Chris Saad

Just wanted to share with you here that I wrote a guest post on Mashable last week about Facebook’s world view. Be sure to check it out here.

Are these blunders a series of accidental missteps (a combination of ambition, scale and hubris) or a calculated risk to force their world view on unsuspecting users (easier to ask for forgiveness)? Only the executives at Facebook can ever truly answer this question.

What’s clear, though, is that their platform is tightly coupled with countless other websites and applications across the web, and their financial success is aligned with many influential investors and actors. At this stage, and at this rate, their continued success is all but assured.

But so is the success of the rest of the web. Countless social applications emerge every day and the rest of the web is, and always will be, bigger than any proprietary platform. Through its action and inaction, Facebook offers opportunities for us all. And in the dance between their moves and the rest of the web’s, innovation can be found.

The only thing that can truly hurt the web is a monopoly on ideas, and the only ones who can let that happen are web users themselves.

I have published a guest post on RWW about Facebook’s recent privacy challenges and their claims about data portability.

“The lack of honesty and clarity from the company and its representatives … and the continued trend of taking established language – such as “open technology” or “data portability” – and corrupting it for its own marketing purposes, is far more disconcerting than the boundaries it’s pushing with its technology choices.”

Read it here.

For whatever reason, a new project called Diaspora is getting a lot of attention at the moment. They are four young guys who have managed to crowd source $100k+ to build an open, privacy respecting, peer-to-peer social network.

A number of people have asked me what I think, so instead of repeating myself over and over I thought I would write it down in one place.

First, I don’t think Diaspora is going to be the ‘thing’ that solves the problem. There are too many moving parts and too many factors (mainly political) to have any single group solve the problem by themselves.

Second, I don’t think that’s any reason to disparage or discourage them.

When we launched the DataPortability project, we didn’t claim we would solve the issue, but rather create a blueprint for how others might implement interoperable parts of the whole. We soon learned that task was impractical to say the least. The pieces were not mature enough and the politics was far too dense.

Instead, we have settled for providing a rolling commentary and context on the situation and promoting the efforts of those that are making strides in the right direction. We also play the important role of highlighting problems with closed or even anticompetitive behaviors of the larger players.

The problem with the DataPortability project, though, was not its ambition or even it’s failure to meet those ambitions, but rather the way the ‘old guard’ of the standards community reacted to it.

The fact of the matter is that the people who used to be independent open advocates were actually quite closed and cliquey. They didn’t want ‘new kids on the block’ telling them how to tell their story or promote their efforts. Instead of embracing a new catalyzing force in their midst, they set about ignoring, undermining and even actively derailing it at every opportunity.

Despite my skepticism about Diaspora, though, I don’t want to fall into the same trap. I admire and encourage the enthusiasm of this group to chase their dream of a peer-to-peer social network.

Do I think they will succeed with this current incarnation? No. Do I think they should stop trying? No.

While this project might not work their effort and energy will not go to waste.

I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.

What they might do, however, is strongly consider how their work might stitch together existing open standards efforts rather than inventing any new formats or protocols. The technologies are getting very close to baked and are finding their way into the web at every turn.

We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.

Welcome to the party Diaspora team, don’t let the old guard (who have largely left for BigCo’s anyway) scare you off.

Last week Elias Bizannes and I wrote a post Assessing the Openness of Facebook’s ‘Open Graph Protocol’.

To summarize that post, it’s clear that Facebook is making a play to create, aggregate and own not only identity on the web, but everything that hangs off it. From Interests to Engagement – not just on their .com but across all sites. To do this they are giving publishers token value (analytics and traffic) to take over parts of the page with pieces of Facebook.com without giving them complete access to the user , their data or the user experience (all at the exclusion of any other player). In addition, they are building a semantic map of the Internet that will broker interests and data on a scale never before seen anywhere.

In the face of such huge momentum and stunningly effective execution (kudos to them!), aiming for (or using the word) Open is no longer enough. The web community needs to up it’s game.

The same is true for data portability – the group and the idea. Data portability is no longer enough. We must raise the bar and start to aim for Interoperable Data Portability.

Interoperability means that things work together without an engineer first having to figure out what’s on the other end of an API call.

When you request ‘http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com’ it isn’t enough that the data is there, or that that its ‘open’ or ‘accessible’. No. The reason the web works is because the browser knows exactly how to request the data (HTTP) and how the data will be returned (HTML/CSS/JS). This is an interoperable transaction.

