight for media companies to forward for their own purposes. As John Perry Barlow put it a few years back, “I didn’t start hearing about ‘content’ until the container business felt threatened”.

Media is where the madness is maintained. And that madness will persist for as long as we continue to assume that business is shipping, and that our worth is measured as freight for The Media’s container cargo business.

But rather than gripe some more, Adriana offers a useful way of framing the full worth of individuals, the creative goods they produce, and what they bring to both social and business relationships: the concept of the person as the platform:

Content is media industry term. The number of people talking about content grows every day as they assume roles that before only media could perform. With more tools and ways of distributing, photos, videos, writings, cartoons etc. are being ‘liberated’ from the channel world. Alas, often sliding into the platform and silo world. As far as I am concerned there are only two platforms - the individual user and the web.

That gives us something interesting to work with as we continue exploring how this changes everything.

Change is in the air at WUMB is a story ran ran in the Boston Globe yesterday, about trouble the U Mass Boston radio station is having with the label for most of its programming: folk. And perhaps the programming itself. It begins:

Hey, WUMB: poll me. I like the station. I don’t have a problem with “folk radio” — although the label does call to mind an old Martin Mull line: “Remember the Folk Music Scare of the Sixties? That fiddle and banjo crap almost caught on.”

WUMB’s music isn’t even close to “all fiddle and banjo”. It’s an artfully eclectic mix of what might better be called “traditional” or “americana”. But how do you draw a categorical line around the Subdudes, David Lindley, Shawn Colvin, Goeff Muldaur, JJ Cale, Dolly Parton, Sleepy John… except to say you can’t. You’ve gotta listen to tell.

I started listening on line (in Santa Barbara) before I got to town, and on the radio ever since I moved here in September. My car radio has a button on WUMB, and my Webio runs its streams.

Hope they don’t give me a reason to change that.

[Later…] Actually, the station’s main problem is really its signal. The transmitter puts out only 660 watts at a height of just 207 feet above average terrain. It also doesn’t come from the campus on the shores of Dorchester Bay, but rather from the corner of a golf course in Quincy, a few miles southeast of town. Its signal to the northwest (say, Cambridge and beyond) is too weak to stop “scan” on a car radio. At my house I need the hands of a safecracker to tune it in on our kitchen radio dial.

As an old radio engineering type, I know the dial is too packed with existing signals to offer much if any elbow room for moving the transmitter or raising the power or antenna height; but I’d suggest putting some of that new money toward, say, a booster transmitter on one of the downtown buildings currently shadowing the signal. Or toward buying one or more other stations around the edge of the market. I’ll bet that some of the AMs would come for a bargain. And with “HD” radio coming, some of those signals could carry music at sound qualities that are higher than the current legacy technology allows. In any case, it’s worth some study (if that isn’t happening already).

To its credit, WUMB has a bunch of other signals (actually, stations), two others of which are also on 91.9. That helps. But with money perhaps more could be done.

As for “the community”, I have some other thoughts about that, which I’ll link to here after I put them up.

[Later still…] This morning’s Guest Set features bassist John Troy, providing faves from the Pousette-Dart Band, Little Feat, NRBQ, Tower of Power, Chris Smither, Sal Baglio… Wow. Great, great radio.

Back to the Globe article…

Hence the headline above.

This morning I decided to start un-following every Twitterer whose majority of tweets are crumbtrails announcing what they are doing now, but whose crumbtrailings do not intersect mine. My twiver has grown too thick with crumbs, and something must be done.

The question is, by whom? Is this a problem Twitter alone can solve? I suggest not.

What I’d like to do is set conditions that trigger following and unfollowing various Twitterers, expecially when we chance intersecting in meet space. I see two ways that can happen.

One is some kind of feature addition to Twitter and (in my case) Dopplr, allowing the latter to tell the former that I’m in the region of Twitterers whose crumbtrailings might interest me.

The other is to have my own dashboard and controls, independent of Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook or any other social (or travel) webservice provider. By that dashboard I could turn the crumbtrailings of others on or off, or set conditions that turn them on or off. That dashboard would manage my relationship with Twitter and other service providers, and connections between them on my behalf. A dashboard like this would be a good example of VRM at work.