Anyone could write a web server, create a web page, or develop a web browser and it just works. Point the browser somewhere else, and it continues to work.

Now map this to the social web. Anyone could (should be able to) build an open graph, create some graph data, and point a social widget to it and it just works. Point the social widget somewhere else, and it continues to work.

As you can see from the mapping above, the interaction between a social widget and it’s social graph should be the same as that of a browser and a web-server. Not just open, but interoperable, interchangeable and standardized.

Why? Innovation.

The same kind of innovation we get when we have cutting edge web servers competing to be the best damned web server they can be (IIS vs. Apache), and cutting edge websites (Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Google vs. Every other site on the Internet) and cutting edge browsers (Netscape vs. IE vs. Safari vs. Chrome). These products were able to compete for their part in the stack.

Imagine if we got stuck with IIS,  Netscape and Altavista locking down the web with their own proprietary communication channels. The web would have been no better than every closed communication platform before it. Slow, stale and obsolete.

How do we become interoperable? It’s hard. Really hard. Those of us who manage products at scale know its easy to make closed decisions. You don’t have to be an evil mastermind – you just have to be lazy. Fight against being lazy. Think before you design, develop or promote your products – try harder. I don’t say this just to you, I say it to myself as well. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else out there developing product. We must all try harder.

Open standards are a start, but open protocols are better. Transactions that, from start to finish, provide for Discoverability, Connectivity and Exchange of data using well known patterns.

The standards groups have done a lot of work, but standards alone don’t solve the problem. It requires product teams to implement the standards and this is an area I am far more interested in these days. How do we implement these patterns at scale.

Customers (i.e. Publishers) must also demand interoperable products. Products that not just connect them to Facebook or Twitter but rather make them first class nodes on the social web.

Like we said on the DataPortability blog:

In order for true interoperable, peer-to-peer data portability to win, serious publishers and other sites must be vigilant to choose cross-platform alternatives that leverage multiple networks rather than just relying on Facebook exclusively.

In this way they become first-class nodes on the social web rather than spokes on Facebook’s hub.

But this is just the start. This just stems the tide by handing the keys to more than one player so that no one player kills us while the full transition to a true peer-to-peer model takes place.

If the web is to truly stay open and interoperable, we need to think bigger and better than just which big company (s) we want to hand our identities to.

Just like every site on the web today can have its own web server, every site should also have the choice to host (or pick) its own social server. Every site should become a fully featured peer on the social web. There is no reason why CNN can not be just as functional, powerful, effective and interchangeable as Facebook.com.

If we don’t, we will be stuck with the IIS, IE and Netscape’s of the social web and innovation will die.

Something that frustrates me about liberals in general and Democrats in particular is that they seem content to take the carefully chosen language constructs the Right manufactures and paint themselves into the corner that was laid out for them.

With the Health Care Reform bill they managed to smash out of that corner and get the job done anyway, but they still failed to take control of the debate and wrestle it like the true wordsmiths and salesmen the Republicans are.

They need to take control of the language and redefine it for us or they will continue to lose elections even if they have found the courage to stand up for legislation they believe in…

I am pro life

I believe in life. I believe in allowing people to have the life they choose and make choices about their body. I believe in the life of a mother forced to make a terrible decision.

I believe in the life of the unborn, unwanted baby that might have been prevented if only actual data from real life was listened to when we’re told that teaching abstinence doesn’t work. Life tells us that condoms and sex education works. So I believe in listening to life.

I also believe in lives that are out on the street because we fail to look after the poor. We fail to provide for their basic needs like shelter and healthcare. I believe in the life of people in foreign countries – life that is equal in value to my own. I believe that you can’t invade their countries or prop up their dictators without having violent reactions. That’s just how life works and how people protect the lives of their families. When life gets desperate you take desperate actions.

I believe in life. I am pro life.

The life of undifferentiated cells, however, is only one form of life. I believe that abortion should be safe, legal and rare because I am pro life, and life happens. Abortion is horrible, however, abortion is going to happen if it is legal or not. We need to safeguard the lives of the young mothers involved. There are many, many lives to consider.

You know who is pro choice. Republicans. They believe that the government should get off our backs and let the free market decide. They choose to believe that making money is more important than providing basic checks and balances to make life a little easier for people.

They believe that we should have the freedom and choice to pick an insurance company and they should have the freedom to choose to screw their customers. That is pro choice. They believe that gays and lesbians had a choice when it came to their sexuality. They choose to believe it matters to them.

I am Strong on Defense

I believe in defeating those who would hurt us. I don’t believe in fighting a tactic. Terrorism is not something you can defeat any more than you can defeat walking or shooting a gun. A war against terrorism is not being strong on defense, it’s being weak on language skills.

I know that being strong means having the courage and conviction to know when I am wrong, to understand my enemy’s motives properly (and not the characature some might choose to paint) because I know that without understanding their true motives and methods I am just flailing around like a defenseless fool.

I am strong on defense because I understand that defense is not hurting defenseless people, but rather helping those people defend themselves against ignorance and violence.

I am strong on defending the freedoms and liberties that I believe in. I am strong enough not to let ‘Terrorists’ scare me into compromising my way of life.

I am strong on defense.

I believe in protecting a flag

I am against burning Flags. Actually no, not flags, but rather the things those flags represent. The American flag represents the freedom to burn flags. So I believe in protecting the flag by letting people burn it. Because in burning it they are demonstrating the power of that flag to transcend any moment and last forever. By performing the symbolic act of burning the flag those people are at once making their point and undermining it. I believe in the flag to transcend its own burning.

I believe in Civil Unions and defense of Marriage.

I believe all marriges should be civil unions. Why is a religious institution handled by the Government? Why can’t any two people form a civil union in order to confer certain basic rights to each other. Why is marriage not protected by and sacred to the church instead of allowing it to get corrupted by Government.

If you want to get Married in the eyes of God, then go to a church. If you want a legal contract to confer rights onto another through the state, get a Civil Union. They should be two, separate things and the church can make up any rules it wants about Marriage, and the state shouldn’t discriminate when it comes to unions.

I am a regular Joe

I hate being elitist, I don’t like reading books and I sure as hell don’t like to over think problems. That’s why I am not a politician. I also can’t run very fast or very long, that’s why I am not an elite athlete either.

I’m sure as hell glad that elite people run our government though, and run our races, and practice law and do all the other important and hard things they do. I am glad that the elites who run for office think through problems properly and consider the complex systems that make up our society rather than knee jerk reactionary ‘ordinary people’ who would easily let their emotions and mob rule guide them.

I love regular people, I want to have a beer with them. But I don’t want them running any country I live in.

I have faith

I am full of faith. I believe deeply in the things I believe. They are different from the things you believe but that does not make me a ‘non believer’.

I have a strong moral compass – one I spent a great deal of time thinking about and defining for myself. In some ways, I might have given more thought to morality than you have.

As a wise man once said, You believe in things that have not been proven; Well I believe in people despite abundant amounts of evidence to the contrary. That is faith. I have more faith in the divinity of people (something Jesus taught) than you do.

I might not believe that Jesus (or anyone else who has been elevated to his status) was God, but I believe in his message. His actual message of unconditional love and forgiveness for all. I believe he taught us to look after the least among us and to turn the other cheek. That means that bombing other countries, allowing the poor to persist and judging others for their sex, race or geographic location is the exact opposite point of having faith in his teachings.

He also taught us to be free thinkers, not to believe in institutions just because they are there. He was a rebel who blasphemed the religious institutions of his time.

I have more faith than you in the actual words and deeds of Jesus. And that means I am not afraid of all the scary gays and terrorists and flag burners out there. If you question my faith you are simply showing a weakness in your own.

I could go on and on… but you get the idea.

What words would you like to reclaim for reality?

MG Siegler over on Techcrunch yesterday wrote a story about how the AP is tweeting links to its stories. Those links, however, are not to its website. Instead those twitter links lead to Facebook copies of their stories!

Here’s a snippet of his post:

The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve been doing this, but Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted the oddness of this, and how annoying it is, tonight. The AP obviously has a ton of media partners, and they could easily link to any of those, or even the story hosted on their own site. But no, instead they’re copying all these stories to their Facebook page and linking there for no apparent reason.

As Sullivan notes in a follow-up tweet, “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.”

What’s really odd about this is the AP’s recent scuffle with Google over the hosting of AP content. The two sides appeared to reach some sort of deal earlier this month (after months of threats and actual pulled content), but now the AP is just hosting all this content on Facebook for the hell of it?

To me this isn’t unusual at all. In fact it’s common practice amongst ‘social media experts’. Many of us use/used tools like FriendFeed, Buzz, Facebook etc not just to share links, but to actually host original content. We actively send all our traffic to these sites rather than using them as draws back to our own open blog/publishing platforms.

I completely agree with MG. Sending your audience to a closed destination site which provides you no brand control, monetization or cross-sell capability shows a profound misunderstanding of the economics of publishing.