What we want, methinks, is to give social webservice companies ways they can adapt to their users, rather than vice versa. This can only happen when users take the lead, rather than just follow.

As Joe Andrieu says, VRM is a vector, and that vector proceeds from the user.

Once we equip customers to lead vendors, the axe is pulled from our heads, and the walled garden becomes obsolete.

Simon Collister in The death of spin has been greatly exaggerated:

Right on.

In that post Simon sources this post by Wendy McAuliffe in Liberate Media. Among other things she says,

Some thoughts.

First, amen to the algorithm point. That’s a great clue that will help with my third point, below.

Second, politics has always been about control. So, in a different way, has democracy. Substitute democracy for politics in Wendy’s second point and I’ll agree with it.

Third, the online world has both social media and social habitats. They are different, even when they overlap. Twitter is a social medium. Facebook is a social habitat. Twitter is a new breed of Web site/service that grew out of blogging. Facebook is a walled garden: a place you have to go to be social in the ways it facilitates and permits. In this respect Facebook is AOL 2.0. By calling both “social media” we blur distinctions that are necessary for making sense of highly varied progress (or movement in less positive directions) in the online world. We need a Linnean taxonomy here. And we don’t have one. Yet. For those so inclined, that’s an assignment.

Fourth, the “audience” isn’t any more. And nobody needs to get over that fact more than PR, which wouldn’t exist without the demand for spin. What we wrote about PR in The Cluetrain Manifesto is barely less true today than it was in 1999. If PR wishes to remain relevant in an environment where networked markets get smarter faster than those that would spin them, the profession needs to define and satisfy a market for something other than spin. Good luck with that.

I watch little television, so I’ve felt comfortable ignoring the writers strike, which has been going on since November.

But it’s hard to escape the strike’s effects while hanging out in Southern California, where writers of movies and TV shows are essential to what they call The Industry here.

Not surprisingly, a search for a bracing perspective on the matter took me to Articulation and Activism: In Praise of Screenwriters … and “Hackwriters” Too — a post last month by my old friend and colleague Stephen Lewis at his blog Hak Pak Sak. His core points:

Steve has also been active in ProjectVRM, and his post moves me to point out that VRM should, among other things, create business models that facilitate “willingness to pay” for writing and other “content” in the open marketplace where the users of that content have wide-open choices over what to pay for creative goods and how to relate to creators. Our job is to create that “how”. Hollywood won’t, and perhaps can’t. Certainly not without our help, anyway.

That “how” needs to lower the friction involved in “willingess to pay” in the direction of zero. That is, the cost in time and effort required to pay must move toward zero until the willingness to pay exceeds the same value. This challenge first faced us with Napster, and nearly all “solutions” from the supply side since then have ranged from harmful to inadequate.

The will to pay fair sums for perceived value needs to be melded with technology that facilitates 1) working relationships (on an elective basis for both supply and demand), and 2) efficient transaction. Neither can be scaffolded on the old supply-controlled systems that feel threatened by the Net. Nor can it be built on an artist-by-artist or distributor-by-distributor basis, because that will just result in countless narrowly-focused and incompatible CRM (customer relationship management) systems, such as those we see today with public broadcasting, where CRM systems restrict listeners and viewers to paying for freely available creative goods only through hundreds of different channels comprised of stations that mostly comprehend relationship only in terms of “membership”.

Nor can it be built only inside some large company’s walled garden. The most free markets will be built on the most free customers — and the most creative and resourceful suppliers and intermediators.

VRM systems need to leverage the freedom and facilitate the independence of individuals, and their ability to make their own choices. They must enable passive consumers to become active customers. It must help demand find and drive supply at least as well as supply drives and creates demand. A healthy market ecosystem with have both. Not just the latter.

The markets that arise from independent and enabled customers will be incalculably varied and large. And some of the largest potential facilitators of those markets — especially those without stakes in the old distro systems — are in an ideal position to help out here, and to break free of their own old failing or hidebound business models. (Hear that, phone companies? Retailers? Banks and credit card companies?) This is the Intention Economy I wrote about almost two years ago. We’ve made progress in that direction (especially around identity), but we still have a long way to go.