Some will argue that the content should find the audience, and they should be free to read it wherever they like. Sure, I won’t disagree with that, but actively generating it in a non-monetizable place and actively sending people there seems like a missed opportunity to me. Why not generate it on your blog and then simply share the links in other places. If those users choose to chat over there, that’s fine, but the first, best place to view the content and observe the conversation should always be at the source, at YOUR source. YOUR site.

Some will argue that those platforms generate more engagement than a regular blog/site. They generate engagement because your blog is not looked after. You’re using inferior plugins and have not taken the time to consider how your blog can become a first class social platform. You’re willing to use tools that cannibalize your audience rather than attract them. You’re willing to use your  blog as a traffic funnel back to other destination sites by replacing big chunks of it with FriendFeed streams rather than hosting your own LifeStream like Louis Gray and Leo Laporte have done.

Some will argue (or not, because they don’t realize or don’t want to say it out loud) that they are not journalists, they are personalities, and they go wherever their audience is. They don’t monetize their content, they monetize the fact that they HAVE an audience by getting paying jobs that enable them to evangelize through any channel that they choose. Those people (and there are very few of them) have less incentive to consolidate their content sources (although there are still reasons to do so). Unfortunately, though, media properties sometimes get confused and think they can do the same thing.

The list of reasons why publishing stuff on Buzz or FriendFeed or Facebook as a source rather than an aggregator goes on and on, so I will just stop here.

I’m glad MG has picked up on it and written about it on Techcrunch.

#blogsareback

Update: Steve Rubel is agreeing with the AP’s approach. Using all sorts of fancy words like Attention Spirals, Curating and Relationships Steve is justifying APs ritual suicide of their destination site in favor of adding value, engagement and traffic to Facebook. Sorry Steve, but giving Facebook all your content and your traffic and not getting anything in return is called giving away the house.

Again, I’m not advocating that you lock content away behind paywalls, I’m simply saying that you need to own the source and make your site a first-class citizen on the social web. Not make Facebook the only game in town by handing it your audience.

Over on EdgeTheory Conversations Louis Gray and I discuss Buzz and Google’s missed opportunity to be a pure aggregator.

Head on over to the site and check it out.

FriendFeed was dead, now it is re-born as Google Buzz.

I’ve not been able to try the product yet, but philosophically and architecturally it seems superior to FriendFeed.

Here are my observations so far:

Consumption Tools

Buzz is better than FriendFeed because Google is treating it as a consumption tool rather than a destination site (by placing it in Gmail rather than hosting it on a public page). FriendFeed should have always been treated this way. Some people got confused and started hosting public discussions on FriendFeed.

That being said, though, I’ve long said that news and sharing is not the same as an email inbox and those sorts of items should not be ‘marked as read’ but rather stream by in an ambient way.

While Buzz is in fact a stream, it is its own tab that you have to focus on rather than a sidebar you can ignore (at least as far as I can tell right now).

How it affects Publishers (and Echo)

The inevitable question of ‘How does this affect Echo‘ has already come up on Twitter. Like FriendFeed before it, Buzz generates siloed conversations that do not get hosted at the source.

So, the publisher spends the time and money to create the content and Buzz/Google get the engagement/monetization inside Gmail.

For some reason, all these aggregators think that they need to create content to be of value. I disagree. I long for a pure aggregator that does not generate any of its own content such as comments, likes, shares etc.

That being said, however, the more places we have to engage with content the more reasons there are for Echo to exist so that publishers can re-assemble all that conversation and engagement back on their sites.

Synaptic Connections

Note that they don’t have a ‘Follow’ button – it’s using synaptic connections to determine who you care about. Very cool! I worry though that there might not be enough controls for the user to override the assumptions.

Open Standards

Already, Marshall is calling it the savior of open standards. I don’t think Open Standards need to be saved – but they certainly have all the buzz words on their site so that’s promising.

That’s it for now, maybe more later when I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Update: After playing with it this morning, and reading a little more, it’s clear that this is actually Jaiku reborn (not FriendFeed), because the Jaiku team were involved in building it. They deserve a lot of credit for inventing much of this stuff in the first place – long before FriendFeed.

Also, having used it only for an hour, the unread count on the Buzz tab is driving me nuts. It shouldn’t be there. It’s a stream not an inbox. Also it makes no sense why I can’t display buzz in a sidebar on the right side of my primary Gmail inbox view. That would be ideal.

It’s also funny to me that some people have tried to give Chris Messina credit for Buzz even though he’s been at Google for no more than a month. They clearly don’t understand how long and hard it is to build product. Messina is good, but he aint that good

Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices.

In it, he states that news consumption has barely changed in the last 10 years. RSS and Feed Readers drive very little traffic and most people still get their news from hand selected mainstream portals and destination sites (like MSN News and Yahoo news etc). In other words, mainstream users do not curate and consume niche subscriptions and are quite content to read what the mainstream sites feed them.

This is troubling news (pun intended) for those of us who believe that the democratization of publishing might open up the world to niche voices and personalized story-telling.

Marshall goes on to argue that Facebook might be our last hope. That since everyone spends all their time in Facebook already, that the service has an opportunity to popularize the notion of subscribing to news sources and thereby bring to life our collective vision of personalized news for the mainstream. Facebook already does a great deal of this with users getting large amounts of news and links from their friends as they share and comment on links.

Through my work with APML I have long dreamed of a world where users are able to view information through a highly personalized lens – a lens that allows them to see personally relevant news instead of just popular news (note that Popularity is a factor of personal relevancy, but it is not the only factor). That doesn’t mean the news would be skewed to one persuasion (liberal or conservative for example) but rather to a specific topic or theme.

Could Facebook popularize personalized news? Should it? Do we really want a closed platform to dictate how the transports, formats and tools of next generation story-telling get built? If so, would we simply be moving the top-down command and control systems of network television and big media to another closed platform with its own limitations and restrictions?

Personalized news on closed platforms are almost as bad as mainstream news on closed platforms. News organizations and small niche publishers both need a way to reach their audience using open technologies or we are doomed to repeat the homogenized news environment of the last 2 decades. The one that failed to protect us from a war in Iraq, failed to innovate when it came to on-demand, and failed to allow each of us to customize and personalize our own news reading tools.

That’s why technologies like RSS/Atom, PubSubHub and others are so important.

What’s missing now is a presentation tool that makes these technologies sing for the mainstream.

So far, as an industry, we’ve failed to deliver on this promise. I don’t have the answers for how we might succeed. But succeed we must.

Perhaps established tier 1 media sites have a role to play. Perhaps market forces that are driving them to cut costs and innovate will drive these properties to turn from purely creating mainstream news editorially toward a model where they curate and surface contributions from their readership and the wider web.

In other words, Tier 1 publishers are being transformed from content creators to content curators – and this could change the game.

In the race to open up and leverage social and real-time technologies, these media organizations are actually making way for the most effective democratization of niche news yet.

Niche, personalized news distributed by open news hubs born from the ‘ashes’ of old media.

Don’t like the tools one hub gives you? Switch to another. the brands we all know and love have an opportunity to become powerful players in the news aggregation and consumption game. Will they respond in time?

Due to my experience working with Tier 1 publishers for Echo, I have high hopes for many of them to learn and adapt. But much more work still remains.

Learn more about how news organizations are practically turning into personalized news curation hubs over on the Echo Blog.

Synaptic Web Scenarios:

Real-time Story Telling

How to save mainstream media using real-time platforms to re-invent the way we listen to, engage with and share stories.

Note:

• This topic was discussed on a panel hosted by Echo with participants from CBS and CNN at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco summit on 8.18.
• Khris Loux is hosting a panel on Real-Time Storytelling at Web 2.0 Expo NY 2010, be sure to join us!
• Vote for our SXSW Panel on this subject!

Cut to the chase…

For mainstream media to survive, if not thrive, it must embrace social media and take on the critical role of curator of the conversation. For social media to remain relevant and avoid slipping further into a wall of noise, it must work hand in hand with news organizations to create a symbiotic storytelling relationship.

The result will be a kind of curated grassroots conversation that has the authenticity of social media and the reach and authority of mainstream media.

The story so far…

The past 5 years has been hard for the mainstream media. The rise of bloggers as aggressive, lean and agile news sources, the decimation of the classified business by sites like craigslist and the increasing tendency of the general public to spend time telling each other personal stories on platforms like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter has meant that the traditional news business now looks like a slow, expensive, unfunded and out of touch legacy institution from the 20th century.

Today, there seems to be two camps.

There are those that declare mainstream news as ‘dead’ and have shifted their attention entirely to social media. Typically they are called ‘Social Media Experts’ and consist of disenfranchised ex journalists or recently empowered ex lawyers who have given up or been fired from their stodgy jobs and are now free to ‘tell it how it is’ on their own blogs.