More at How VRM can help CRM get past DRM and some other links I don’t have time to find right now. Gotta pack and leave for CES in Las Vegas. [Later… here’s one.]

To understand the matter of Scoble vs. Facebook, you need to understand the matter of Neo vs. Matrix.

I explain in Dependence vs. Independence. That’s the choice. Over in Linux Journal.

[Later…] Much more in the comments below both that post and this one.

In CBS Video: Not In The Conversation, John Battelle writes,

I want to look at it from the opposite side, asking How are customers doing when it comes to having conversations with their key companies?

More to the point, how can we equip customers with better tools for communicating with their suppliers — across all those suppliers’ CRM (Customer “Relationship” Management) systems? Especially when most of those systems are designed to deflect or prevent actual human-to-human contact.

For example, I would like a dashboard — or the technology and standards that would allow anybody to build a dashboard — by which I could manage my billing relationships with all my suppliers.

Right now my bookkeeper, my wife and I are together trying to figure out what the hell a bunch of Visa bill expenses are for. Visa bills tend to have a list of transactions, most of which have little or no useful information associated with them. Usually it’s just a phone number. Call that number and you get routed into the supplier’s deflection maze or to a machine where you leave message and nothing happens. Once in awhile you actually reach somebody. But even then the mystery sometimes only deepens.

Right now my bookkeeper is on the phone with Dish Network, which for some reason is charging us for two accounts, including one at a strange address where we’ve never lived. It’s very complicated. (Later… it was just solved, and we’ll get a check from them for having collected on the account that didn’t exist.)

I have other mysteries right now involving Sirius, 1&1, T-Mobile, SixApart, Verizon, Rhapsody and AT&T. All those companies have their own billing and CRM systems. In some cases (such as Rhapsody), I just want to cancel the service but don’t know how, since I lack any kind of paperwork (physical or virtual) on the “relationship”. In other cases I want to know exactly what I’m being charged for, since the charges are at variance with my understanding of what I should be paying (which in some cases is zero).

I think what we need is something like an API. Let’s call it an VRI: Vendor Relationship Interface. Through it I could know, and see, what I’m getting from each vendor with which I “relate”. On top of that the dashboard could be built.

An interesting thing here is that I really don’t want to have a conversation of the literal kind with most of these companies, unless there’s a problem. I do want to relate with them, however. That is, I would like to request or arrange for services, pay bills and occasionally make suggestions or provide feedback. Most of that does not require wasting the time of another human being. A lot of that could be automated. I believe that automation would be easier if there were a consistent way of relating established on the customer side. That would be one set of wheels that all these different suppliers would not have to invent and re-invent over and over again, each in their own different ways. There could be standard routines for querying transaction histories, or for requesting information about current service offerings, or turning services on or off or up or down.

Whatever we do, “management” needs to go both ways. For the good of both parties.

Okay, back to making calls and doing research and wasting three people’s time…

In The RIAA is Right, Robert Scoble offers a tongue-in-cheek take on the RIAA’s insane idea that ripping one’s own CDs is illegal.* Among other things he says,

Robert is right about all but one thing. Because VRM is about independence as well as engagement, it can’t come from “a site”. Or from anybody other than ourselves. It’s something that lives on the buyer’s side, allowing him or her to relate independently with many suppliers, on terms that are mutually agreeable.

I unpack some of this in a comment under Robert’s post.

A few months ago I also proposed a VRM system that would extend the RadioHead model to any artist.

* According to this post, that’s not really what the RIAA is doing, but they’re “still kinda being jerks about it”.

Tristan Louis is done with Palm. While his tale of tech support woe (ask for support, fail to get it, vow not to continue supporting the company), it does contain an interesting veer from the typical to the surreal: a tech support supervisor who claimed to be the company CEO.

The basic problem, as often happens with lame CRM systems, was that the company forgot that Tristan was ever a customer — even though he had been one for many years. I had the same problem with Dish Network last year.