Then there are those who claim that trust in mainstream media brands or the quality, depth and breadth of professional content can never be matched by the ‘great unwashed’ and therefore peruse last ditch efforts to save their old way of business using techniques like paywalls or pulling content out of Google indexes.

Mainstream media is alive and well…

The reality is that mainstream news is not dead. It is, however, based on business models and editorial processes that are outdated, ineffectual and economically inefficient given the new media landscape. A change is necessary.

There have been harmonious trends that have eroded the attention spent with big media brands. First, the rise of empowered audiences and second, the perceived failure of mainstream media.

The advent of personal publishing tools (like blogs, myspace, youtube, facebook and twitter), more flexible copyright laws like creative commons has created a generation of empowered audiences that have the means by which to tell their own stories and reach a small but significant audience.

Couple this with an important portion of the audience having a sense that the mainstream media missed some important counter arguments to major events of the new century and a growing skepticism in the reality of ‘unbiased reporting’ and you have a smart audience that has lost faith in the fourth estate and has the power to create an alternative.

However, the human impulse to tell each other stories – to want our own voice heard – is not new. It’s as old as cave men paintings. In that sense ‘social media’ is not novel. The only thing that’s changed are the tools and the resulting reach of an individual voice.

Social media only seems new because, for a while at the end of the 20th century, mainstream media was so successful at telling us what to think that many of us all forgot how to create, remix and share our own world views.

While mainstream media has made its mistakes, its role and responsibilities will always be very important.

What is occurring, then, is not a death, but rather a rebalancing between the powerful top down editorial process and the basic human instinct of telling personal stories by a camp fire.

Social media is here to stay…

For those that claim that mainstream media brands and content can’t be matched by the long tail, they misunderstand the point and purpose of personal publishing and storytelling. The impulse (and the outcome) is not to replace polished, professional and well told stories. The point is that people trust their friends more than they trust journalists or companies. The point is that today, you can get your news directly from the person living the incident. The point is that there is a hunger for authentic first hand accounts, niche subject matter and opinion.

Personal stories are stories about your mother, your father, your daughter, your son. They are about your neighbor, your friend, your co-worker or your peers in the factory down the road. Personal stories are the stories that are insignificant to everyone else but matter profoundly to you and your immediate community. These are the stories that were once shared around the water cooler or over hour long phone calls amongst husbands and wives, high-school sweethearts or two housewives in the kitchen. They are now turning into published media that consume more and more ‘audience attention’ every day.

We see clear examples of this everywhere. Simply uploading a photo to Facebook literally creates a ‘News Feed Story’ for your friends. It seems everything we do online is packaged up as part of a narrative. These are the things that cynics call ‘inane chatter’ on Twitter. There is nothing inane about family and friends sharing their lives with each other.

Trying to lock these platforms out only serves to isolate and alienate mainstream media from the audiences its trying to serve.

It is also true, however, that left to its own devices, social media can lack an important, cohesive and meta narrative that creates clarity and helps the world make sense of events. While algorithms and basic filters can help, social media needs the ethics, rigor and insight of professional journalists to help tell big stories.

Content Creation to Content Curation…

The key opportunity for media companies then, is to recognize and respect this ancient desire in our society and learn how to adapt.

The brands and the individuals that study the art of professional storytelling – traditionally called journalism – have a vital and pivotal role in this new landscape. It is not, however, the same role they played in the last century. Their role has already changed and their mindset, process and business models must necessarily change as well.

The role of journalist changes from one of content creation to one of content curation. From telling a story to curating a conversation. From finding sources to enabling people. From news organizations to news platforms. From selling ads to adding value.

The stories of our world are already being told in countless public, archivable, searchable and discoverable ways. What’s missing now is not someone to hunt stories down, but rather to weave them into a narrative. What’s missing is not the information, but the expertise to connect the dots and cut through the noise to find the meaningful and the important.

The job of today’s journalist then, is to help us look past cats playing piano or politicians giving talking points and listen to real people giving real opinions with real points of view. To find the authentic, to put it into context and to broaden its reach.

The whistle blower who is quietly tweeting about something he’s seen; The blogger who is trying to highlight an injustice; The people living through the hurricane and taking pictures of the devastation in real-time.

In many ways the role of journalist – curator of the news – has never been more important.

Rebalance the equation…

The tools to empower journalists to capture, curate and share these real-time stories have barely begun to take form. We have only just created fire, now we need to figure out how to harness the energy.

For example, media companies have been sharing their content on social networks and actively promoting those networks as the place to consume and engage. Platforms like Facebook are doing everything they can to encourage this behavior. The challenge with this model, however, is that media companies are outsourcing their core business to branded (someone else’s brand!), uncontrolable and unmonetizable 3rd party software platforms. They do this without taking anything back except some residual return traffic. In essense, media properties invest money in creating high quality content and then hand over the engagement and monetization opportunities to sites like Facebook, Twitter and others. This model is clearly unsustainable.

Balance must be restored.

The alternative is not to lock out these networks, but rather to recognize that while they play a role, there must also be a reciprocal exchange of value from social networks to media companies and their own websites – an exchange of value that is totally within the control of media companies to implement. In other words, media brands must not only share their content, but they must also borrow the best ideas, conversations and data from those networks to populate and inform their own product.

To do this, news media must understand 8 key principles.

1. Control the source

Mainstream media can not outsource its infrastructure to any one 3rd party social network. The internet is made up of many social tools and each can be leveraged in unique ways but in the end, controlling the point source (not the ‘destination’) of content is critical.

The opportunity here is to turn news sites into rich social news platforms. These platforms should be the first, best place for audiences to read and participate in the news. If audiences learn that your site is a better news experience than their Facebook news feed, then they encouraged to click the link and start to engage on your site.

To do this, news media sites must borrow and integrate the cutting edge technologies and interaction metaphors of social networks; Metaphors like friends, faces, social likes, real-time streams and more.

2. Crowd-sourced production

In many ways, posting an article or video should be the beginning of a story not the end of it. Journalists have an opportunity to plant a seed, pose a question and create a space inside which a conversation can take place.

The resulting feedback, properly curated, is extremely powerful yet cost effective to produce. It is like a ‘request for input’ on a global scale. Many today are just as interested in helping to tell a story as passively reading it; This technique empowers them to get involved.

In most cases, the request is not even needed. When an incident occurs, chances are people are already tweeting about it. Journalists, then, need the right tools to harness the best conversations and popular materials (photos, videos, links), apply the right metadata, mix them with editorial and make them part of the story.

3. Heightened Engagement

Once the piece is ‘complete’, the audience must be empowered to continue the story. This isn’t just about commenting (although that’s important) but rather about enabling audiences to add supplementary material, strengthen the importance of related links and prune irrelevant photos.

4. Distribution

A well known and broadly implemented aspect of real-time storytelling is sharing. Users need an easy way to share the permalinks to your content with friends and family via their favorite social networks.

This kind of social distribution across social graphs is becoming increasingly important in terms of driving traffic. Social networks now outstrip google when it comes to traffic generation.

Sharing, however, needs to be tied to more than just a ‘share this’ button. Every action on the page (like, comment etc) should be an opportunity to ask the user to share with their friends. Further, sharing should be cross platform – why force them to choose just one social network when you can get them to share it to many at the same time.

5. Aggregation

A good story creates countless conversations. Like a pebble dropped in a pond, the ripples flow out and bounce around the edges coming to rest only after making countless beautiful patterns. Some of these reactions are comments on your article, but many, many more (more than 80% of all reactions) actually take place in hundreds of semi-public micro communities.

There is no where better, however, to see the full conversation than back on your site, where the content was first published. Your article must act as a magnet, pulling in and re-assembling all the niche conversations back into a cohesive and complete whole.

Aggregating, assembling and re-contextualizing these fragmented conversations is a non trivial task. It is, however, critical to understanding, communicating and leveraging the full scope of value your content has created.

6. Connection

Journalists also have an opportunity not just to curate a story or its conversation, but also a list of relevant information sources. As each of us become producers of niche information, helping audiences to find and connect to authoritative voices to follow is an emerging problem perfectly suited for media companies to solve.

7. Micro-subscriptions

Today, most news outlets only allow you to subscribe to board topics like ‘politics’ or ‘sports. Why not allow users to subscribe to tags, keywords, journalists or even memes.

Also, instead of providing geeky options like RSS, outsourcing the subscription problem to Twitter or defaulting to stale options like Email newsletters, why not offer real-time twitter like experiences right from your site.

8. Monetization

Monetizing these opportunities is a rich and critical subject. As such, it deserves its own discussion. Suffice it to say, however, that a new storytelling model requires a new monetization model – one that leverages, rather than stifles, the atomization and distribution of content far and wide.

New forms of monetization in a real-time storytelling world include advertising that travels with atomized content, micropayments, value added products and services like reports and conferences and more.