So one advantage to VRM, as we build it out, is that customers can become trusted respositories of relevant relationship data. That way when the company forgets that somebody is a customer, the customer can remind them and business can proceed.

Meanwhile, Tristan is looking for a replacement phone and provider:

Tristan’s basic request (for an unlocked device, presumably with some specific featurs) here is a personal RFP. Simple market logic is required: a request for a variety of specifics, broadcast selectively to providers of those specifics — without necessarily giving up any more information than the deal requires.

When helpful customers show up, suppliers are much more likely to help them.

Here’s a Techcrunch story on a patent application by Tony Fadell, Senior Vice President of Apple’s iPod division. Under “Summary of the Invention”, it begins,

The comments below the story are worth reading, and a few are very clever. In any case, draw your own conclusions.

Mine is that this is a VRM move. If so, that makes it cool in my book. (Even though I’m no fan of software or business method patents. Still, companies like Apple are going to file them. It’s what they do.)

I also know Tony and like him a lot, so maybe I’m prejudiced a bit.

Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship.

Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metasticized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization.

Even the Net has been seen as a way to remove the humanity from markets — one more way to maximize transaction and minimize everything that, from the transaction angle, looks like cost and friction.

With that small pile of theses in mind, check out Peer-to-peer lending hits its stride, in USA Today. Looks to me like the the long tail has a longer tale to tell than can ever be told through the prism of Transaction. One interesting irony is that it appears P2P lending can actually reduce transaction costs.

Anyway, some grist for the VRM mill. Now we really are on our way outa here.

This is the first slide from Turning the Tables: What happens when the users are really in charge — the talk I gave at LeWeb3 in Paris a couple weeks ago. The predictions are somewhat long-term. I’ll have some just for 2008 up soon at Linux Journal.

All the LeWeb3 videos are up now, by the way. Mine among them, I assume. Haven’t checked. (Hey, it’s Christmas. I wouldn’t be posting anything if I wasn’t sitting in a basement waiting to pull clothes from a dryer.)

Nice, huh? It’s now minutes away from Dec 24.

So it almost certainly won’t get there by Christmas. And I bought it early morning Dec 18, and paid extra for Second Day Air, to get it there by then. The site even encouraged buying because there was still plenty of time.

But no email came. No call from a robot. Nothing. Just “Not yet shipped”. Damn. This really sucks.

[Later…] Turns out Apple sent an email to my never-used address at mac.com. Or says they did. I can’t find it there. Seems they stopped the order so I could authorize my credit card compnay to do something it’s always been authorized to do: send something to an address other than my biling one. I’ve used this credit card many times to send stuff to addresses other than mine, so I don’t know what the deal is.

Actually, it’s no deal. I’m cancelling the order.

And I’m giving props to the manager of the Apple store in Durham, North Carolina. He came up with a clever alternate solution, which we’re carrying out now. Much appreciated.

Over in Linux Journal: Why Big Compute and Big Storage will meet Big Pipe at the Last Mile. A sample:

Might be a far-out idea. But I do think it’s huge.

What most business leaders don’t understand today is that the social web is a medium for open, honest and frank conversations between people, one to one to millions. Nothing can be hidden and the more people that become engaged the greater the reach of the conversations. — Jay Deragon

Jay’s blog is Relationship-Economy.com. I like his ideas. Check it out.

Stephen Wellman has a nice rundown of Mark Anderson’s predictions for 2008 (most of which I agree with — in some cases enthusiastically —, though it’ll take more than a year for many of them to pan out). What’s also cool is that Stephen includes a pointer back to Mark’s predictions for 2007, some of which were right on.

Links to the audio and video of the predictive talk are here.

David Isenberg has announced the next F2C: Freedom to Connect, which will happen on March 31 and April 1 of next year, in Washington, DC. The theme is “The NetHeads come to Washington”. The new term “NetHeads” is counterposed to the old term “BellHeads”, which referred to folks whose world view was framed by the old Bell System, which was the U.S. telephone monopoly until 1984. The successors to that system broadly include the telcos and cablecos through which nearly all U.S. customers connect to the Net.

F2C is for what David calls “the creators of the future of the Internet”, and will be “a meeting of people engaged with Internet connectivity and all that it enables, including vendors, customers, regulators, legislators, analysts, financiers, citizens and co-creators”. The theme is “how universal connectivity and the plunging capital requirements of information production are changing our fundamental economic and social assumptions”.

F2C one of my favorite events. I’ll be going. If you care about the future of the Net, and how it is regulated (and de-regulated) in the U.S., I highly recommend it.

Should Brands Join or Build Their Own Social Network? is the question Jeremiah Owyang raised yesterday on Twitter and in facebook. If you’re a facebook member, you can participate. I am a member, but I’d rather not. At least, not there.

All due respect (and I respect Jeremiah a great deal), I’d rather talk outside the facewall.

Forgive me for being an old fart, but today’s “social networks” look to me like yesterday’s online services. Remember AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and the rest? Facebook to me is just AOL done right. Or done over, better. But it’s still a walled garden. It’s still somebody’s private space. Me, I’d rather take it outside, where the conversation is free and open to anybody.

So here’s what I think.

First, I’m not sure a “brand” can get social at all. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry in the first place, and will never escape that legacy, now matter how much lipstick we put on the branding iron.

Second, the notion of “brands” either “building” or “joining” social networks strikes me as inherently promotional in either case, and therefore compromised as a “social” effort. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t join a social network any brand built, and I wouldn’t want any brand trying to join one I built. But that’s just me. Your socializing may vary. (And, by the way, if I wear a t-shirt with some company’s name on it, that doesn’t mean I belong to that company’s “network”. All it means for sure is that I’m wearing a t-shirt that was clean that morning. It might mean I like that company or organization. At most it means I have some kind of loyalty — although in the cases of sports teams and schools, the loyalty and sense of affiliation is not to a “brand”, unless you insist on looking at everything in commercial terms, one of which “brand” is. My main points here are that, a) there may be less to expressions of apparent loyalty than it may appear, and b) the social qualities of affection, affiliation or belonging mostly don’t derive from “branding” in the sense that Procter & Gamble began popularizing the term back in the 1930s.)

Third, I’m not sure social networks are “built” in any case. Seems to me they’re more organic than structural. Maybe I’m getting too academic here, but I don’t think so. Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. When I think about my social networks — and I have many — I don’t see them as things, or places. I see them as collections of people I know. The best collections of those for me aren’t on facebook or LinkedIn. They’re in my IM buddy list and my email address book. Even if I can extend those two lists into a “social graph” (a term that drives me up a wall), and somehow federate them into these mostly-commercial things we call “social networks” on the Web, I don’t see those “networks” as structures. I see them as people. Huge difference. Critical difference.

Fourth, the thing companies need to do most is stop being all “strategic” about how their people communicate. Stop running all speech through official orifices. Some businesses have highly regulated speech, to be sure. Pharmaceuticals come to mind. But most companies would benefit from having their employees talk about what they do. Yet there are still too many companies where employees can’t say a damn thing without clearing it somehow. And in too many companies employees give up because the company’s communications policy is modeled on a fort, complete with firewalls that would put the average dictatorship to shame. If a company wants to get social, they should let their employees talk. And trust them.

Bottom line: companies aren’t people. If you like talking about your work, and doing that helps your company, the “social network” mission is accomplished. Simple as that.

One last thing. I’m not saying facebook or LinkedIn are bad. They can be useful for many things, and their leaders deserve kudos for the successes they’ve earned. Still it creeps me out when people treat facebook as “The Web, only better”. It ain’t the Web and it ain’t better. It’s a new, interesting and widespread set of experiments, mostly in technology and business. I’m interested in seeing where it goes. But I’m not drinking the kool-aid.

What’s meta about life transcends what’s meta about electronics. Or what’s meta about online social networks or anything that’s less real than life itself. That’s the point made here. From MemoireVive, recorded at LeWeb3 in Paris on Wednesday. And thanks to Joe Andrieu for the pointage.