Real-time storytelling…

This is realtime storytelling. News platforms that are as functional, if not more functional, than their social networking counterparts. Journalists that cut through the noise and pick out the stories that matter. Articles that don’t necessarily tell a complete story, but rather plant a seed – creating a space inside which a conversation can occur. Tools that can aggregate and curate the conversation. An audience that can carry the story forward with their own links and media. Channels where participants can share the story with their friends.

Mainstream media is not dead. Social media is not the new game in town. They are two parts of the same ecosystem. They must work together to create a new form of storytelling.

Real-time storytelling is here…

With Contributions from: Khris Loux (Echo), Jeremy Wright (Co-founder, b5 Media), Ben Metcalfe (ex BBC, Myspace), Dan Schmidt (CBSi), Eric Blantz (Co-author, Synaptic Web), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter group)

Did you know that Echo can be embedded in your iPhone apps?

Our customers and partners over at the Washington Post have shown the way in their new iPhone app for Metro-riding in Washington DC. In it, they allow you to comment on lines using Echo Comments!

Here’s a screenshot:

If you are a DC resident, you can get it from the Apple App Store.

Today we are happy to announce another first for publishers – An embeddable Real-time River widget for their site.

The Latest News section of today’s sites are static, non-social blocks that freeze after the page loads. These blocks fail to update readers of new content or show social interactions happening on article pages.

Echo’s new River product streams all new headlines and a preview of the emerging conversation to the home page in real-time. Users are drawn into the site by seeing the news of the day and its related conversation unfold before their eyes without having to refresh the page.

Displaying conversations on the home page in this way changes the way people see the front page of a typical news site. Readers get to see a summary of what people like them are saying right from the front page, getting a new perspective on the headlines of the day.

Each Headline in the stream includes a linked Title, the author’s name & avatar and the first few lines of the article. Nested underneath is a Whirlpool of its related conversations with special emphasis on the Face, Username and Comment of each user. Facebook and other social networking sites prove that placing the faces and friends of real people on the page in this way drives engagement and page views.

Integration into existing sites is extremely lightweight, and the product works with any content management system, quickly integrated into existing logins and content. Publishers can effectively join the real-time web with one block of javascript.

Of course Echo River supports the display of Echo Comments, but it also supports Disqus, WordPress and IntenseDebate comments as well or any site with an RSS feed of their comments

Publishers can completely customize the look and feel of River. They can choose to display headlines from across the site or from specific sections. Any combination of Comments, Tweets, Diggs, etc. can also be added or removed from the stream.

Echo River is designed to support the business of publishing by driving more time spent, more engagement with comments, increased click-through rates and increased page views and ad views.

This new product continues our mission to turn static web pages into vibrant real-time experiences, driving Facebook style engagement on our publisher sites.

You can see a demo of the Echo River running on a mockup of the Techcrunch homepage here or on our official demo.

Publishers can get access to Echo River by signing up for Echo Pro.

Coverage around the web

• Mashable – Add Facebook-like Interaction to Your Website’s Front Page
• Teens in Tech – Echo Announces Echo River; Brings Real-Time Comments To The Homepage
• Techcrunch – Echo Brings Comments To Your Homepage With Real-Time River
• LouisGray – Echo Debuts Real-Time River to Highlight Media Engagement
• TheNextWeb – Echo launches “River” to keep content flowing on the homepage
• SiliconAngle – Echo River Makes News Headlines and Comments Real-Time
• Search Engine Watch

Today we are happy to announce another first for the industry – A Real-time Recent Comments Widget.

Static home pages fail to show the vibrant, community activity occurring on a site. Echo’s new Real-time Recent Comments reveals the velocity of social activity across the site — driving readers to where the activity is now!

The stream includes Comments, Tweets and other social reactions from across the web. Each reaction is displayed with the visitor’s avatar, linkable title to the article, the first few lines of the comment, and the source of the content (E.g. Echo, Twitter, etc.)

The widget is designed to be displayed on site sidebars and on home pages. It continues our mission to turn static web pages into vibrant real-time experiences, driving Facebook style engagement on our publisher sites.

Publishers can customize “Recent Comments” to display reactions across the site or on a section by section basis. Any combination of Comments, Tweets, Diggs, etc. can also be added or removed from the stream.

You can install the widget by signing up for an Echo Pro Trial account and installing both the Comments and Recent Comments widget on your site.

You can see a live demo of the widget floating on the right side of this blog post. It is displaying comments and tweets from one of our customers Slate.com.

More coverage here: